Great power competition foreign policy is rooted in anti-Asian sentiments and racial prejudice

Figure 3.2 visually summarizes this dynamic interaction between racial and international hierarchies as applied to the case of contemporary Sino-American relations: As far as the U.S.-led global order has at least partly been shaped and sustained by white-dominant racial hierarchy, China’s rise as a hegemonic challenger would activate deep-seated anti-Asian sentiments within the United States, which can significantly shape American foreign policy views and responses (also see Búzás 2021). Racialized views toward Asians, therefore, may work as a powerful heuristic or cognitive short-cut in shaping how Americans interpret and respond to threats from China. As scholars of Asian American politics have pointed out, ordinary Americans tend to subscribe to an essentialist view of Asians as a homogeneous racial group regardless of their nationality – the process of ‘racial lumping’ that further facilitates the translation of racial attitudes to views toward foreign Asian countries such as China (Kim 1999; Wu 2002). In the United States, one key dimension of anti-Asian sentiments revolves around the view of Asians as “perpetual foreigners” perceived as “both unfit for and uninterested in the American way of life” (Kim 1999, 112). Dating back to the 19th century portrayal of “Chinamen” in the mysterious and cunning image of Fu Manchu (Mayer 2013; Tchen and Yeats 2014), Asians have been regarded as generally inscrutable and suspicious outsiders. This image has been rendered 55 even more threatening by the second, complementary dimension of anti-Asian racial resentment: the perception of Asians as “unbeatable competitors” (Smith 1993). Since the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 19th century, as Smith (1993) notes, the presumed relative economic superiority and competence of Asians have been a major source of anti-Asian racial fear and animosity. Such entrenched racial resentment held by the American public should therefore trigger more alarmist views about the economic and military rise of China, induce the inference of hostile Chinese intensions, and lead accordingly to higher levels of mass support for hawkish foreign policy responses. Based on the discussion thus far, I derive the following testable hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 (H1): Higher levels of anti-Asian sentiments will be positively associated with higher levels of support for hawkish China policies. Hypothesis 2 (H2): The racial attitude effects will be mediated by heightened threat perceptions.