The Aff’s discourse of great power conflict is inherently xenophobic. Depictions of the Chinese monolith magnifies anti-Asian racism.

Fighting a monolithic communist enemy abroad also boomeranged in the form of racism and xenophobia against immigrants at home. The 1950 Internal Security Act, which required Communist Party members to register with the federal government, allowed U.S. authorities to deport naturalized immigrants suspected of “disloyalty.” After the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Chinese immigrants during the Cold War were compelled to “confess” their illegal immigration status—even if they had broken no laws when they came to the United States—to earn their citizenship rights. Such policies reflected the anticommunist hysteria of McCarthyism that lasted well into the 1960s. Even when Democrats finally took up the cause of civil rights, as the historian Mary Dudziak has explained, it was in a stunted, narrow way that had been delayed decades by the earlier destruction of a previously unified Progressive movement that was the first organized champion for political and economic equality in America. That coalition was undone by anticommunist liberals—including Democrats and Republicans—whose visions for change were shortened by defining their politics against an enemy rather than for their own theory of democracy.

Just as racism and ethnically motivated violence was part of the Cold War experience, so too has it become the most visible and immediate price of today’s showdown with China and Russia. In the past few months alone, xenophobic attacks against Russians and Chinese immigrants have escalated in the United States. Incidents of hate crimes toward Asian Americans have increased 339 percent since 2021, including a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021 that killed six Asian American women. Following the Ukraine invasion, Russian businesses in the United States have been boycotted, and Disney paused its new film releases in Russia. Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell even went so far as to recommend “kicking every Russian student out of the United States.” This is a disturbing echo of Cold War exclusionism.

U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly denounced acts of overt racism and xenophobia against Russian and Chinese immigrants. But an antiracist, antixenophobic policy is not one that merely denounces racial slurs or bigoted civilizational reasoning; it must also make it harder, not easier, to traffic in racialized sentiment. And on this count, the Biden administration is failing. Every gesture toward “outcompeting China” unintentionally buoys ethnonationalism at home and abroad. U.S. policymakers need to understand that Xi draws strength from rivalry, as do American far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and the demagogic Washington politicians who pander to them.

Republican senators such as Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley straddle the interests of Washington polite society and the far right. How? By invoking hateful rhetoric and promoting policies of racial exclusion that appeal to white supremacists and conspiracy theorists while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy by claiming that they target the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or “China” writ large—a vague menacing “other” that ensnares the larger community of Asian Americans. Months into the 2020 pandemic, Cruz defended the use of racially coded epithets aimed at China, including “kung flu” and “Chinese virus.” Cotton personally trafficked in these yellow-peril dog whistles, and co-sponsored legislation that year to ban Chinese students from securing visas to study science, technology, engineering, or math in the United States. And Hawley earned a Vanity Fair headline that read “Josh Hawley Proudly Declares Himself Pro Hate Crimes” after casting the sole vote against the uncontroversial COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Hawley also campaigned for reelection on ads that included depictions of Chinese businessmen taking over American farms, creating a racial stigma around who should be allowed to own the most important tangible asset in the U.S. economy.

Expedient hate-mongering is not confined to the political right. Rather than condemn Republicans’ race-baiting and diversionary politics, many Democrats flirt with that same premise. Tim Ryan, a Democrat running for Senate in Ohio, has been unapologetic in his willingness to blame the economic plight of blue-collar workers on a China bogeyman—“China is winning and workers are losing” and “It’s us versus China,” he said in one ad. Democrats have been complicit in creating the economy that has put millions of Americans in a precarious financial position, so small wonder that they, too, would rather blame China for the state of things than reflect on their culpability.