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As another non-Chinese Asian, really? You don’t want to be lumped in with the Chinese so it’s easier to know who the “bad ones” are?

I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.

It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now. The people who want to hate Asians will find a reason.

It might be interesting to compare the treatment of Italian-Americans and German-Americans to Japanese-Americans in WW1 and WW2. Relatively few Italian and German-Americans were interned in comparison. Meanwhile, the hostility towards Japanese-Americans spilled over to Chinese-Americans despite China being invaded and allied with the US, leading to Chinese-Americans having to explicitly distinguish their racial identity while out in public as here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/chinese-americans-during-ww...

The fact of the matter is, being a visible ethnic minority come with challenges in addition to being just an ethnic minority. If you are visually similar to the ethnic target of the day, whether or not you actually have links with them, you automatically get hit as collateral damage whether you like it or not. German and Italian Americans could blend in and stay out of the spotlight during the world wars. Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian Americans could not and still cannot, and their visual appearance forces them to share the same spotlight. No matter how varied the Asian experience may be, the Pan-Asian identity will continue to exist because identity is not just a product what you think of yourself, but what others think of you and how they interact with you.

That situation is more complex than you imply. My German immigrant ancestors, for example, survived anti-German sentiment during and after the war by denying their heritage and giving up things like the communal making of barrels of sauerkraut, making Lumberger cheese, and of course most of all: speaking German. So they survived okay, but only with their culture completely assimilated.

The difference for visible ethnic minorities though is that even with your culture completely assimilated, you cannot hide your racial appearance and people will still treat you based on it. Plenty of Asian-Americans are 2+ generations in America little to no connection with their language and culture, completely assimilated as you say. They're still targeted just because of their appearance, assimilation does nothing to help protect them. For German and Italian Americans, at least assimilation has the intended effect.

I suspect there's probably some anger behind assimilating and tossing away cultural roots and identity only to find out it was absolutely pointless that's helping to drive the upsurge in recent Asian-American movements.

My German ancestor had a different experience. Perhaps he had to do this for a while after first arriving in Canada, but by the time I was born he was a part of a rich and thriving German community in the town I grew up in. I have many good memories of going to events at the German club growing up, singing German christmas carols in December, all of that stuff.

I guess it depends on the region.

Agree: multiple visually similar ethnic minorities probably experience "spillover" racial hatred when any of them is does. Internment is a good example.

Disagree: German and Italian Americans experienced (and experience) ongoing racial prejudice. Cultural differences are very easy to spot and target for discrimination even when racial body features are not.

No one deserves racial discrimination or hatred.

Politically, I am sympathetic to anyone would want to put as much distance between themselves and the CCP, Chinese or not. It is hard to speak about the CCP without saying "the Chinese" and immediately sounding racist when the comment has nothing to do with race. That is the problem with overloaded terms.

Also, no one was saying things about Japan that they are saying about the CCP. There was great fear about the economic power of Japan. In terms of human rights and influence and military and pollution and human rights, the narrative was completely different.

> Politically, I am sympathetic to anyone would want to put as much distance between themselves and the CCP, Chinese or not.

Okay, but if how close I am to the CCP is seen as a function of how I look and where I’m from, then what the fuck am I supposed to do? Walk around in white-face with a big American flag and tell people I’m from Kansas?

The problem is that people are inferring political beliefs from how people look or their race or their nationality.

Regarding Japan, the narrative was different, but the sentiments were similar. Vincent Chin was murdered for being Japanese (although he was Chinese) and his murderers only got a $3000 fine.

And those assholes can fuck off. But are they really that numerous? Are they driving the cultural narrative? I think no, and in the areas where this is the case, I think it's probably more of a white vs. not white thing which is a whole other bag of worms.

This is an egregious strawman of gp’s comment. Gp plainly specified that they mean to distinguish between people of Chinese descent and CCP supporters. And there’s really no other way to play it if you oppose the CCP’s behavior and vision of international order.

The Japan example is ultimately a bad comparison. On the American side, it was much more transitory and contained narrative. On the counterparty side, the CCP is being much more openly hostile and normalizing atrocious, anachronistic state behavior.

Edit to add: Your closing attitude betrays a lot. If you are convinced in advance that American society writ large is determined to hate Asians, that is what you will contort your view to see. Further telling you ignored the data gp presented.

> Gp plainly specified that they mean to distinguish between people of Chinese descent and CCP supporters.

No, they plainly specified that they wanted to distinguish between other Asians and Chinese, and of the Chinese between CCP and non-CCP supporters. But in another comment they note that the majority of Chinese are CCP supporters anyway.

Let me ask, what do you think the end effect of this “racial distinguishing” is? What do we do once we’ve identified the “problematic ones”? How would such a system be implemented? Anyone could just claim to be non- Chinese/CCP supporters. Perhaps, a tattoo?

Obviously its by not assuming someone is a CCP supporter unless they voice this opinion. I did not say anything to the effect of harm or violence against people who support the CCP. But I think a stronger level of national comfort discussing the CCP as a hostile state would be beneficial.

My thesis is this: a growing population of Americans believe the CCP is hostile. A very small minority of Americans are violent and act on appearance alone. A band of thugs should not get to set the tone that America is becoming racist against Asians. The reality is that a nation state is growing in moral and geopolitical transgressions, and that is what people are upset about.

You don't need to profile anyone. But if someone says "I hate the CCP" and harasses a Korean person. That person is awful, but it doesn't make this a collective struggle.

The presence of racists does not define a cultural consensus that hatred of asians is growing. If there's a 100% in hate crimes against asians, and a 10000% person increase in negative feelings towards the CCP, I guarantee you, nobody will feel more hostile towards the CCP that non-CCP aligned asians.

>As another non-Chinese Asian, really? You don’t want to be lumped in with the Chinese so it’s easier to know who the “bad ones” are?

> I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.

I don't condone hate crimes, and I don't hold any hostility to people of Chinese descent. But the CCP is a hostile nation, which in my opinion is engaging in liberal cyber warfare against western countries, committing genocide within its borders, and aggressively expanding its geopolitical influence across the globe. I think the CCP is evil. And yes, the United States government is full of bad actors as well, but I think the CCP is much worse and much more dystopian.

The converse of saying Muslims aren't accountable for the acts of Muslim extremists, is saying that supporters of Muslim extremists are accountable. Which really shouldn't be a controversial statement. You put "bad ones" in quotes to imply that there are no bad ones. I don't agree. A difficult conversation here is that while the majority of Muslims were not violent extremists, the majority of Chinese citizens are CCP supporters. It isn't a fringe belief, even among those living outside of China.

That doesn't justifying profiling someone based on appearance or committing a hate crime either way, but to put it bluntly, if someone says they support the CCP, I think they support a hostile enemy nation, on some spectrum of naivety/indifference to clarity/purpose, not unlike how I would respond to hearing someone is in the KKK. Most are probably just underinformed or misinformed, but its a dangerous state.

Forget brutish idiots who just hate squinty eyes. Yes, they're just assholes. Perception of China as an enemy nation is growing, and as a reactionary force, many people are calling this a racist movement because they want their Chinese friends and neighbors to feel comfortable in this country. I too have many Chinese friends. But your cultural heritage and ethnic origin are distinct from your government and geopolitical beliefs. It may require difficult conversations, and it may not lead to amicable outcomes, but I hope the national dialogue can sort out this nuance.

Chinese culture is awesome.

> It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now.

3 decades ago? Like in the 80s? I know Japan was seen as a rising economic power, but I don't think the perception was similar to that of China today, which is seen as a potential military threat among other things. I'm not especially well versed here though.

>Casually looking up stats on the FBI hate crime database (2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table...), asian hate crimes are an order magnitude less than black/african american hate crimes.

Isn't that expected because there's an order of magnitude less asians? Not to mention that the people targeted with this wave of violence are probably east asians which are a subset of all asians.

> Isn't that expected because there's an order of magnitude less asians?

Per the article, Asian-Americans are 7% of this country. I leave as an exercise what an order-of-magnitude would imply here.

This is just spitballing, but I would think the number of hate crime committers is far more important than the number of potential hate crime victims. There's likely to be far more potential victims than actual victims in any given locale. Of course there's going to be some confounding effects here.

edit: that is, adding one violent white nationalist will increase anti asian violence far more than adding one asian person.

An acquaintance of mine mentioned that in college, she was involved in a college group that was trying to organize against anti-Asian violence, and there ended up being so little of it that they had to reorient to being a volunteer organization.

I'm also pretty liberal, but it feels like the NYT has decided it's their role to litigate the culture war. I really don't love it. Being driven to substack a la Taibbi and Greenwald, because it's not like going and reading Breitbart or whatever is going to give me better info.

I lean traditional[1], not Conservative (TM), and I find Breitbart just as insufferable as MSNBC or CNN. They’re all using the same formula of eliciting emotional responses and using them to assign and cement opinions to their victims.

I don’t agree with their political beliefs, but I find Taibbi and Greenwald readable. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is exactly, but you can tell they have far more intellectual respect for their readers than the mainstream propagandists do.

[1] Think Chesterton’s Fence applied to politics.

“Think Chesterton’s Fence applied to politics.”

I like this. I may have to adapt this somehow. “Where do you stand on....” “I’m on the fence—the Chesterton fence.”

Most Americans, and Europeans too, really don't know much about China. The picture you get painted by only reading news articles is not representative of what real life is actually like over there. China is not a third world country, and the CCP is not a North Korean style military dictatorship. It's really just a normal place, and visiting Shanghai or Hangzhou just feels like you're in US cities. You don't have to like the CCP to enjoy China and respect its people.

Visiting China’s richest cities (like Shanghai or Hangzhou) will also give one a biased view of what China is like, just less so than being completely uninformed. For the good and the bad, Beijing is much more representative, or head out to the countryside in the poorer provinces.

Even Shanghai has sparsely populated areas mostly used for agriculture. Someone just visiting the city is unlikely to ever end up there, though.

Ya, but I don't think a 5 star hotel in Zhizhun (where Microsoft Shanghai's office is located) is going to give you an idea of what real China is like.

Do you mean the Zizhu (紫竹) technology park? I used to live in the vicinity and took a lot of long walks, so I know there's quite a lot of agricultural land south and east of there. If you follow Dongchuan Road to the eastern end it already looks pretty rural, and randomly taking smaller roads from there in a southeasterly direction should lead you to your first rice field soon. That's less than 5 km away from the Microsoft campus.

However, I don't expect the kind of person who stays at a 5-star hotel to spend much time randomly exploring their surroundings.

Not my choice, that was during the expo anyways. Shanghai is one of the most boring places in China to visit, even if it has shiny modern city scapes. If you goto China and spend most of your time in shanghai? You’ll see much more of the real China in hefei, it’s only a night by train (and they probably have HSR now).

Or what about southern China during the winter? Learn what it’s like to live without central indoor heating is fun. I’ve never been colder in winter than in Changsha.

> You don't have to like the CCP to enjoy China and respect its people.

This is the crux of it though. You don't need to like the CCP to enjoy China and its people. But you don't need to dislike China and its people in order to consider the CCP a hostile, morally evil state.

Rebranding the latter as racism is damaging.

I find it rather odd that you can describe yourself as "aggressively liberal" and then go on to defend discrimination against an entire ethnic group because of one government's admittedly problematic actions.

The CCP does not inherently represent Chinese people (either from the PRC or certainly ethnic Chinese broadly), any more than the Republican Party represented all Americans simply by virtue of being in control of Congress and the Presidency.

I find that a bad faith interpretation of the following quote:

> As a non-chinese, I'm also annoyed at the lack of differentiation between Asian and Chinese- and then further from Chinese descent vs. CCP supporter.

But to further exemplify. If objectively evil aliens who looked just like white dudes with early male balding appeared, and people started attacking bald people. I think bald people would be frustrated if the cultural narrative asserted on them was "Anti-bald hatred" and that all bald entities should work together here, including the evil aliens. The problem might just be that a subset of bald people are bad, and some assholes are particularly degenerate in their willingness to group them together. Bald people would reject being called the same as the evil aliens just because they're visually similar. They're not the problem and they shouldn't have to put up with this.

People hate the aliens, and a subset of people are just jerks. Unlike past controversies like anti Muslim and anti Black sentiments, anti-CCP isn't unsubstantiated. It's a non trivial threat. Some racist, violent thugs shouldn't get to control the cultural narrative of what's going on. If I oppose X, hell no am I going accept a movement that says that both I am equivalent to X, and that opposition to X is unfounded.

The idiotic practice of lumping Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian people together as “Asians”, as if the term had any kind of cultural relevance, is mainly a tic of journalists. For the most part, normal people don’t talk or think this way.

Here's my strange anecdote:

My girlfriend's mom is Cambodian with Chinese ancestry. One time she was describing a pickled cabbage preparation from her home village, and I responded with "oh, so kind of like Korean kimchi?" and her response was "yeah, but Asian-style."

In her mind, "Asia" specifically means China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Thailand.

In the US, people refer to descendants of East Asia (China/Korea/Japan/similar looking) by Asian. In the UK, Asian means descendants of South Asia (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Nepali).

Asia is a big continent, and often Pacific Islanders are also thrown in with the jumbo term. Africans probably also feel weird when we bucket everyone from their continent under a single African label.

It is in fact "Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month" in the US right now. So go ahead and celebrate with some dumplings and a side of poi?

African as a label becomes even stranger when mixed with American. African-American is usually used as a synonym for Black American, despite not all Africans being Black. An Egyptian-American likely would not be called African-American.

We use words weirdly!

It’s worse than that. I’ve heard black Africans living in Africa, who have never been to any country in the Americas, referred to as “African American” by people who think—well, who knows what they think? Americans are insane when it comes to “race”.

At some point in time, some portion of popular culture deemed “black” as a descriptor of people with certain skin tones and cultural background in the US was derogative and pushed for switching to “African American”, even though it can cause confusion.

Weirdly for sure - referring to Charlize Theron as "African-American" always sound odd, even if it is technically correct

I’d love to annoy or perplex people by doing this. Unfortunately, her name never seems to come up in conversation.

There’s always Elon Musk, noted African-American businessman.

Russia is also in Asia, but you rarely hear them called Asians. Indians are rarely lumped in either. Lumping dissimilar peoples together never made much sense to me - even Continents are arbitrary divisions.

There are some Russians that look really Mongolian (and probably are close to Mongolian ethnically), and of course pass for East Asians. There is a lot of land between Novosibirsk and Vladivostok.

Looking at it on a map can be deceiving though. About 80% of Russia is in Asia, but about 80% of Russia's population lives in European Russia.

I have questioned the narrative of rising anti-Asian hate in the US ever since I read an HN-linked editorial on the subject in a major American newspaper by an Asian-American, and he included supposed microaggressions in the count of hateful actions against Asians. For example, noticing that someone has a relatively uncommon surname in North America (like Nguyen) and asking if that someone was related to someone else they knew with the same surname, was, according to him, microaggressive. This felt like such a reach made in order to claim there was an emergency going on.

It depends on definitions. Hate crimes against asians are increasing. They're still relatively rare. Are more people becoming anti-asian? Or are the usual suspects just being more vocal in the last gasps of trumpism? Are we able to differentiate anti-asian hate from hostility towards the CCP?

Your last paragraph I get it but I think that's also a sign of racism? Like say I'm Russian because I kinda am, no one holds me accountable for Putin's actions. The geopolitical positioning of Russia's regime at any given moment doesn't affect how safe I feel in my current country, doesn't affect how strangers feel about me.

The fact that it does for some chinese-americans and other asians.... I'm not sure exactly what it says but there is something there and I don't think it's benign.

Of course, but there needs to be a way to say, for example, Russia is a hostile state without being seen as prejudiced against people of Russian descent.

If someone says anti-asian ideals are on the rise, I think it's important to unpack that to say it is caused primarily by the ccp. Many people are anti-ccp but not anti-asian, likely including, a majority of non-chinese southeast asians. Having that conversation is how you remove vague racist sentiments and encourage a focus on actual political entities.

Yes, people often fail and just use visual cues. But historically there have been differences. E.g. the original american views on japan were that of a refined civilization and sort of honorary white Asian vs. the chinese, which is all sorts of fucked up, but serves to highlight that even dumbass racially driven views can have nuance.

To me the GP look like just a thinly veiled “F-word [nationality] [noun]s can go home but some with [judgmental criteria] are good”... Rivalry is strong among East Asian countries. It probably isn’t causing cognitive dissonance in GP for using racist narratives against Asian categories while identifying as an Asian.

I don't suppose the irony is lost upon you that you're using a stereotype of Asians to justify asserting that I'm racist. Consider a good faith interpretation in which I don't think anyone needs to good home because I didn't say anything like that.

Assuming you're a liberal American, how do you feel about conservative media saying the country needs to be protected from anti-american sentiment in europe for trump being an idiot some time ago? Is it possible you thought "Actually I dislike trump too, he's not my president, and I shouldn't be held accountable for him?" Do you accept generalizations about Americans using subsets that you find abhorrent? Have you never said "there's large differences between the red and blue states, it's not all like that"?

I certainly said things like that a lot, and at the end of the day, I think the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP are worse than those of trump.