How The Threat Of China Was Made in The USA Part one

 The Worse Nation in the world is China, or isn’t it?

 

The Chinese government is bad. And Their culinary practices are bad. And Their tech is bad. Their handling of COVID was bad.

Their relationships with countries like Pakistan, Iran, and all of the African nations are bad. China is bad for American jobs. China is bad for manufacturing. China is bad for human rights. China is bad for democracy. China is bad for freedom. And so on.

That sums up how the United States sees China. China is near exclusively through USA assumptions, which are rooted in US values and the US vision of what is good. And what's good for the world is the USA, right?

Because for something to be presented as bad, then there must be something opposing it, which is good. So what's good? It's the US. The US may not actually use the word bad in their headlines, or in their entertainment, but the insinuation is constant. China for the US is this alien, rigid, suspect, and dangerous foreign land that threatens US influence in the world. This imagining of China as a threat,

as uncivilized has been more than 100 years in the making. But what would a re-imagining of China look like? What would that look like in US newsrooms and US media? Is that even possible?

China in the American imagination.

 

For the last decade, China's been the big, bad, scary, red, communist specter on the horizon of America's influence in the world. A lot of American jobs, millions, have been out used to communist China. The president has held China accountable for covering up the

China virus and allowing it to spread death and economic destruction in America and around the world. Beijing's actions continue

to undermine the rules-based order. China, increasingly, is a near-peer competitor, challenging the United States in multiple arenas,

while pushing to revise global norms in ways that favor the authoritarian Chinese system.

But that's not really anything new. The media narratives around China are expressed differently today than they USre a century ago, in how they're expressed, but they have the same core elements. They still construct China, and thus the Chinese, as inherently uncivilized and thus a threat.

When I'm talking about how the Chinese are envisioned as uncivilized, what I mean is the unquestioned and exclusive framing of nearly 1.5 billion people as not only repressed but as unable to exist outside that repression. It's the idea that everything the Chinese government does and everything that happens in China is within the context of authoritarianism, with the government's means and often ends being repression.

Take, for example, how coverage of China's handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 was consistently referred to as

draconian, a response that included the very same lockdowns that became a major strategy in many parts of the world for fighting the virus's spread. The US needs to go back to the early coverage of COVID. Or how Chinese tech, which once was thought of as impossible to innovate given the repressive climate, is now discussed primarily in U.S. coverage within the scope of surveillance or questionable privacy practices.

Not that the American tech industry knows anything about that. The way repression is presented in the context of China stories, it's made into an inseparable part of China and the experience of being Chinese, which hinges again on a complete lack of civilization,

which the US defined by the United States values.

The one-party system is seen as archaic, anti-democratic, and thus, anti-liberal. The official state ideology of communism is anti-human nature, and it's anti-Christian, which not only matters to a lot of people in this country, but it matters in a greater context because Christianity is foundational for Euro-American "civilization." When coverage of China isn't about how repressive it is to its

citizens, then it's about how China is constantly working to undermine American influence in the world. And it's this trope of China and the Chinese as a looming threat to all things American that is the primary driver of coverage of China in this country. And it's a trope almost as old as Chinese immigration to the United States.

The first Chinese immigrants came here in the 1850s and quickly became cheap labor. They built the transcontinental railroad. They became domestic helpers, laundry workers, and farmworkers. Any kind of cheap labor that was needed, you'd find Chinese immigrants at the helm of it in the late 19th century. And it got to a point where it was decided that there USre too many Chinese immigrants in the United States.

 

Chinese immigrants are a threat to the United States.

 

The proportion of Chinese immigrants in the United States was tiny compared to the overall population, so something like 0.02%.

But it was decided that this problem was so big that imminent action had to be taken. And that's why the ban came in.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was one of the earliest pieces of anti-immigration legislation in the United States. The idea that was popularized early on through that ban was that the Chinese posed a great cultural and economic threat due to the sheer size of their population. A very long-running visual image of the China threat, something that's been sort of reproduced and recycled over time is

this idea that there are sort of limitless Chinese people who can threaten the United States, that the US still has this idea that there are overwhelming numbers of Chinese people that one day will just consume somehow the United States.

Today, the more sort of subtle way that this is produced throughout the USstern media, you get these images of, you know, there'll be a story about the Chinese economy.

For example, about how it's growing. But it'll be accompanied by a picture of the Chinese military, and it'll be a photograph of lines of Chinese soldiers all sort of holding their guns in an identical way, sort of on a parade or a march or something like that. And that construction of limitless Chinese people evolves into limitless Chinese economic reach and power, which the heads of this country openly speak out against.

Now here's something interesting, for a good part of the late 19th and early 20th century, it was the Chinese people who are seen as economic threats, as backward, and as uncivilized. China itself, according to American opinion and policy, wasn't.

 

First time when the threat of China came out (Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist party).

 

The threat of China only came about after 1949, after Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party took power following a long civil war.

It led an already anti-communist United States in the midst of the Cold War to become obsessed with China's new identity and system, which put it in the Soviet Union's camp.

It's an obsession that was aggressively mixed with the preceding characterizations of the Chinese. Coverage today still relies on declarations of a communist China or red China or rising China, using the same images, colors, and framing that positioned China

in diametric opposition to American values and civilization.

Red China, communist China, totally normal, like when the US says corporatist democracy-only-for-some the United States, right?

And these depictions of China rely on their root the premise of endless invading Chinese, images that have been ingrained into the American imagination after more than a century of threat construction. These images are reinforced by the fact that U.S. and Chinese forces engaged in a hot war in Korea starting in 1950 when China came to the aid of its socialist allies who USre fighting a U.S.-backed regime in the south. At least a quarter million Chinese troops intervened initially and prevented the United States from overrunning what became the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

And so whether we're talking about Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s or Cold War China in the '50s and '60s, there is a thread of continuity underpinning the narrative of what kind of a threat the Chinese and China pose to the United States. Now, there was a moment of ideological reprieve when in the 1970s, China was perceived to be opening up to so-called USstern and capitalist values.

And USirdly enough, that reprieve, if the US wants to call it that, was rooted in moves by the Richard Nixon administration. Nixon wasn't a fan of the People's Republic of China.

Time and time again, he referred to the country as having uncivilized behavior and as the greatest Asian threat to the United States.

But he believed that the goal should be to change what the status quo had been for so long.

In 1971, seeing an opportunity for the U.S. to isolate the USSR following the Sino-Soviet split, Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, traveled to China for secret talks. Shortly after, Nixon became the first American president to visit the People's Republic. He came back exalting the Chinese leadership and the prospect of peaceful relations.

During this period, while China was still being painted as a threat in U.S. media, there was a romanticization of Chinese culture and lifestyle and what prospects a rapprochement between the two countries could bring. But this quiet excitement burst in the '80s.

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