Citizens at risk
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned of a surge in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. According to a statement obtained by ABC News, "The FBI assesses hate-crime incidents against AsianAmericans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease … endangering AsianAmerican communities.
"The FBI makes this assessment based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate Covid-19 with China and Asian-American populations."
However, it is not just Asian-Americans who are targeted. Anyone who looks Asian is endangered, whether they are Americans or foreign visitors from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, or other countries in Asia, as well as nationals of European countries who happen to be of Asian heritage.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the virus of racism against ethnic Chinese and other Asians has been spreading across the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, France and elsewhere. His worry was prompted by the recent racialization of the pandemic by President Trump and his administration as well as members of Congress calling the virus "Chinese." The toxic rhetoric long promoted by China hawks in Washington, amplified by the virus crisis, subsequently helped cause a wave of anti-Asian violence.
If the situation worsens as the FBI assesses, foreign governments may need to consider ways to protect their citizens and perhaps even evacuate them from the US. In a country that prides itself as the leader of the free world, how did it get here, where an entire race of people increasingly fear for their safety?
Unfortunately, racism has always been an endemic part of American history. It ebbs and flows throughout time, with punctuations during economic hardship and public health crisis. Whether with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 amid a recession that politicians blamed on Japan, targeting Muslim Americans after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and now Chinese-Americans and by extension all East Asians, because the average American cannot distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, or any other East Asians.
Against the backdrop of an economic cold war with China, a crescendo of antiChinese rhetoric from US politicians in recent years has fanned the flames of racism toward ethnic Chinese specifically and Asians generally.
It is manifested in the involvement of US domestic intelligence agencies with economic competition in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) over fears of intellectual-property theft, and forgone profits of US high-tech and big-pharma companies. As a result, over the past years the FBI has been targeting and prosecuting, at times persecuting, AsianAmerican scientists, because Washington now largely classifies basic research collaboration as economic espionage.
Because of increasing monetization and commoditization of public goods such as basic research and medical science, international collaboration in science - including cancer research - is now quasi-criminalized, with FBI agents reading private e-mails, stopping Chinese scientist at airports, and visiting people's homes to ask about their loyalty.
This has prompted American scientists to warn against state-sanctioned racism, because while there have been some legitimate cases of espionage and criminal activity, many cases have been bungled through lack of evidence, so much so that Congress has launched an investigation into the FBI over alleged racial profiling of ethnicChinese researchers.
Beijing was so concerned about the US government's treatment of its citizens that in June last year, the Chinese government issued warnings to its students and academics about the risks of studying in the US, and America has seen an exodus of many talented ethnic-Chinese scientists because of increasing de facto criminalization of research collaboration.
Now after years of US politicians using incendiary language against China and blaming the Chinese for economic woes and now the pandemic crisis, much like they blamed Japan in the 1980s, a portion of the American population is targeting Asians - whether Americans or foreign nationals - for abuse and misplaced anger.
However, in the midst of the feverish anti-Chinese sentiments, and seemingly in a sudden twist of irony, the White House currently finds itself in a position of relying on a Chinese-American scientist to lead America's fight against Covid-19.
Bridging the Sino-US gap
Enter Dr David Ho, America's top scientist for infectious diseases, renowned researcher for treatment of HIV/AIDS, Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1996, and recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal from then-US president Bill Clinton.
Dr Ho is racing against the clock and assembling a team consisting mainly of ethnic-Chinese scientists to find a generalized approach that would not only cure Covid19, but would lay the foundation to treat future mutations of the coronavirus that causes the disease.