We’ve Lost the Plot: Sinophobia and the Collateral Damage of American Primacy

What Visa Bans Teach America About Itself

Listen to my audio narration of this essay above.

We’ve seen this before: paranoia dressed up as patriotism, a government casting suspicion by ethnicity. This time, it’s Chinese students. And it won’t stop there.

On Wednesday, under orders from Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, the Trump administration announced it would begin “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese nationals — those studying in “critical fields,” or with supposed “connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” The language was deliberately vague. The implementation, characteristically blunt. But the message was unmistakable: Chinese students are no longer welcome.

We can all speculate over whether this originated with Rubio himself, who, after all, has been an unstinting China hawk throughout his time in the Senate, or whether this came from the Oval Office, where its narcissistic occupant, seething under the humiliation of the deeply funny TACO meme, felt compelled to lash out, look tough, and show the world that Trump does not, in fact, Always Chicken Out. At the very least, it’s about the permission structure — the license within the administration coming from the top that permits open bigotry.

This has nothing to do with genuine security review. If it did, we’d see defined criteria, credible evidence, and some pretense of due process. What we’re seeing instead is performance — a display meant to project toughness to a domestic audience conditioned to see China as threat and Chinese identity as inherently suspect.

The most worrying outcome isn’t just the personal devastation for students or the blow to American higher education, though both are considerable. It’s the way this kind of policy spills outward, accelerating a broader wave of Sinophobia. When the federal government treats Chinese students as latent threats, it doesn’t stay confined to visa holders. It bleeds into the popular imagination and expands its targets. Most Americans don’t stop to parse the difference between Chinese nationals and Asian Americans, or between Han Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. In this climate, phenotype stands in for affiliation. This won’t stop with PRC passport holders. It never has. What’s taking root is something more ambient and more dangerous: the idea that anyone who looks East Asian is suspect by default.

To be absolutely clear, it wouldn’t be remotely acceptable if it did stop at people with “Party connections,” or Chinese STEM students, or even PRC nationals. That would be bad enough, and more than sufficient reason for outrage.

But we’ve all seen how this plays out. After 9/11 and the San Bernardino attacks, turbaned Sikh men — men who were not terrorists, not Arabs, not even Muslims — were assaulted and even killed by people unable to even try to distinguish between religious identity and imagined enemy. Again, it would have been no less bad had they been Arabs or Muslims. I share the view of the Sikhs who said they were uncomfortable describing that violence as “misdirected” because, as this report notes, “that invites questions about violence being correctly targeted at Muslims.” My point is simply that just as anti-Islamic and anti-Arab bigotry spills its boundaries, so too does Sinophobia.

After COVID, there was a surge of anti-Asian hate crimes across the country: verbal harassment, vandalism, beatings, even murders. Most of the victims weren’t Chinese, but that didn’t matter. The people committing these acts had absorbed a message: these people don’t belong. They’re not us. No one will pause, before hurling the epithet, or the fist, or the brick, to ask my daughter, my son, or my wife whether they have “ties to the Communist Party,” or whether they’re STEM students, or whether they’re even mainland Chinese, or ethnic Chinese at all.

What’s infuriating is that even to point this out — to suggest that anti-AAPI hate is fueled by Sinophobia, by ideological or political animosity toward China or its ruling party — is to invite suspicion in some circles. To say that Sinophobic rhetoric has real consequences — that it travels from press briefings and Truth Social posts to sidewalks — is to risk being accused of “repeating CCP talking points,” of “carrying water for the CCP.” But that very accusation proves the point. It reflects how deeply the logic of rivalry has sunk its roots into the American political discourse. Some of us are now so afraid of conceding narrative ground to Beijing, of letting Beijing score a point, that even acknowledging racism at home is treated as suspect. To me, that only proves how the zero-sum thinking on China, the very hallmark of Sinophobia, has endured.

To confront the anti-AAPI hate that will assuredly follow in the wake of this (and is already frothing up, to judge from MAGA world’s enthusiasm for Rubio’s announcement), we need to speak plainly about Sinophobia.

This policy of visa revocations and expulsions isn’t just paranoia; it’s moral panic masquerading as national security. When concern for civil rights is made subordinate to geopolitical positioning, we’re no longer acting out of principle — we’re reacting out of neurosis.

There’s something uncomfortably revealing about how easily this country now accepts the logic of collective suspicion when it comes to China. Would we be pursuing the same policies, with the same vindictive fervor, if our strategic competitor weren’t a nonwhite, one-party state with a vastly different political culture? I doubt it. The racial dimension is not incidental. It helps explain both the vehemence of the reaction and the blindness to its consequences. We’re living in a time when loyalty is judged by phenotype. And where noticing racism is itself seen as subversive.

We have entered a feedback loop in which Sinophobia is both a byproduct and a driver of strategic rivalry. It fuels the antagonism, and the antagonism legitimizes the prejudice. And in the meantime, real people — scientists, students, ordinary Asian Americans — are swept up in it, forced to prove loyalty or endure scrutiny simply because of their heritage.

(On the subject of “proving loyalty,” if you try telling me that the right reaction to this is for the “good” Asians to drape themselves in the American flag, we’re going to have a problem.)

This is not a theoretical danger. We saw it with the “China Initiative,” which ruined lives and careers before being (partially) abandoned in disgrace. We see it now as universities quietly shift policies on research collaboration, or turn away from China-related partnerships out of fear of political reprisal. We see it in faculty lounges and corporate boardrooms, in grant applications and tenure reviews, where being Chinese — or even “too close” to Chinese colleagues — starts to feel like a liability.

And we’ll see it again, in uglier ways, as the broader public takes its cue from the government’s posture. That’s how this works. When the state racializes a threat, the public follows. That threat becomes ambient, and the policing of it moves from institutions into everyday life.

This could have been avoided. The U.S. has every right to protect national security, but it can do so without targeting ethnicity, without collapsing individual identity into collective guilt. It is possible to view immigrants and international students not as liabilities, but as bridges. That’s what many of them, like my parents, came here to be.

But when we start treating affinity for America as a test that must be passed and passed again by people whose only disqualifying trait is that they were born in a different country, we don’t just betray them. We betray ourselves. We give up the very idea that anyone can belong here if they choose to. We begin to believe that allegiance is racial, and trust is conditional. This isn’t just a soft power loss. It’s a lethal tear in the fabric of our civic culture.

And if we can’t reverse this — if we keep allowing suspicion to stand in for strategy, and rivalry to justify racism — then we may well succeed in keeping out some Chinese students. But we will also have shown, quite plainly, that our professed ideals are no longer meant for everyone.

We forfeited much of the world’s admiration long ago. But there was still, in some places, a residue of respect for our openness, our education system, our ideals. If we make it clear that those, too, are expendable in the name of rivalry, we shouldn’t be surprised when even that last ember goes cold.