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Comment by doom2 | Hacker News Reader

As a personal anecdote, living as an Asian in a US city with a population over 1M people, I definitely saw a change in peoples' stance towards Asians in general and Chinese in particular, and not in a good way. There was a lot more suspicion about Asians, their businesses, etc. It wasn't the same level of suspicion as during post-9/11 America but it had a similar vibe. A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both) Maybe that didn't result in violent crime, but it was not (and still isn't) a good time to be Chinese or display pride in one's Chinese heritage.

I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.

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Sorry you had to go through that. But I have to ask about this:

> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)

Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.

It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.

I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.

Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.

In what way did they claim to be criticizing the Chinese government but actually criticized Chinese culture? Because it is possible and valid to criticize the Chinese government and not the people. And it is also a possibility that your own personal biases could make it difficult to differentiate between the two. We have a surplus of Americans who take any criticism of America, the nation-state, as a personal insult, so I'm sure the same thing happens elsewhere.

>A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people."

This is a reasonable thing to say. I think mainland Chinese are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and I hope I live to see the end of this cruel regime.

Being a Russian post-invasion, I feel this is awfully familiar.

This may not be entirely fair but citizens of a country which is being shit to others feeling negative consequences due to their countries shitty actions is generally a good thing. It's up to Russians to fix their government and its up to Chinese to fix theirs - unless you are advocating for foreign invasion, which will probably make things a lot worse for you no matter where you currently live.

Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.

Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.

What would you do to make it clear you are not one of a shitty group of people?

Agreed, like the cold shoulder shown to white South Africans during Apartheid. Overall, it helped to change national sentiment and led to the end of Apartheid even though it might've harmed some people living abroad who were opposed to the system.

I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.

This kinda just seems like an argument in favour of bigotry. I find it odd that you are so casual in your justification of it. This reminds me to always be mindful of the social norms of my current environment, because we could very easily be the oppressors/bigots/racists etc., and not even realize it until decades later...

> Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war

There are many white people being racist towards white people, should I give all white people the cold shoulder so one day it will end racism?

I think it is unkind to treat people in a punitive manner for something that is beyond that individual person.

> you fit into a pattern of shitty people

What an awful thing to say to another person

> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)

'Dog-whistling', meaning they don't overtly say it and you infer that they mean it. If they make it overt such that it doesn't need to be inferred, they're not longer dog whistling.

How do you know your inference is correct and that is their intent? How can you be sure that wasn't just an impression given to you by [social] media? The CCP has a vested interest in conflating any criticism of itself or the PRC generally with racist criticism of all Asians. They also say that criticism of their Uyghur genocide is dog whistling anti-Asian racism. The CCP say this of anything that criticizes them, and their narratives do not stop dead at their borders. I've heard it echoed by some of my coworkers, PRC nationals working in America, and even western media that might not endorse such narratives will still give voice to consideration of those narratives.

Now allow me to be frank; during the supposed surge of anti-Asian hatred ostensibly motivated by Trump and perpetrated by white nationalists, much of anti-Asian crimes that were being reported had been perpetrated by African Americans. It was probably crime motivated by class/social/economic inequality, and insofar as it disproportionately targeted Asian Americans at all (rather than selective reporting merely creating that appearance) it probably had nothing to do with any politician's covid rhetoric and was instead was an artifact of geographic proximity and inequality in policing (Asian American neighborhoods receive less protection from the police, making Asian Americans an easier target for crime.) In this last regard, you can easily show that racism against Asian Americans played a role, but such inequalities in policing are problems that go back many generations and have little if anything to do with covid.

I hope other readers will note that, in response to the above user’s account of sinophobia in the US, the comments here on HN have overwhelmingly attempted to invalidate those experiences. Responses have ranged from outright hostility to gaslighting behavior, even an attempt to deflect the discussion onto Black Americans despite the original comment mentioning no race other than Asian or Chinese.

The above commenter’s experiences will ring true for many Chinese living in the US, because we are the ones who experience and are impacted by sinophobia (this can also extend to other E/SEA diaspora to an extent). Whereas the commenters claiming that we’re biased or influenced by propaganda, as if they are uniquely exempt from such things, are not.

The comments rightly ask for clarification: did the user witness or experience discrimination or bias, or is the user equating criticisms of China with criticisms of individuals of Chinese descent. If the above user doesn't make that distinction, then it does invalidate the user's observations.

Criticisms of the Cuban government are absolutely independent of criticisms of individual Cubans like myself. If another Cuban person felt that they were being individually criticized when other people criticize Cuba, I'd tell them they need to learn to distinguish between the two - it's not the responsibility of the public to avoid any criticism of the Cuban government. This isn't an attempt to "deflect the discussion", it's using another country as an example to make it clear that this is a distinction we're perfectly capable of making for other ethnic group.

The point of using the term “sinophobia” rather than simply “prejudice” is that no, it does seem that some subset of people are uniquely unable to “criticize” PRC policy without injecting some trope about mainland Chinese people and culture. In fact, the point is to repeat the stereotype as if it were fact. The policy (whether it exists or not) is just an excuse.

For that matter, sincere requests for clarification are not immediately followed by attempts to dismiss the underlying concern as invalid. This inherently makes the request insincere.

If the criticism of the PRC were mixed in with Sinophobia, then doom2 should have expanded on that. As written, there's nothing to suggest that doom2 witnessed anything other than criticisms of the PRC. The idea that it's mixed in with stereotypes about mainland China would be a good example, but it's entirely your injection, not something stated in doom2's comment.

Remember, allegations of "dog-whistles" are really just saying "I'm assuming other people are implying XYZ." My conservative relatives think words like "diversity" or "inclusion" are dog-whistles for anti-white discrimination. They're earnest when they say the feel attacked, but that's entirely on account of their own assumptions and does not indicate any actual racism. If doom2 wants to make point, they should actually explain what they witnessed that was bigoted or hateful - don't just allege "dog-whistling" and do nothing to substantiate that claim.

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