{"id":263819,"date":"2024-06-10T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2024-06-10T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=263819"},"modified":"2024-06-08T06:03:30","modified_gmt":"2024-06-08T05:03:30","slug":"a-new-chinese-exclusion-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/a-new-chinese-exclusion-act\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Chinese Exclusion Act"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Happier days: Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017. Project 2025 commits the US to a state of permanent belligerence toward China.\u00a0 (Qilai Shen\/Bloomberg via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

Demonizing China allows Republicans to unite around an authoritarian agenda at home\u2014and provides a convenient rationale for unfettered Pentagon profiteering.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Jun 2024 <\/em>– In Project 2025\u2019s Mandate for<\/em> Leadership<\/em>, fear and hatred of China have replaced the interests of big business and free-market dogma as the motive forces in Republican politics.<\/p>\n

The Chinese exclusion agenda has lent new vitality to the Republican policy program. In the wake of Trump\u2019s disorienting triumph over the GOP mainstream, vilification of China is also creating shared ground for the party\u2019s discordant factions. And because animosity to China helps make sense of widespread hardship in the US (which the Biden campaign is simply denying), it helps the otherwise unpopular politics of conservatives gain majority backing.<\/p>\n

In his framing essay, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts rehearses<\/a> familiar conservative themes of cultural decay and government interference, but the pivot on which Project 2025 turns marks a new direction for the right. The many challenges facing the North American people, Roberts writes, can in fact be traced to a Chinese conspiracy against the USA and the US elite\u2019s treason in joining it.<\/p>\n

Roberts claims that the \u201cwoke Left\u201d\u2014which supposedly includes big business, public institutions, and popular culture\u2014wants to foist open borders and free trade on the North American people in order to hoard power, expand profits, flaunt its own virtue, and secure cheap \u201chousekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Roberts, the US elite has carried out this betrayal hand in glove with the \u201ctotalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing\u201d: \u201cFor a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting US values into China. The opposite has happened. US factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized.\u201d Roberts singles out Wall Street and Big Tech in particular, describing the latter as \u201coperatives in the lucrative employ of US’ most dangerous international enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, Roberts continues, China\u2019s reach into US society goes beyond the corruption of the elite and laying waste to the economy. Through TikTok, China corrupts teenage girls; through its Confucius Institutes, it corrupts US universities. Other chapters in Mandate<\/em> expand on the indictment.<\/p>\n

Christopher Miller, who served <\/a>as acting secretary of defense under Trump, writes that China \u201caspires to dominate Asia and then, from that position, become globally preeminent. If Beijing could achieve this goal, it could dramatically undermine US’ core interests, including by restricting U.S. access to the world\u2019s most important market.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Kiron Skinner (the State Department\u2019s director of policy planning under Mike Pompeo), \u201cThe same cartels that parasitically run Mexico are also working with the PRC to fuel the largest drug crisis in the history of North America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Navarro (formerly Trump\u2019s director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy) asserts that China created the pandemic: Covid-19 \u201calmost certainly originated as a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Navarro also includes an eight-page list of Chinese \u201ceconomic aggression,\u201d including such nefarious practices as making use of publicly available knowledge, investing in technology, and offering to support US priorities in exchange for US support of Chinese priorities.<\/p>\n

What all these claims have in common is their focus on problems facing the US, and the world, in which China plays some role: job loss, <\/a>community disintegration, violation of data privacy,<\/a> drug addiction,<\/a> pandemic disease. Then they assert, on flimsy evidence, that China is not only the primary cause of these problems but has deliberately created them in order to victimize North Americans. In other words, these are conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

Skinner admits as much: \u201cThe reality, however, is that the PRC\u2019s actions often do sound like conspiracy theories\u2014because they are conspiracies.\u201d The conspiracy theorist insists that, in this case, the conspiracy really is real.<\/p>\n

These allegations have just enough truth to be superficially plausible. China is involved in the core problems facing US and the world. But it is never the sole or even the primary author of them, and its own contribution to these problems is generally similar to US behavior rather than representing a contrast.<\/p>\n

Deindustrialization<\/a>, the destruction of organized labor, and the suppression of wages<\/a> in the US, for example, began decades before China became<\/a> an important exporter. What created these problems was instead a crisis<\/a> of business profitability in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan\u2019s policies of crushing unions<\/a> and deregulating the economy. The dismantling of workers\u2019 power<\/a> in China in order to draw foreign investment there makes China\u2019s path all too similar to North America\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Yet Mandate<\/em> claims that China\u2019s unchanging cultural essence, radically different from that of the West, makes confrontation inevitable. According to Skinner, \u201cChinese power today is the product of history, ideology, and the institutions that have governed China during the course of five millennia\u2026meaning that internal culture and civil society will never deliver a more normative nation.\u201d (Skinner, who is Black, argues that the US is facing \u201ca fight with a really different civilization\u201d in China, because \u201cit\u2019s the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Fear of this alien influence justifies one of Mandate<\/em>\u2019s most noteworthy through lines: centralizing political power in order to carry out a wide-ranging purge of \u201cun-American\u201d elements from the body politic\u2014starting with government personnel. Ironically, this closely mirrors the conduct of Xi Jinping himself, who launched an anti-corruption campaign that allowed him to concentrate power in his own hands.<\/p>\n

To what ends is this US authoritarianism directed beyond consolidating Republican power? If China by its very presence in US society endangers the nation, the solution must be Chinese exclusion from the United States\u2014accompanied by confrontation in those areas (like the Asia-Pacific) where unilateral action cannot achieve exclusion. Project 2025\u2019s proposals range from the complete decoupling of the United States from the Chinese economy, to restarting the Department of Justice\u2019s China Initiative (a racial-profiling program devoted to harassing<\/a> researchers with connections to China), to the exclusion of China from global standards-setting bodies. As William Hartung shows below, Miller justifies his proposals to massively expand the US military by citing the need to make US threats against China credible.<\/p>\n

This zeal to punish China\u2014and its resonance with GOP traditions of militarism and nativism\u2014also eases the way toward repudiating the party\u2019s previous commitments to free markets, free trade, and concentrated wealth. Billionaires looking to avoid populist wrath, like JPMorgan Chase\u2019s Jamie Dimon, have learned that you can still crush workers, shirk taxes, and get rich\u2014as long as you cover yourself in belligerent patriotism. Yet precisely because Sinophobia allows Republicans to connect with popular animosity against a rigged system run by unaccountable and condescending elites, it opens a path to reviving the popularity of conservative politics.<\/p>\n

Far from attacking this Sinophobic worldview, the Biden administration has largely adopted it. Biden officials say that China\u2014not transnational threats like climate change, global inequality, and the collapse of the global system into warring great-power blocs\u2014is the primary threat the US faces<\/a>. Which only affirms the basic Republican narrative. As the more aggressive party, the GOP will always have a clear advantage when both parties encourage the idea of shadowy foreign threats. At the same time, the Biden campaign is having a hard time speaking to the widespread sense of national decline and injustice, leaving the field open to reactionary explanations.<\/p>\n

Yet pandering to nationalism while preparing for war is not the only way forward. Popular hostility to China is widespread<\/a>\u2014but also very shallow. <\/a>North Americans remain open to more complex understandings that acknowledge the terrible abuses of the Chinese state while focusing on shared experiences of everyday injustice and suffering in the US and China, and to solutions that don\u2019t pit the people of each country against the other.<\/p>\n

Standing against the nativist populists, who claim that inclusion at home can be achieved only through the exclusion of foreigners, multiracial and internationalist populists offer a progressive critique of the status quo. This analysis has the potential to mobilize popular dissatisfaction into the fight for an alternative vision that would embrace everyone. Merely dismissing Sinophobia will only make it stronger\u2014and we urgently need a powerful response.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Jake Werner is a historian of modern China and a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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