Reps shape reality for China threat reps.

The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat

The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its emergence amid the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is significant in that the prevailing tensions between the two countries and the discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition, scientific espionage, and technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may argue that President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in his administration’s sustained attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides a foil to distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and public health crisis in which we find ourselves.

At this particular juncture, we unfortunately have been inundated with media coverage of a plethora of accusations and actions launched against China and Chinese Americans. Within the past two years, we have witnessed the implementation of trade sanctions and tariffs against China, the removal of prominent Chinese American scientists from research institutions, and the severing of nationwide economic transactions with certain China-based telecommunications corporations, with Huawei Technologies Company being the most notable. All these have been advanced in the name of national security. The discursive formation and the representational devices that have been used to justify these state directives play a critical role in constructing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as culprit and as America’s enemy number one. These constructions, some of which will be examined in this essay, are layered upon one another, each building and elaborating on the last, and each invoking and simultaneously inciting a different set of anxieties that lie within the broader repertoire of China/ Chinese as threat. Indeed, the inundation of media about China makes it difficult, if not impossible, to decipher truth from falsehood, myth from reality, rhetoric from evidence. Our task here is not to weigh the truth-value of these representations but to treat them as ongoing contests embedded in power and to draw out their material effects. It is worth noting that while the explicit target of U.S. state aggression has been the mainland Chinese state or the PRC, the actual effects are much more wide-ranging and extend into everyday aggressions against all those who present as East Asian American.