Consider This from NPR - What, Exactly, Does 'Tough On China' Mean?

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Democrats and Republicans disagree on a lot of issues. But there's a growing consenus in both parites that China represents a threat to the U.S. And some worry that the rise in anti-China rhetoric could pave the way for xenophobia against Asian-Americans.Congresswoman Judy Chu, D-Calif., is concerned about that. She herself has been accused of disloyalty by a fellow lawmaker, and she says she worries about a "new McCarthyism," in the Republican Party.And Erika Lee, a professor of history and Asian-American studies at the University of Minnesota, says there's a long American history of national security concerns fueling xenophobia.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. When Sho Chu, the CEO of TikTok, testified before Congress last month, he got this greeting from Georgia Republican Buddy Carter. Welcome to the most bipartisan committee in Congress. Carter had a point. This hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee touched on one of the few topics that reliably bring Democrats and Republicans together. China.

At the TikTok hearing, members of both parties raised legitimate concerns about whether Americans' data was safe from China's authoritarian government. Like Frank Pallone, the committee's top Democrat. The Chinese communist government can compel companies based in Beijing, like TikTok, to share data with the communist government through existing Beijing law or coercion. But some members of the committee also voiced suspicions about Chu personally, and even suggested that he had ties to the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP. Here's Republican Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee. You're going to have to make a decision about

whether you choose freedom from the CCP or you continue to be an agent of the CCP. Now, Chu pointed out several times during the hearing that he is Singaporean. He is not from China. But that detail didn't seem to sway many lawmakers who are critical of Chu, like Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, speaking here about Chu during a different hearing. Seems to me like a communist party stooge, an agent of communist influence in America. And Cotton called for Chu to be deported immediately. Consider this. Although the rhetoric in Washington about China has moved away from explicitly racist phrases former President Trump used during the pandemic, like Kung Flu or the China virus, a different kind of rhetoric has gone mainstream now, one where hostility towards China is framed in the language of geopolitics and national security. We'll talk to one congresswoman who worries that rhetoric

has given rise to a new McCarthyism. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Tuesday, April 11th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

It's Consider This from NPR. For Democratic Congresswoman Judy Chu of California, the hostile rhetoric on China has gotten very personal. As the first Chinese American ever elected to Congress, Chu says she never really felt she had a target on her back because of her ethnicity until this past February, when another member of Congress, Republican Lance Gooden of Texas, singled Chu out during an interview on Fox News. Do you think Congresswoman Chu should be looked into? I think everyone that's standing up for Chinese Communist Party should be looked into. Yes, I question her either loyalty or competence if she doesn't realize what's going on. Gooden said if Chu were serving on the House Intelligence Committee, the speaker would force her off.

I'm really disappointed and shocked that someone like Judy Chu would have a security clearance and be entitled to confidential intelligence briefings until this is figured out. This attack from Gooden, these insinuations that Chu could have loyalties to the Chinese Communist Party, this all came after Chu had publicly defended a Chinese-American man named Dominic Ng, a businessman whom President Biden had appointed to an economic advisory council. Gooden and other Republicans had accused Ng of belonging to organizations that were front groups for the Chinese Communist Party, allegations that Ng and his supporters have refuted. To Representative Chu, these personal attacks, both on her and on Ying, are part of a larger disturbing trend that she has sensed, a new McCarthyism, as she put it, in the Republican Party.

She sat down with me to talk about it. When a fellow House member questioned whether you had personal loyalties to the Chinese Communist Party, what went through your mind? a centuries-long stereotype that Chinese Americans and Asian Americans more broadly are forever foreigners in their own land, no matter how much they've contributed to this country, no matter whether they're someone like me, born in America. My father fought for the U.S. in World War II in the Army. I've been an elected official for 37 years in this country. How much more American do I have to be to prove that I am an American? When Congressman Gooden was asked for a response, he replied with a statement that accused Judy Chu of, quote, race baiting. But Chu is not the only one who took issue with Gooden's attack. The Republican

chair of the House Select Committee looking into the China-U.S. relationship, Mike Gallagher, said that questioning someone's loyalty to the U.S. is, quote, beyond the pale. I asked Congresswoman Chu if that makes Gooden more of an outlier rather than a trend. So I have to give credit to the ranking member, the Democratic member of the Select Committee, because he is the one that convinced Congress member Gallagher to make that statement. They were on the broadcast together at that point. And so it did make a powerful statement to his fellow colleagues that they shouldn't continue it. To be fair, do you think only Republicans are speaking about China and Chinese people in a troubling way? Like, is it a strictly partisan problem? Listen to what the members of the select committee said. Most of the Democrats portrayed the tension between U.S. and China as one of competition,

where the U.S. must regain its leadership in the world in innovation and technology. However, I would say that most of the Republicans characterized it as conflict. And I felt that they were headed towards a new Cold War. So there is a difference in how people are viewing a concrete issue, which is the US competition with China. So the Select Committee could take the issue and try to deal with it in a rational manner, or it could turn into xenophobic rhetoric. That's what I worry about. I bring this up. Some Democrats have been called out for using anti-Asian rhetoric. You know, Democrat Tim Ryan, when he was running for Senate in Ohio, was criticized for an ad that said

it is us versus China. But I ask you about the partisanness of all this? Because there are few things that draw more robust bipartisan support than toughness on China. It has become the political mainstream. And I'm wondering, what about that most concerns you as a Chinese American? Does it concern you that it has become mainstream? Yes, I've been concerned about xenophobic rhetoric that could negatively affect Asian Americans in this country. We are already experiencing three years of anti-Asian hate as a result of President Trump calling COVID-19 the China virus. But any kind of out-of-bounds rhetoric could certainly hurt Chinese Americans and more broadly Asian Americans in this country. And I use the example of what happened to Vincent Chin when I talked to my Democratic colleagues. It was a cool June night when Vincent Chin and several friends arrived at a go-go bar in Highland Park. The brutal killing of Vincent Chin back in 1982 was a stark reminder of the dangerous and sometimes deadly consequences of xenophobia in this country. Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese-American man

living near Detroit, and he had gone out with friends one night to celebrate his upcoming wedding. But inside the bar, the Fancy Pants Lounge, Chin got into an argument with two men, 43-year-old Ronald Evans and his stepson, Michael Nitz. Exactly what happened next is not clear, but witnesses say that Evans made some cracks about foreign cars, putting Americans out of work. At the time, the U.S. auto industry was struggling.

The United Auto Workers blamed Japanese imports. Ronald Evans was a foreman at Chrysler, and Michael Nitz was a recently laid-off auto worker. And that night, in 1982, after some sort of confrontation, they approached Chin outside the bar, and Evans beat Chin in the head repeatedly with a baseball bat. One of Chin's friends remembered the two men saying to him, because of people like you, Americans are losing their jobs. Apparently, it was lost on them that Chin was of Chinese descent, not Japanese. Vincent Chin lost consciousness and died in the hospital four days later. The history of xenophobia in this country against people of Asian descent is long, one that has been fueled by fears over economic competition and national security. There are so many examples across 200 years of American history, specifically targeting peoples of Asian ancestry. Erica Lee is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota.

So, for example, Oregon, 1859, banned what was in the Constitution labeled as Chinamen, any Chinamen, from owning property in the state. Then in the early 20th century, the U.S. was concerned about expansionist activities by the Empire of Japan. But again, it wasn't just the Japanese government that they focused on. Our lawmakers set their sights on Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in the United States and labeled them an advance guard of the Japanese emperor. They were not innocent strawberry farmers, asparagus farmers. They were soldiers-in-waiting. Roughly a dozen states passed laws banning Japanese and other Asian immigrants from owning or, in some cases, leasing land. And then, of course, came World War II. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,

our west coast became a potential combat zone. Which led to the forced internment of Japanese Americans. No one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores. Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move. 120,000 individuals, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. That's extremely important. These are not foreigners who had been tried in any court of espionage or disloyalty. These were American citizens, largely children,

forcibly removed and incarcerated. Notices were posted. All persons of Japanese descent were required to register. It took decades for the U.S. government to officially apologize and to say that there was no military necessity, which was the reason, the justification that President Franklin Roosevelt used, the military used to justify these actions. Eric Lee says this history should serve as a warning. That lesson should make us all extremely cautious in fully understanding what is at risk to our civil liberties and to our values and ideals. We've made these mistakes before. Let's not make them again.

But Congresswoman Judy Chu worries that history could repeat itself. She represents large portions of the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. It's one of the areas from which people of Japanese descent were removed during World War II. And today, it's an area teeming with Asian immigrants, people from mainland China, from Taiwan, from parts of Southeast Asia. And Chu says a lot of her constituents are disturbed by the growing hostility in the rhetoric that they hear and read about China. They are incredibly worried down to their very core. We started seeing this when there was the racial profiling of Chinese scientists and engineers, starting with the Trump administration. The so-called China Initiative. The China Initiative, exactly that, where Chinese scientists and researchers were accused of being spies for China on the flimsiest of evidence. Eventually, most of them were exonerated, but their lives were ruined because of this. leaders here address concerns about national security and economic tensions between the U.S.

and China without letting the conversation backslide into red scare rhetoric, xenophobia, or just straight up racism? Well, the China initiative is a good example of overreach. I mean, obviously, we want to make sure that our national secrets are protected. But what Trump did was to make this a focus on one country. He didn't have a Russian initiative. He didn't have an Iran initiative. No, it was only a China initiative. And that's why I have always emphasized to my colleagues that they distinguish between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party. Because I tell you, when it just becomes the Chinese people, then it becomes, in Americans' minds, everybody. That was Democratic Congresswoman Judy Chu of California.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.