Keywords

What role does race—expressed as racialized identities, resentment, and worldviews—play in shaping mutual perceptions and foreign policy views between the United States and China today? Did the dramatic growth and increased visibility of anti-Asian violence in American society during the pandemic serve to add a more explicit racial overtone to the deteriorating great power relationship? In this chapter, I utilize cross-national public opinion surveys and foreign policy discourse analyses to trace the link between COVID-19, anti-Asian racism, and policy views and discuss implications of this behavioral feedback loop for contemporary Sino-American relations.

Specifically, I first find with an American national survey fielded during the early stage of the pandemic a significant interconnection between the American public anxiety over the virus, negative sentiments toward Chinese and Asians, and support for a hardline China policy. This preliminary evidence indicates how heightened concern about COVID-19—which had already become deeply politicized through the U.S.-China blame game over its origin—shaped American mass support for punitive action against China and more importantly, how broader anti-Asian sentiment was strongly associated with their views on the virus and China. Next, I examine what effects this political salience of anti-Asian racism in America has exerted on China’s foreign policy discourses that increasingly subscribe to its own nativist and nationalist rhetoric. Whether understood as the manifestation of America’s dysfunctional democracy or racially motivated foreign policy toward China, anti-Asian racism has appeared perfectly congruent with the Chinese view that China and its people, since the ‘century of national humiliation’, continue to be victimized by dominant Western powers.1 Turning to evidence from an original national survey in China, I then find how the Chinese public’s own racialized identity and animus translate to their support for the nation’s more assertive foreign policy measures. Taken together, the findings indicate the far-reaching transnational implications of domestic anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, highlighting how it contributes to the interactive emergence of hawkish foreign policy views and discourses between the United States and China.

Toward the end of the chapter, I derive broad implications of my findings for both American and Chinese policymakers who aspire for a peaceful management of the great power rivalry. I first suggest that American and Chinese leaders should refrain from employing foreign policy narratives that appeal to the sense of identity difference and exceptionalism in their assessment and public discussion of U.S.-China relations. I argue that such identity narratives bring the risk of encouraging domestic racism and anti-minority violence, emboldening the other country’s own exclusionary identity and worldview, and finally, fueling U.S.-China security dilemmas through strategic misperceptions. In the next section, I discuss the link between COVID-19, anti-Asian racism, and U.S.-China relations before moving on to introduce my research design and key results. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of my findings and policy recommendations.

COVID-19 and the Racial Politics of U.S.-China Rivalry

“You will never turn into a Westerner,” remarked China’s former foreign minister Wang Yi during his meeting with South Korean and Japanese officials in July 2023, immediately capturing the attention of China watchers around the world. Calling for greater cooperation between China and its neighbors, united by a sense of “strategic autonomy” from the West, Wang Yi addressed his fellow Asian guests, stating “One needs to know where one’s roots are…China, Japan, Korea––if we can join hands and cooperate, it would not only serve the interests of our three countries but also fulfill the wishes of our peoples, and together we can prosper, revitalize East Asia and enrich the world” (Xu 2023).

Since the pandemic, appealing to such racialized sentiments2 has become increasingly popular among both American and Chinese leaders. In the United States, President Trump ignited the controversy over his reference to COVID-19 as “Chinese virus” while the mass media and other political elites insisted on using the racially charged label to highlight the association between the virus and China. Research shows that such racially inflammatory elite messages have strong “emboldening effects” on the public’s prejudiced attitudes and behavior against marginalized groups in society (Newman et al. 2019; Siegel et al. 2019). Reports on surging anti-Asian hate incidents during the pandemic (e.g., Jeung et al. 2021) suggest that American elites’ strategic racial rhetoric might have stoked mass xenophobic and discriminatory behavior toward Chinese and broader Asian communities in the United States (Reny and Barreto 2022; see also Adida et al. 2020). Using observational data, another recent study finds that negative sentiment toward Asians in American society has indeed noticeably increased after the onset of the pandemic (Nam et al. 2022). In the midst of the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Chinese political rhetoric has, in other words, brought the century-long “yellow peril” anti-Asian racial trope back to the forefront of American politics.3

As Michael Omi and Howard Winant illustrate in the context of American race relations, race can also turn out to be the ideological weapon of the weak—who often react to perceived discrimination with a heightened sense of collective victimization, racialized identity, and resentment (Omi and Winant 2014, p. 108). From the Chinese perspective, humiliation has long defined the way foreign powers and “Westerners” treated China in the history of modern international relations, dating all the way back to the British incursion of Qing China and the First Opium War in 1839. As a central element of popular nationalism in China today, this “victim mentality” has endured a decades-long process of internalization and shaped the way Chinese view the world and interpret the actions of foreign powers (Gries 2004; Wang 2008; Callahan 2012). As a result, anti-Asian violence during the pandemic and the revitalized discussion of America’s yellow peril syndrome (see, e.g., Li and Nicholson 2021) would have further consolidated the view that China and its people continue to be victimized by dominant Western powers in international politics. Faced with an American President invoking the “Chinese virus” label and the vivid images of helpless victims of anti-Asian hate crimes in America, both the Chinese elites and masses––from China’s young “wolf warrior diplomats” and the government-run media to millions of Chinese netizens4––have paid increased attention to anti-Asian racism, its intimate connection with America’s views and historical relations with Asian powers, and perhaps more importantly, their perceived status as part of a subordinate and stigmatized racial group. The Economist, at the height of the pandemic, thus aptly observed that Chinese public discourse since the pandemic has been dominated by “resentment of a West” that attempts to “demonize” and “scapegoat” China during the health crisis (The Economist 2020). Another commentator also laments that “American and Chinese political hawks view the pandemic as the perfect opportunity for actualizing some long-standing ideological fixations,” with the Chinese side preoccupied with what they perceive as America’s “ethnocentric assault on all Chinese, regardless of nationality” (Wong 2020).

To summarize, anti-Asian racial violence in the United States during the pandemic has not only revealed the persistence of anti-Asian animus and its role in shaping American views toward China, but also convinced the Chinese that the world is still dominated by the same “white” countries responsible for China’s national humiliation. Since the pandemic, this feedback loop between mutual racial resentment, identity, and hawkish nationalism between the two great powers, facilitated by both opportunistic elites and bottom-up pressures in each society, has become an important element of U.S.-China rivalry today. The future course of the great power relationship—whether the two continue viewing each other as a racial Other and eventually an existential threat to be eliminated—thus at least partly depends on our efforts to correctly understand how this vicious behavioral circle works and prevent it from exacerbating U.S.-China security dilemmas.

Research Design

In this chapter I draw on multi-method examination of public opinion and political discourses in the United States and China to examine the abovementioned relationships between COVID-19, racial attitudes, and mutual perceptions and foreign policy views between the two countries. For the analysis of American and Chinese public opinion, I turn to evidence from original national surveys in both countries during the pandemic. For the analysis of societal-level foreign policy views and discourses, I introduce empirical patterns from the state media coverage in China and toward the end of this chapter, American election campaign messages on China. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence for my argument that (1) first, during the pandemic, Americans’ negative views of people of Chinese and Asian origin were closely associated with their response to the virus and support for hardline policy action against China and (2) that the Chinese elites and public have responded to anti-Asian racism with their own nativist and racialized view of the United States and international politics in general. After examining this intricate yet increasingly salient feedback loop between American and Chinese perspectives on race, policy, and the great power rivalry, in the next section I derive practical suggestions for policymakers tasked with formulating measures to prevent misperceptions and unintended conflicts between the two countries.

In partnership with Lucid Theorem, my main U.S. survey was administered during the early phase of the pandemic in February 2020 on a national sample of 923 American adults balanced on age, gender, race, region, and partisanship. To replicate my findings, the second survey was fielded in May 2020, again through Lucid, on 1,852 American adults with roughly the same demographic characteristics. I then subset both survey data to responses by self-identified white Americans for my main analyses below.5 For both surveys, I added a scale measuring the perceived adverse effect of COVID-19 on the respondents: “How worried are you about the Novel Coronavirus?” (1 = Not worried at all—5 = Extremely worried) for the February survey and “Have you experienced financial hardship due to the current Coronavirus pandemic?” (1 = None at all—5 = A great deal) for the May survey. I then assessed the participants’ foreign policy preference toward China by constructing a four-item China policy questionnaire adapted from Myrick (2021). The scale asked about the extent to which the American public find it acceptable to employ economic sanction, covert military action, and use of military force against China. Finally, to capture racial attitudes, I included a new validated measure of anti-Asian sentiment (the Asian American resentment scale) and alternative measures of racial group favorability and racial stereotypes.6

For the China survey, I worked with a local survey firm in March 2022 to recruit a total of 2,007 Chinese adults across the country who were well balanced on age and gender and with diverse economic backgrounds and varying levels of political knowledge. To measure Chinese foreign policy views, I constructed a comparable scale of hawkish US policy based on levels of approval of more militaristic and assertive policy measures. To assess racial attitudes, I first included the standard racial feeling thermometer scale to construct a scale of anti-white sentiment. Participants expressed their favorability of four different racial groups—whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians—with a continuous scale ranging from 0 (“Unfavorable, cold feeling”) to 100 (“Favorable, warm feeling”). I then subtracted target out-group (i.e., whites) from in-group (i.e., Asians) ratings to calculate scores for anti-white sentiment—how unfavorably Chinese view whites vis-à-vis the baseline in-group category. I additionally build on the widely utilized white identity scale (Jardina 2019) to construct a measure of Asian identity, replacing the term “white” with “Asian” in its original scale items. The scale captures three central elements of racial identity–how strongly individuals identify with a racial group, feel positively toward the group, and maintain a sense of belonging and commonality. I then calculated composite scores by averaging responses to these three question items such that a higher score indicates a stronger attachment to Asian identity.

Key Findings

First, observational evidence from American national surveys suggests that the public’s anxiety over the pandemic was significantly associated with heightened mass support for more confrontational foreign policy measures against China and that this relationship was partially mediated by negative views toward people of Chinese and Asian origin. In Table 6.1, I present results from a series of regression models that probe this interconnection between American anxiety over the virus, racial attitudes, and China policy preference. As shown in Model (1), a unit increase in reported anxiety about COVID-19 significantly predicted approximately four percentage point increase in American public support for punitive China measures. Models (2)-(5) further demonstrate that the more one was worried about the virus, the less likely the respondent was to view Asian and Chinese Americans favorably, as captured by the measures of anti-Asian racial resentment and feelings and negative stereotypes toward Asians and Chinese in American society.

Table 6.1 Associations between COVID-19 anxiety, anti-Asian/Chinese sentiment, and support for hawkish China policy among the American public (February 2020 survey)
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The rest of the models, next, show that it was specifically attitudes and feelings toward Asian and Chinese people and no other minority groups that significantly predicted the China policy preferences of the white American respondents. For example, controlling for the widely used measure of anti-black racial resentment or symbolic racism (Kinder and Sanders 1996) in Model (6) does not reduce the effect of anti-Asian sentiment and for Models (7)-(8), negative stereotypes against Asian and Chinese Americans but not toward other minorities were strongly associated with China policy opinion. While not shown in a separate table, I replicate these findings with the follow-up survey fielded in May 2020 that employed an alternative measure of perceived negative impact from the pandemic. The more one felt financially disturbed by the pandemic, as in the previous survey, the more likely the respondent was to view Asians in negative light and support assertiveness vis-à-vis China. Although we are here based on correlational data, a causal mediation analysis also reveals that for both surveys, higher levels of anti-Asian sentiment significantly mediated the effect of COVID-19 on American public support for hawkish China policies.

Racialized views toward Asians during the pandemic, in other words, played an important role in shaping how Americans responded to the pandemic with its contested origin from China and subsequently approved firmer—including military—action against the foreign rival. Next, the growing visibility and politicization of anti-Asian racism in America during the pandemic, as manifested in the dramatic rise of anti-Asian violence across the country (Jeung and Lee 2021), have also brought important consequences on the bilateral relationship by shaping China’s own foreign policy discourses and preferences. As reported in my previous study (Kim 2022), I find that there has been a dramatic growth in the volume of Chinese state media coverage of issues related to anti-Asian racism, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. A closer examination of the contents of these reports reveal two dominant themes and rhetoric running through these top-down narratives: On the one hand, the Chinese official media have attributed growing anti-Asian violence to racially motivated American foreign policy toward China. For example, a Global Times article quotes an op-ed written by an Asian American activist: “Today, as Washington cynically promotes Yellow Peril as a strategy to pass major legislation at home and retain America supremacy abroad, Asian American and Pacific Islanders face increased surveillance, harassment, and attacks” (Kim 2022, p. 118). The other prominent theme interprets anti-Asian violence as demonstrating the inherent limitations of American democracy and the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy. A People’s Daily article, for example, contends that “Without solving its own domestic problems, the U.S. is increasingly interfering in China’s internal affairs in the name of human rights and democracy.” Citing remarks by Chinese officials, the article then directs attention to the “poor racial record” in America, marked by “discrimination and brutality against African Americans and bullying of Asian Americans” (Kim 2022, p. 65).

Evidence on Chinese public opinion from my original survey in March 2022 further suggests that Chinese views on race also matters for shaping the country’s foreign policy preferences. The left panel in Table 6.2 displays the distribution of Chinese feelings toward various racial groups. Most importantly, I find that the Chinese respondents feel overwhelmingly more favorably toward Asians (M = 74.5, SD = 0.22) than toward whites (M = 48.5, SD = 0.22), Blacks (M = 47.1, SD = 0.23), and Hispanics (M = 50.0, SD = 0.20). This result suggests the presence of strong racial in-group favoritism among the Chinese public—they express starkly divergent views toward different racial groups, favoring Asians overwhelmingly over the other racial outgroups. The regression table in the right panel then shows that these racial attitudes have noticeable and independent effects on what the Chinese public want their government to do vis-à-vis the United States. While controlling for baseline hawkishness across all models, more favorable views of Asians and less favorable views of whites were significantly predictive of Chinese support for hawkish foreign policy. In short, the Chinese public not only exhibit a remarkably high level of Asian racial identity and racial in-group favoritism but also readily translate such racialized sentiments to their more confident foreign policy outlooks. Reported in another study (Kim 2022), findings from an experiment embedded in the same survey also suggest that Chinese foreign policy narratives that denounce anti-Asian racism in America significantly boost the Chinese public’s anti-white sentiment and Asian racial identity, both of which in turn are strongly associated with higher levels of support for foreign policy assertiveness.

Table 6.2 Distribution of racial group favorability and associations between racial attitudes and support for hawkish U.S. policy among the Chinese public (March 2022 survey)
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Discussion and Policy Implications

In this chapter, I examined anti-Asian racism and hawkish China opinion in the United States following the onset of the global pandemic and its lasting implications for continued Sino-American great power rivalry. Utilizing an original national survey fielded during the initial phase of the pandemic, I first find evidence for the close connection between the American public anxiety over the virus, negative sentiments toward Chinese and Asian people, and support for a hardline China policy. While the design of the survey does not allow the identification of causal directions between these factors, the evidence clearly shows how heightened concern about COVID-19—which had already become deeply politicized through the U.S.-China blame game over its origin—shaped American mass support for military action against China and more importantly, how broader anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiments were strongly associated with both attitudes. The relationships are robust to controlling for party identification, ideology, and potential confounders such as generalized ethnocentrism, and it is specifically attitudes toward Asian and Chinese Americans but no other minorities that significantly predict support for hawkish China policies. In another study, I experimentally test whether information about COVID-19 and its alleged Chinese origin significantly boosts the public’s anti-Asian sentiment (Kim 2023). Taken together with the findings of this chapter, existing survey evidence suggests that racialized views toward Chinese and broader Asians—often lumped together under the long-standing “model minority” and “yellow peril” racial tropes—have played an important role in shaping how Americans have coped with the pandemic and responded to perceived threat from China.

The implication of these finding for U.S.-China relations becomes more evident when we examine how the growing salience and visibility of anti-Asian racism in America exert a strong influence on China’s foreign policy discourses that increasingly subscribe to its own nativist and nationalist rhetoric. Since 2020, the Chinese state media have published hundreds of news reports and opinion pieces that attribute growing anti-Asian violence in the United States to what they perceive as racially motivated American policy toward China and inherent limitations of American democracy. As Peter Gries and Zheng Wang have shown, anti-foreign sentiments have gradually become a key element and driver of China’s popular nationalism since the end of the Cold War.7 The pandemic politics, against this background, has added a more explicit racial overtone to the anti-foreign sentiments undergirding Chinese foreign policy discourses. With “the white powers of Europe and America” identified as the perpetrator for China’s continued humiliation and victimization (Dikötter 2015, p. 125), racialized resentment and identity have become important to how China views the United States and American foreign policy and defines its own identity and standing in the world. The view that China and its people continue to be victimized by the racially prejudiced Western powers, in turn, has far-reaching effects on the landscape of China’s own racial thinking and foreign policy preferences. Turning to evidence from an original national survey in China, I find that Chinese foreign policy narratives that explicitly link anti-Asian racism to American foreign policy significantly boost the Chinese public’s anti-White sentiment and Asian racial identity which in turn strongly predict mass support for military action against the United States and its regional allies. Not only have the Chinese public come to embrace a noticeably high level of Asian racial identity and anti-White sentiment but they also readily translate such racial attitudes to more confident and hawkish foreign policy views.

Now I conclude the chapter by drawing lessons and policy recommendations for contemporary U.S.-China relations, calling for greater awareness of state leaders and publics about the connection between inter-state rivalry, political rhetoric, and racialized violence. In the context of the ever-deepening U.S.-Soviet security competition in the 1950s, John Herz argued that we should collectively work toward a more rational foreign policy “through a kind of psychoanalysis in the international field where lifting one factor into the realm of the conscious might become part of the healing process” (Herz 1959, p. 249). By lifting the underexamined factor of race and identity into the analysis of current Sino-American relations, my discussion in this chapter therefore suggests following policy recommendations for both American and Chinese leaders who aspire for a peaceful management of the great power rivalry:

  1. 1.

    Both American and Chinese leaders should refrain from using foreign policy narratives that appeal to the sense of identity difference and exceptionalism in their assessment and public discussion of the bilateral relationship. Foreign policy narratives with identity appeals—whether more or less racialized (e.g., “Kung Flu,” “You’ll never turn into a Westerner”) or ostensibly non-racial (e.g., “defend the West and the free world,”8 “China’s Community of Common Destiny”9)—pose the risk of stimulating exclusionary, nativist, and racialized resentment and violence against the other country and people associated with it.

  2. 2.

    Both American and Chinese leaders should beware of the societal and political downstream consequences of identity appeals in foreign policy narratives, which may have the effects of (1) inciting domestic discrimination and violence against minorities, (2) emboldening the other country’s own exclusionary identity and worldview, and (3) exacerbating inter-state security dilemmas through inflated threat perception and miscalculation of the other side’s strategic intention.10

The first step toward fully embracing these lessons is to acknowledge the power and agency of political elites in shaping how countries view each other and whether people draw more exclusionary and essentialized identity divisions vis-à-vis the foreign rival. In my analysis of televised political campaign advertisements in all levels—Congressional, gubernatorial, and presidential—of U.S. elections from 2006 to 2018 that specifically discussed China as a major issue, I find that American political elites, across the party line, rely heavily on the strategy of evoking economic and cultural anxiety during their campaigns, blaming China as a threat to American economy and security. As shown in Table 6.3, a sentiment analysis further demonstrates the role of negative emotional appeals in shaping the overall tone of America’s China rhetoric. Compared to the rest of the political advertisements, China-related messages were significantly more likely to express and deliver negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness to the receiving public. Among the negative emotions, anger in particular has been the predominant source of emotional appeals in these discourses, consistently shaping the tone of election campaign messages on China for the past decades. As Antoine Banks aptly shows in his work on American race politics, elite messages that evoke anger have the effect of making racial resentment more salient to American voters and their policy opinion (Banks 2016). In other words, even without the explicitly racialized identity rhetoric in both American and Chinese foreign policy discourses we have observed since the pandemic, we have to pay more attention to the broader societal and political costs of foreign policy narratives that stoke angry responses and zero-sum thinking among the masses.

Table 6.3 Emotional appeals in political campaign advertisements on China across all U.S. elections, 2006–2018
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International politics today is characterized by the resurgence of ethno-racial nationalisms, populist elites, and resentment between groups both within and across borders. Deepening Sino-American tensions in particular are articulated increasingly in terms of exclusionary identities—be they ideological, civilizational, and noticeably since the pandemic, racial. Are China and the United States, trapped in the spiral of mutually reinforcing identity politics, destined for another war without mercy in the Asia–Pacific?11 Similarly, as in the late nineteenth century when the first appearance of anti-Asian racism in American society led up to the notorious Chinese exclusion acts, will the Chinese respond to America’s racial dilemma with their own racialized worldview and hawkish nationalism?12 To break this tragic, vicious circle of race, identity, and great power conflict in international politics would require more scientific and evidence-based policy discourses on the issue and greater awareness of political elites and masses alike. The present study therefore calls for renewed scholarship on the normative and practical discussion of how inter-state conflict shape and interact with costly behavioral pathologies, including racialized violence, at the individual and societal level––what scholars have begun to identify as the “first image reversed” approach in International Relations (Kertzer and Tingley 2018; Pomeroy 2022, 2023; see also Bustamante 2023).13

Notes

  1. 1.

    For seminal works on China’s century of humiliation narrative, see Gries (2004) and Wang (2008).

  2. 2.

    It is here important to note that not all racialized (or what some call racialist) views amount to racism—whose very definition is still debated among philosophers of race (see James and Burgos 2023). Blum (2002), for example, laments that the concept of racism is invoked and “used so expansively as to refer to virtually anything regarded as wrong in the area of race.” In fact, I propose that one of the major challenges for the study of race in IR is to build a theory of race that clarifies the definitions, sources, and implications of “race”, “racism”, and “racialization”—all of which are basically global in nature and thus merit IR theorizing (for recent efforts, see Mercer 2023, Maass 2023, Brown 2024, and also Johnston and Kim 2024).

  3. 3.

    For the history and critical analysis of the yellow peril syndrome in America, see, e.g., Tchen and Yeats (2014) and Wu (2002).

  4. 4.

    On China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats, see Smith (2021). On the role of the state media in Chinese foreign policy, see, e.g., Wang and Wang (2014). For a study on the political attitudes of Chinese elites and netizens, see Weiss (2019).

  5. 5.

    Empirical results remain unchanged for respondents who identified themselves as black, Latino or Hispanic.

  6. 6.

    For the validation and application of the Asian American resentment (AAR) scale, see Kim (2022) and Kim (2023).

  7. 7.

    Gries (2004) and Wang (2008).

  8. 8.

    A related identity rhetoric or “meme” that frequently appears in American foreign policy discourses is the “Rules-Based Order (RBO)”. For a critical analysis of how such identity narratives feed into the U.S.-China security dilemma, see Breuer and Johnston (2019).

  9. 9.

    For a review of the concept of the “Community of Common Destiny,” see Smith (2018).

  10. 10.

    For pioneering research on the interconnection between exceptionalism, identity politics, and U.S.-China security dilemma, see Breuer and Johnston (2019) and Johnston (2018).

  11. 11.

    John Dower famously described the Pacific War between Japan and the United States as a war without mercy that was marked by unprecedented degrees of racial hatred and mutually exclusive and reinforcing racial identities between the two great powers. See Dower (1986).

  12. 12.

    For a comprehensive and critical analysis of the Chinese exclusion acts, the role of racism, and their implications for Sino-American relations in the late nineteenth century, see Ngai (2021).

  13. 13.

    Pomeroy (2022) also uses the term “behavioral realism” to describe a systematic study of the link between structural—realist—pressures of international politics (e.g., the balance of power) and domestic behavioral pathologies (e.g., threat inflation). Bustamante (2023) specifically calls for bridging the emerging literature on race and racism with structural Waltzian approaches in IR.