I realize this is explosive territory because Asian-Americans, particularly Chinese-Americans, fear getting caught up in the mounting U.S.-Chinese confrontation. Bad things, like the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the anti-Chinese laws of the late 19th Century, have unquestionably happened.
But Jessica Chen Weiss, writing an essay in today’s New York Times, goes too far in trying to persuade Americans that they are not ALREADY in a massive, technologically intensive confrontation. Here are her last two paragraphs:
“Reflexively maneuvering to out-compete or thwart China only validates hard-liners in Beijing who believe that America is implacably hostile and that the only response lies in undermining the United States.
“By continuing on that road, the world’s two most powerful countries may end up turning each other into the enemies that they fear.”
First of all, the “hard-liners” are overwhelmingly in control of China’s party-state-military apparatus, thanks to President Xi Jinping. They are not hiding in the shadows. These Marxist-Leninist hardliners have abandoned decades of the Chinese practice of tolerating the existence of a private sector along side separate governmental and Communist Party centers of power. The hardliners in the party are consolidating control of all aspects of life in China and they have put China on a path to undermine America’s democracy and national security, as co-author Michael McLaughlin and I argue in our new book, “Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia Are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security.” (Available for pre-order here.)
These two authoritarian states, dominated by China, are in very act of penetrating U.S. computing systems on a massive scale. Both are flooding our social media with disinformation and seeking to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own institutions and to further inflame the deep culture wars that have already gone too far. TikTok is clearly part of a strategy of cognitive warfare. The Chinese have stolen billions of pieces of data from Americans and stolen so much technology that the American military is now looking at a People’s Liberation Army that is equipped with many aircraft, and even an aircraft carrier, that were built on the basis of American designs. The Chinese government has established secret police stations around the world to monitor the Chinese diaspora. Jessica Chen Weiss mentions none of this because she is a foreign policy expert. The entire U.S. foreign policy establishment is missing the true nature of the challenge that China and Russia are mounting because they don’t understand the technological dimension.
Jessica Chen Weiss has been candid in other settings talking about how her Asian mother in Seattle (where Chen Weiss was born) fears walking the streets because of anti-Asian violence. Chen Weiss self-identifies as half-Asian, half-white. I completely understand the impulse of Chinese-Americans, through such bodies as the Committee of 100, to seek to defuse the strengthening U.S. conviction that China is behaving in fundamentally hostile ways. Chen Weiss is a professor at Cornell University, but also has an affiliation with the Asia Society, which is dominated by Hong Kong billionaires loyal to Beijing.
I submit that the better course for Chen Weiss and all Asian-Americans is to help the United States identify and combat China’s underhanded strategies and prove that Asian-Americans are essential in helping America formulate a coherent response, which it has not yet established. By helping to lead, they could guarantee that Americans are grateful to them, not resentful and suspicious.
