Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time of Covid-19:

Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and

Techno-Economic Warfare

Lok Siu, Claire Chun

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 23, Number 3, October 2020,

pp. 421-440 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2020.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/772573

[ Access provided at 18 May 2021 16:44 GMT from New York University ]
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-
ORIENTALISM IN THE TIME OF
COVID-19
Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and
Techno-Economic Warfare

Lok Siu and Claire Chun

ABSTRACT. The essay examines the rise of anti-Asian aggression within the
converging vectors of the pandemic, the escalation of the U.S.-China trade war,
and the growing concerns about cyber- and techno-security. By analyzing the
techniques and effects of race-making in the current pandemic moment and
connecting them to historical antecedents, we trace the persistence of the yellow
peril ideology across different contexts. We argue that the yellow peril ideology,
now configured within a techno-Orientalist imaginary where China is posited as
the chief enemy-threat, is powerfully animating the racial logics and racial affect
mediating the multiple terrains of public health, technology, and global trade.

Introduction

I n the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, President
Trump put out many mixed messages, but he remained consistent with
one—that China was to blame for the spread of the virus. Repeatedly,
he insisted on calling the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” despite
mounting public criticism against the racialization of the deadly pathogen.
Many noted the inflammatory nature of this anti-Asian rhetoric. During
this same period, reports ranging from verbal abuse to intimidation to
physical assault against people of Asian descent documented the sudden
rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States and globally. According

jaas october 2020 • 421–440

© johns hopkins university press
422 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

to Human Rights Watch, an Asian woman in Brooklyn, New York, suffered

a racially motivated acid attack, and in Texas, a Burmese American man
and his two children were stabbed by a man who claimed he thought the
family was “Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.”1 The Asian
Pacific Policy and Planning Council in the United States reported over one
thousand cases of anti-Asian incidents in a two-week period in March 2020.2
Outside the United States, a Singaporean student in the United Kingdom
was violently kicked and punched by an angry group of men after they
uttered, “we don’t want your coronavirus in our country” (my emphasis).3 In
Australia, a survey taken by the community group Asian Australian Alliance
recorded a total of 178 reports of anti-Asian incidents in two weeks, ranging
from racial slurs to physical assault.4 Though President Trump has dropped
the “Chinese virus” for “kung flu” and tweeted on March 23 that “It is very
important that we totally protect our Asian American community . . . the
spreading of the virus is NOT their fault,” it seems that Sinophobia and
racial violence against Asian Americans have been unleashed.
Make no mistake, as long as President Trump continues to take a
confrontational stance, using the rhetoric of blame against China with the
intention to punish it with new sanctions, tariffs, and even the cancellation
of U.S. debt obligations,5 the racial aggressions against Asian Americans
will continue to rise, if not intensify. By now, it is widely accepted that the
novel coronavirus emerged first in Wuhan, and scientists believe that the
zoonotic disease might have jumped from animals to humans at Wuhan’s
Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wet market where vegetables, sea-
food, meat, and a small number of exotic wildlife were sold. Despite this,
on April 30, President Trump casually offered a new theory, which Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo tweeted: that COVID had originated in the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, which houses a biosafety level-4 lab, and that the virus
might have “leaked” from that lab. The implicit suggestion is that China had
either intentionally bioengineered the novel coronavirus to cause massive
destruction, thereby attributing malice, or carelessly leaked the virus due
to scientific negligence, thereby attributing incompetence. In either case,
these kinds of unsubstantiated speculations work to further stoke anger
and disdain against the Chinese state. More disturbingly, they traffic in
the idea of China as a biotechnology threat, resonating with pre-existing
filmic representations of futuristic dystopian worlds.
The immediate and unqualified responses from the scientific com-
munity reveal the danger of these potentially incendiary speculations.
Responding swiftly, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued
a press release the morning of April 30 stating that “The Intelligence Com-
munity . . . concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 423

virus was not manmade or genetically modified . . . ” (my emphasis).6 Within

days, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease,
Dr. Anthony Fauci, attested that the virus “could not have been artificially
or deliberately manipulated.”7 These assertions sought to extinguish any
attribution of malice to the Chinese state. Even with firm contestation, how-
ever, the very invocation of the idea of biotechnology warfare has tapped
into and perhaps even fueled our existing techno-Orientalist anxieties.
As the COVID pandemic story transpires in real time, engulfing the
entire global community, taking unexpected twists and turns, making
divergences and transgressions, we have become increasingly aware that
the layers of entanglements cannot be easily parsed out, nor will we know
anytime soon how and when the story will end. We offer a query into how
we might assess and make sense of the intensifying Sinophobia and xe-
nophobia in this current context. To do so, we must resist the temptation
to confine our analysis to the narrow parameters of the pandemic. Rather,
we insist on examining the rise of anti-Asian aggression within the con-
comitant vectors of the pandemic, the escalation of the U.S.-China trade
war, and the growing concerns about cyber- and techno-security. Here
we assert that the ideology of yellow peril set within a techno-Orientalist
imaginary is powerfully animating the racial form and racial affect medi-
ating the multiple terrains of public health, technology, global trade, and
national security. While it is tempting to treat this historical conjuncture
as extraordinary, it is crucial that we situate the current unfolding within
the long history of Asian racialization, one that indexes the abiding ten-
sion between the political impetus to define national belonging and the
shifting economic imperatives of the nation-state.8
In this essay, we examine the techniques and effects of race-making
in this current moment, while linking them to historical antecedents, in
order to illustrate the persistence of the yellow peril ideology as it is being
configured through a techno-Orientalist imaginary where China is posited
as the chief enemy-threat. What follows is an analysis of how Chinese al-
terity as national security threat is being simultaneously constructed and
disciplined in the different but related arenas of the pandemic, science,
and technology.

The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat

The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it
could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its emergence amid
the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is sig-
424 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

nificant in that the prevailing tensions between the two countries and the
discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition, scientific espionage, and
technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may
argue that President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread
of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in his administration’s sustained
attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides
a foil to distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and
public health crisis in which we find ourselves.
At this particular juncture, we unfortunately have been inundated
with media coverage of a plethora of accusations and actions launched
against China and Chinese Americans. Within the past two years, we have
witnessed the implementation of trade sanctions and tariffs against China,
the removal of prominent Chinese American scientists from research insti-
tutions, and the severing of nationwide economic transactions with certain
China-based telecommunications corporations, with Huawei Technologies
Company being the most notable. All these have been advanced in the
name of national security. The discursive formation and the representa-
tional devices that have been used to justify these state directives play a
critical role in constructing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as culprit
and as America’s enemy number one. These constructions, some of which
will be examined in this essay, are layered upon one another, each building
and elaborating on the last, and each invoking and simultaneously inciting
a different set of anxieties that lie within the broader repertoire of China/
Chinese as threat. Indeed, the inundation of media about China makes it
difficult, if not impossible, to decipher truth from falsehood, myth from
reality, rhetoric from evidence. Our task here is not to weigh the truth-value
of these representations but to treat them as ongoing contests embed-
ded in power and to draw out their material effects. It is worth noting that
while the explicit target of U.S. state aggression has been the mainland
Chinese state or the PRC, the actual effects are much more wide-ranging
and extend into everyday aggressions against all those who present as
East Asian American.
In our examination of the variegated representations of China/Chinese,
we suggest that the longstanding ideology of “yellow peril” remains not
just pertinent, but extremely forceful in constructing a multifaceted reper-
toire of Chinese state threat and, by extension, of Chinese/Asian American
threat. What is particular about this recent iteration of yellow peril is its
configuration through the lens of techno-Orientalism, a framework that
is primarily used to examine the explicitly fictional genres of novels, vid-
eogames, and films but that we now assert as being actively deployed in
this current historical conjuncture.
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 425

Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism

The term yellow peril emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to
Japan’s arrival to the geopolitical stage as a formidable military and indus-
trial contender to the Western powers of Europe and the United States.9 The
concept was further elaborated and given a tangible racial form through
Sax Rohmer’s series of novels and films that provided the early content for
the social imaginary of “yellow peril” along with its personification in the
character of Dr. Fu Manchu, the iconic supervillain archetype of the Asian
“evil criminal genius,” and his cast of minions.10 Strikingly, Dr. Fu Manchu’s
characterization as evil, criminal, and genius continues to inform the racial
trope of the Asian scientist spy; and more recently, we may add to the list
the bioengineer, the CFO, the international graduate student, to name
just a few. Moreover, the notion of the non-differentiable “yellow” masses
continues to function as a homogenizing and dehumanizing device of
Asian racialization, which makes possible the transference of Sinophobia
to Asian xenophobia.
In its inherent attempt to construct a racial other, “yellow peril” is more
a projection of Western fear than a representation of an Asian object/sub-
ject, and in this sense, it may be better understood as a repository of racial
affect that can animate a myriad of representational figures, images, and
discourses, depending on context. Indeed, the images and discourses of
yellow peril have surfaced multiple times throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, capturing a multitude of ever-shifting perceived threats that range
from the danger of military intrusion (i.e., Japanese Americans during WWII),
economic competition (i.e., Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century,
Japan in the 1980s), Asian moral and cultural depravity (i.e., non-Christian
heathens, Chinese prostitutes, opium smokers), to biological inferiority
(i.e., effeminacy, disease carriers). As Colleen Lye observes, “the incipient
‘yellow peril’ refers to a particular combinatory kind of anticolonial [and
anti-West] nationalism, in which the union of Japanese technological
advance and Chinese numerical mass confronts Western civilization with
a potentially unbeatable force.”11 Arguably, the yellow peril of today rep-
resents heightened Western anxieties around China’s combined forces of
population size, global economic growth, and rapid technological-scientific
innovation—all of which emerge from a political system that is considered
ideologically oppositional to ours. The current context, we suggest, is best
understood through the lens of techno-Orientalism.
When the idea of techno-Orientalism first appeared in David Morley
and Kevin Robins’s analysis of why Japan occupied such a threatening posi-
tion in Western imagination in the late 1980s, techno-Orientalism offered a
426 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

framework to make sense of the technologically imbued racist stereotypes

of Japan/the Japanese that were emerging within the context of Western
fears and anxieties around Japan’s ascendancy as a technological global
power. They proposed that if technological advancement has been crucial
to Western civilizational progress, then Japan’s technological superior-
ity over the West also signals a critical challenge to Western hegemony,
including its cultural authority to control representations of the West and
its “others.” They claimed that the shifting balance in global power—the
West’s loss of technological preeminence—has induced an identity crisis in
the West. In response, techno-Orientalism, in which “[idioms of technology]
become structured into the discourse of Orientalism,” is produced in large
part to discipline Japan and its rise to techno-economic power.12 The United
States, for instance, externalized its anxiety into xenophobic projections of
Japan as a “culture that is cold, impersonal, and machine-like” in which its
people are “sub-human” and “unfeeling aliens.”13 Techno-Orientalism, born
from the “Japan Panic,” was effectively consolidated through and around
political-economic concerns that frame Japanese and, by extension, Asian
techno-capitalist progress as dangerous and dystopian.
Extending Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism,14 techno-Orientalism
marks a geo-historical shift where the West no longer has control over the
terms that define the East—the “Orient”—as weak, inferior, and subor-
dinate to the West. It marks a shift not only in political-economic power
but also in cultural authority. Techno-Orientalism, then, is the expressive
vehicle (cultural productions and visual representations) by which Western
and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires, and anxieties that are
produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony
through economic trade and scientific innovation.15
Analogous to Japan’s position in the late 1980s, China currently figures
into the techno-Orientalist imaginary as a powerful competitor in mass
production, a global financial giant, and an aggressive investor in tech-
nological, infrastructural, and scientific developments. At the same time,
the increasing purchasing power of China provokes American fear of a
future global market that is economically driven by Chinese consumptive
desires and practices. It is this duality—the domination of both production
and consumption across different sectors of the techno-capitalist global
economy—that undergirds American anxieties of a sinicized future.16
Further amplifying these anxieties around Chinese techno-economic
domination is our imagination of China/the Chinese as the ultimate yellow
peril, whose state ideology is oppositional to that of the United States and
whose unmatched population size combined with its economic expansion
and technological advancements may actually pose a real challenge to U.S.
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 427

global hegemony. We turn now to examine how the ideology of yellow

peril is manifesting in the current context of techno-Orientalism, beginning
first with an analysis of the racial trope of “Chinese as contagion” and its
connection to anti-Asian aggression.

The Racialized Contagion

The recent exponential rise of anti-Asian violence in the United States and
globally during the pandemic illustrates the persistent danger of racializing
diseases. Historians and social critics have documented and traced the ways
in which diseases have been continually racialized by their association with
particular peoples in geographical regions. Examples in recent memory
include SARS marked as Asian, MERS as Middle Eastern, Ebola as African,
and so on. In regards to this current pandemic, it might be useful to recall
the popularization of the “Chinese as contagion” trope in U.S. history, as
its multiple afterlives continue to inform the public’s facile acceptance of
the notion of Chinese as diseased bodies and pathogenic carriers. The late
nineteenth century racialization of the smallpox outbreak in San Francisco
serves as the antecedent to the current moment and illustrates its relation-
ship to the broader context of the anti-Chinese movement.
When the smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco intermittently
from 1868 through the 1880s, its origin was presumptively traced to China-
town. At the time, it was widely accepted that epidemics were caused by
environmental factors like polluted air, contaminated water, and general
bad hygiene and sanitation. Through prevailing racist ideas of this period,
Chinatown’s crowded streets, tight living quarters, and irregular layout
were taken as evidence in creating a “laboratory of infection.”17 According
to Nayan Shah, public health officials of the time helped construct China-
town as a place filled with “horrors of percolating waste, teeming bodies,
and a polluted atmosphere” and attributed these unsavory conditions
to “depraved” innate Chinese cultural behaviors and practices, ignoring
the economic factors that compel sharing of living quarters and the racist
state in not extending sanitation services to Chinatown.18 By linking the
environmental conditions of Chinatown with Chinese “primordial” culture,
government officials came to target the Chinese person (the cultural-
biological body) as the site of disease origin, contamination, and threat
to public health writ large. Another study of public health in Los Angeles
offers an analogous scenario.19
The emergence of these public health discourses in the 1870s must be
situated in the context of the anti-Chinese movement. As Chinese workers
428 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

poured into cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles after the completion
of the railroad, they quickly became targets of intensified prejudice and
racial violence. To the white working class, these Chinese laborers were
perceived not only as economic threats to their livelihood; but, as racial-
ized discourses of Chinese as disease carriers intensified, they were also
feared and despised as a biomedical threat. Together, these yellow peril
discourses molded perceptions of ethnic Chinese as both economic and
biological threats, fueling the anti-Chinese movement that eventually led
to the successful legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This historical ex-
ample shows how the racialization of disease worked in tandem with racial
capitalist logic to animate anti-Chinese sentiment, violence, and legislation.
The current rise in anti-Asian violence is clearly spurred by President
Trump’s persistent attacks against China along with his explicit racialization
of the virus. Indeed, since the onset of the pandemic, his administration
has sought to blame China, whether it is for hiding the seriousness of the
outbreak in Wuhan, delaying communication of the outbreak, or under-
reporting the number of deaths. The deployment of the politics of blame
seeks to displace the pandemic-induced anger, anxiety, and rage onto
China and, by extension, onto the bodies of Chinese and Asian Americans.
Moreover, the racialized terms, the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu,”
naturalizes the virus as being endemic to Chinese bodies, thereby conjur-
ing the phantasm of the Chinese/Asian contagion. While the ideational
power of the Chinese/Asian contagion lies in its construction of the Asian
body as the vehicle and embodiment of the virus, the deployment of blame
against China/the Chinese for the spread of the virus serves as the catalyst
that directs anger and rage against Chinese/Asian bodies.
However, to view current attacks against Chinese/Asian Americans in
the isolated context of the pandemic risks the danger of interpreting this
aggression “as exception.” Instead, drawing on the lessons of the late nine-
teenth century example, we want to situate the rise of anti-Asian violence
within the broader context of the anti-China campaign.

The Scientist Spy: Espionage, Intellectual Theft, and the Commoditization

of Science

Beginning with the escalation of the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, it seemed
every new tariff imposed by the United States on China was reciprocated
by a tariff placed on the United States. The mediated trade war, like an
extended cockfight, makes for brilliant displays of male bravado at the
same time that it inspires nativist white nationalism against China and
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 429

“the Chinese.” This broad scale and highly publicized interstate trade war,
we should note, is carried out alongside a relatively quieter but equally
damaging domestic attack against Chinese American scientists in the
United States.
The first half of 2019 witnessed a surprising amount of media coverage
on the removal of top Chinese American scientists from research institu-
tions in the United States. In January, epidemiologist Xifeng Wu resigned
from MD Anderson Cancer Center after three months of intensive FBI
investigations, which yielded no charges. She had worked there for twenty-
six years and at the time served as the director of the Center for Public
Health and Translational Genomics. The Center later decided to remove
three other Chinese American scientists.20 In May, Emory University fired
two Chinese American neuroscientists, Li Xiao-Jiang and Li Shi-Shua, who
had worked there for twenty-three years and were well-known for their
groundbreaking research on developing animal models to study Hunting-
ton disease and other neurological conditions.21 The university charged the
Lis with failure “to fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and
the extent of their work for institutions and universities in China,” charges
that the Lis dispute.22 These investigations, led by the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) in coordination with (and in some cases prompted by)
the FBI, were part of the effort that focused on China’s Thousand Talents
Plan (TTP), which recruits scientists to work at universities in China. It was
the fear that China was using the TTP and other funding programs to ac-
quire intellectual property via U.S.-based scientists that prompted these
investigations. Since August 2018, the “NIH has investigated at least 180
scientists at more than 65 institutions . . . Most—but not all—are ethnic
Chinese scientists.”23 According to Michael Lauer, NIH’s head of extramural
research, “82 percent of those being investigated are Asian [American].”24
The disproportionate number of allegations against Asian American
scientists across the United States has stoked fears that they are being
singled out and racially profiled to be stigmatized, scrutinized, and pun-
ished. As it is, many Chinese American scientists have been removed from
their tenured positions, often without due process or even an opportunity
to respond to the allegations. Indeed, still fresh in memory is the case of
Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the engineer who was working at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory when he, then age sixty, was arrested in 1999. It mattered not
that he was a U.S. citizen nor that he was Taiwanese American. Initially
indicted and placed in solitary confinement for nine months, Lee eventu-
ally accepted a plea bargain from the federal government on one out of
59 counts when the government could not prove the case against him.
He was awarded $1.6 million in settlement.
430 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

This 1999 high profile case did not only call attention to the greater
number of racial profiling cases against Chinese American scientists in the
period that preceded Lee’s arrest and that had remained largely invisible
until then. It also helped crystallize in the popular imagination the racial
trope of the Chinese “scientist-as-spy”—quite resonant of the “evil criminal
genius” of the fictional character Dr. Fu Manchu—and made visible the
targeted criminalization of this highly educated class of ethnic Chinese
scientists and engineers. This trope and its consequential effects on racial
profiling make explicit that educational-scientific achievement does not
automatically translate into national acceptance or belonging. It exposes
the falsehood of meritocracy that undergirds the American dream. Race
and ethnicity—in this case, being ethnic Chinese/racially Asian—renders
people suspect in all aspects of national security. As Andrew Kim, an at-
torney in Houston, asserts, “In the same way racial profiling African Ameri-
can as criminals may create the crime of ‘driving while black,’ profiling of
Asian Americans as spies . . . may be creating a new crime: ‘researching
while Asian.’”25
Emerging from the context of the U.S.-China trade war, the 2019 tar-
geted crackdown of Chinese American scientists certainly can be perceived
as part and parcel of the Trump administration’s comprehensive plan to
cripple China’s global economic advance. These specific attacks against
individual scientists aim to stamp out China’s alleged practices in acquir-
ing/extracting intellectual property—both scientific and technological—of
U.S.-based researchers, the kind of intellectual property that could be com-
moditized and entered into the calculus of economic trade. Indeed, the
fear of scientific espionage is fueled by the fear of loss of economic com-
petition. In a global market driven by scientific-technological innovation,
it is the potential loss of the commoditization of science and technology
in the race for control of global market shares that drives this “witch hunt”
for possible intellectual property theft and Chinese scientific espionage.
Yet, despite their joint efforts, the NIH and the FBI seem to share diver-
gent opinions of what might be the cause of NIH rule infractions. The NIH
has attributed the main source of the problem to the scientists’ neglecting,
willfully or not, to report their participation in China’s TTP program, which
recruits U.S.-based scientists with substantial funding. While participation
in the TTP program is not prohibited, the reporting of both their partici-
pation and funding are required. In some cases, scientists are charged for
the failure to recount all the names of their foreign research collaborators.
Others set up businesses in China and neglect to report those sources of
income. Few seem to rise to the level worthy of removal from university
posts. In an e-mail message sent to the campus community, Massachusetts
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 431

Institute of Technology (MIT) President L. Rafael Reif stated, “Looking at

cases across the nation, small numbers of researchers of Chinese back-
ground may indeed have acted in bad faith, but they are the exception
and very far from the rule. Yet faculty members, post-docs, research staff
and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies,
they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge—because of
their Chinese ethnicity alone.”26
Scientists of all backgrounds now feel uneasy about foreign research
collaborations, pointing to the contradiction between the long-standing
encouragement to engage in global collaborations and the recent crimi-
nalization of those same collaborations. Thus far, only five scientists have
been removed from two research institutions. Meanwhile, at least several
universities, including MIT, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, have issued
statements addressing the corrosive effects that heightened scrutiny and
stigmatization of Chinese American scientists have had on the research
community.
The FBI, however, offers a much more dangerous theory. According
to Bloomberg Business reporter Peter Waldman, FBI Director Christopher
Wray, in an April speech given at the Council on Foreign Relations, “de-
scribed the reason for the scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists. [Wray claims
that] ‘China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any
way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations.’
Everyone’s in on it . . . China’s intelligence services; its state-owned and
what he called ‘ostensibly’ private enterprises; and the 130,000 Chinese
graduate students and researchers who work and study in the US every
year. ‘Put simply, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic
ladder at our expense.’ . . . In Wray’s retelling, China’s challenge to the US
today is unlike any this nation has faced. Whereas the Cold War was fought
by armies and governments, the contest is being waged, on China’s side,
by the ‘whole of society,’ the FBI director said, and the US needs its own
whole-of-society response. But what does that look like in a society with
more than 5 million citizens of Chinese descent, many of whom work in
the very science and technology fields said to be under assault?”27
Wray’s message suggests that anyone of Chinese descent is a potential
spy working for China. Herein lies both the logic and justification for racial
profiling, as ethnicity alone is evidence enough for the potentiality of guilt
and wrongdoing. Yet, this logic is deeply flawed, given that the category
of ethnic Chinese encompasses a wide diversity of people with a broad
spectrum of ideological leanings. Certainly, ethnic Chinese in Taiwan and
Hong Kong may not always agree with, if not directly oppose, Chinese state
ideology. Moreover, the message also suggests any and all (non-Chinese)
432 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

Americans should stand ready to respond to this widespread “societal at-

tack.” Undoubtedly, these comments have heightened anxiety and fear
among Chinese/Asian American scientists and engineers. A retired federal
employee, Nancy Chen, commented during a panel discussion on this new
academic climate at the University of Chicago, “The great fear is that history
may repeat itself in this political climate, and Chinese Americans may be
rounded up like Japanese Americans during WWII . . . The fear and worry
is real.”28 The specter of Japanese American mass incarceration continues
to haunt Asian Americans.
Indeed, the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during
WWII exemplifies the most wide-sweeping state-sanctioned response to
yellow peril. War propaganda around the potential infiltration of Japanese
military intelligence of the U.S. Pacific Coast incited popular fear and anger
against people of Japanese descent in the United States. When President F.
D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 to evacuate people of Japanese
descent (citizenship notwithstanding) from the West Coast and to relocate
them to concentration camps throughout the United States, an entire
population of Japanese Americans—men, women, and children—became
racially marked as potential enemies and threats to national security.29
Extending this order beyond the U.S. nation-state, the Roosevelt admin-
istration lobbied its Canadian and Latin American neighbors to adopt a
similar strategy, with the stated aim of establishing hemispheric security.
All but a few Axis-leaning Latin American countries instituted their own
form and degree of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation of Japanese
“enemy aliens.”30 Similarly, in this current context, the United States has
been lobbying other nation-states to impose trade sanctions against China,
end contracts, and hold China responsible for the pandemic.
Yellow peril creates enemies of entire racialized-national populations;
it does not care to differentiate variations within this “enemy” population.
The case of Japanese American incarceration makes clear that citizenship
matters little when pitted against the formidable racializing discourses
of the yellow peril, especially when national loyalty is presumed to align
unquestionably with racial-ethnic descent. During WWII, the geopolitics
involving the United States and Japan directly affected the treatment of
ethnic Japanese in the United States, namely, the removal and incarceration
of an ethnic population mobilized by racist fear and without any substanti-
ated evidence of real threat or wrongdoing.
In this pandemic moment, the warnings of FBI Director Wray take on
an ominous ring. This language of the “whole of society” attack by China
powerfully invokes, once again, the image of yellow peril as an undifferenti-
ated mass of Chinese threatening to overtake the West. This notion that
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 433

any Chinese—whether a student, a professor, an engineer, an executive, a

neighbor, a U.S. citizen or not—can be a potential spy of the Chinese state
resonates with the language that led to and eventually justified Japanese
American incarceration. When aligned with the reference to “the Chinese
virus,” we have an explosive image of the teeming, uncontainable bodies
(yellow peril) of Chinese/Asian contagion—in the forms of both a biological
virus (coronavirus) and a societal virus (scientific espionage)—circulating
and contaminating everything and everyone within its reach. Certainly, un-
like Japanese Americans in WWII, the strategy of containment for potential
Chinese scientific espionage has focused on relatively quiet, isolated, and
individualized removals rather than massive relocation and incarceration.
Such a strategy has hindered public visibility and undermined collective
response. Could it be that Wray’s call for a “whole of society” response
actually is already being carried out through these variegated forms of
responses that range from highly coordinated institutional removals of
Chinese American scientists to interstate policy stand-offs to dispersed,
irregular outbursts of violence against Chinese/Asian Americans?
If the cases of Japanese American incarceration and the imprisonment
of Dr. Wen Ho Lee offer any lessons, it is that ethnic Asians, perceived as
perpetually foreign, are always subject to the rigged test of national loyalty.
It matters not what factual evidence there is, if it exists at all. The machi-
nations of the “yellow peril” rely on the perpetuated belief that ethnicity
determines national loyalty and allegiance. Moreover, projected as an
undifferentiated mass, Chinese/Asian Americans are represented as the
servile minions that both embody and extend the anti-West and its efforts
to dominate the “West.” Filtered through the U.S. racial lens, East Asian
phenotype—no matter one’s ethnic background—is sufficient enough to
provoke hate, anger, and violence. This was the fate of the aforementioned
Burmese American family and the fate of Vincent Chin in the late 1980s,
when he was beaten to death because his perpetrators had mistakenly
assumed he was ethnic Japanese (Japan at that time was constructed as
the main economic antagonist to the United States). No Asian American
is safe from the current anti-China and Chinese/Asian American attacks.
The enumerated cases of increasing violence experienced by Asians of all
ethnic backgrounds attest to this reality.

Technological Behemoth: the Racial Capitalist Frontier of Techno-Economic

Warfare

The American media coverage of Wuhan’s shutdown and the Chinese

state’s deployment of surveillance technology to contain the virus through
434 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

contact tracing and quarantine enforcement measures offered the Ameri-

can public a preview of the PRC government at work. Enfolded in these
stories are both the underlying admiration and fear around the Chinese
state’s efficiency and efficacy in using technology for population control.
Similarly, the same kind of admiration and fear are evident in American
perceptions of China’s explosive economic development and global reach
since the 1990s. And arguably, these same sentiments re-emerge when we
read about the seemingly rapid success of Huawei Technologies, which
has become the world’s largest telecommunications technology company,
overtaking Western companies that were once household names, like
Eriksson, Nokia, and Motorola.
The exemplary case of Huawei brings our discussion of yellow peril into
the explicit terrain of techno-Orientalism where the idea of the Chinese
techno-virus—emerging at the nexus of technology, international trade,
and cyber-security—is articulated through the racialized fear of Chinese
technological domination achieved purportedly by stealing trade secrets,
engaging unfair trade practices, and enabling Chinese state surveillance.
What the case of Huawei illustrates is the extension of the “Chinese virus”
trope that already exists in the domains of public health (as biological
pathogen) and research institutions (scientist-spy) into the realm of ev-
eryday consumer technologies. Our point in discussing Huawei is not to
defend it or to judge its activities. Rather, we want to call attention to the
increasing significance of media/communications technologies as sites of
interstate techno-economic-security struggles (in addition to already exist-
ing corporate surveillance). Toward that end, the Huawei example clearly
shows the entwined issues and discourses of technology, international
trade, and cybersecurity, all of which are filtered through and constitutive
of the racializing techniques of the “Chinese virus.”
Between January 2019 and February 2020, the U.S. Department of
Justice filed three indictments against Huawei and its subsidiaries. That
Huawei is the first foreign company of recent memory that is singled out
by the United States for charges related to sanctions violations, conspiracy
to steal trade secrets from American companies (including source code
and wireless technology manuals), and federal racketeering (including
fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering) is noteworthy in itself.
This last charge of racketeering is used historically to address organized
crime (i.e. mafias) and points to the U.S. government’s intended juridical
delegitimization of Huawei as an irrational institution mired in secrecy
and an unlawful global corporation that cannot be trusted. In response to
these allegations, Huawei accused the Department of Justice of exercising
a form of political persecution and asserted that “[the charges] are based
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 435

largely on resolved civil disputes from the last twenty years that have been
previously settled, litigated, and in some cases, rejected by federal judges
and juries.”31 The case will likely take years to resolve, but its function will
become apparent by the ensuing interstate trade and diplomatic negotia-
tions between China and the United States.
Meanwhile, the White House and various U.S. state departments
have begun to exert pressure on both domestic institutions and allied
nation-states to end contracts and research collaborations with Huawei.
For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2019 blacklisted the
firm on charges of intellectual property theft and barred U.S. companies
from selling products to Huawei without federal authorization.32 Also, as
discussed in the above section, the FBI has placed pressure on universi-
ties to increase oversight of Chinese American researchers and to divest
from research collaborations funded by Huawei and other Chinese firms.
Multiple universities, including MIT, Stanford University, and the University
of Illinois, have terminated research partnerships with Huawei.33
In addition to these domestic pressures, U.S. officials have asked allied
nation-states to cancel any existing contracts with Huawei, especially ones
that involve using the firm’s equipment for developing 5G wireless net-
works. Cybersecurity serves as the stated rationale, conjuring the potential
of the Chinese Communist Party through its ties to the firm to engage in
cyber surveillance/espionage by intercepting individual, corporate, and
government data flowing through the 5G wireless networks. According
to this logic, the “Chinese/Asian contagion” manifest as “Chinese/Asian
espionage” can now be hardwired into the infrastructural fabric of our
telecommunications systems through which data will travel from our
phones, computers, online accounts, and other kinds of technologies to
Chinese companies and, potentially, the Chinese state. The assertion is
that the use of Huawei’s equipment will create massive security vulner-
abilities not just to U.S. intelligence but also to American individuals whose
personal information can be captured and used for endless possibilities
of commoditization. It is also argued that Chinese technology integration
into any Western cyber infrastructure project “would give China the upper
hand in any potential cyber war.”34
Recently, this racialized fear of Chinese technology has materialized
with intensified urgency in the privacy debates surrounding the immensely
popular video-sharing platform, TikTok, and its Chinese parent company,
ByteDance. With over 100 million users in the United States alone, TikTok
has ascended to social media ubiquity, exacerbating American anxieties
around China’s technological dominance.35 Rehearsing much of the same
rhetoric used to condemn Huawei, U.S. lawmakers have argued that TikTok
436 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

poses a threat to the “national security, foreign policy, and economy of the
United States,” citing concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data and the
company’s alleged allegiance to the Chinese government.36 Indeed, in
early August 2020, the Trump administration released an executive order
that would effectively ban the social media app from the United States
if ByteDance failed to address concerns regarding the app’s surveillance
mechanisms, including the Chinese Communist Party’s “access to Ameri-
cans’ personal and proprietary information . . . ”37 Worth noting is the fact
that TikTok was the platform of choice used by K-pop fans to flood the
Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations to the Tulsa, Oklahoma,
rally. The spectacular embarrassment of a half-empty arena no doubt left
an impression on the White House.
However, even as the U.S. government is accusing Chinese corpora-
tions like ByteDance and Huawei of colluding with the state, it too is ex-
panding collaborations with U.S. technology companies. For instance, in
2019, Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion contract from the Department
of Defense to update and transform the U.S. military’s cloud computing
infrastructure. The project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infra-
structure (JEDI), is the Pentagon’s largest technology contract to date38
and represents the growing relationship between the high-tech industry
and the military. Ironically, these are the very same nationalistic ties that
the U.S. government has accused TikTok of advancing.
The strategic framing of potential foreign violation of individual
privacy is part and parcel of the racialized construction of the “Chinese/
Asian techno-virus” as a danger to both American liberal personhood and
national capitalist democracy. Indeed, the potentiality for China to gain the
upper hand in any possible cyber and technological war with the United
States compounds the economic threat that conglomerates like Huawei
and ByteDance pose to U.S. global capitalism. The perceived dual dangers
of compromised national security and economic competition—as embod-
ied by Chinese transnational tech firms—positions Chinese technology,
its commoditization, and its capture of the global market as evidence of
China’s advance in “techno-economic warfare.” In this way, the specter
of the Chinese/Asian threat is central, if not necessary, to legitimizing the
insistence of American hegemony.

Conclusion

The unprecedented havoc caused by the coronavirus offers us an oppor-

tunity to pause and take note of both the deepening fractions within the
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 437

U.S. and the shifting dynamics between the national and the global. At
the time of writing, on July 29, 2020, the virus has infected more than 17
million and has killed upwards of 667,000 people globally.39 The dispro-
portionate impact on U.S. communities of color—Black, Native American,
Latinx, and Asian American—has revealed the deep historical and structural
inequalities that have shaped the profoundly unjust outcomes. Meanwhile,
the racialization of the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus” has given rise to
anti-Asian aggression globally. While this pandemic moment compels
us to critically interrogate the construction of the contagion, our goal is
not to focus solely on the racialization of the pathogen but to situate this
particular discourse of the Chinese/Asian viral threat within the broader
context of the U.S.-China trade war.
The essay has examined how the ideology of yellow peril has been
playing out in current techno-Orientalist discourses of disease, scientific
espionage, and cybersecurity. Although this multivalent Chinese/Asian
viral threat is the most recent iteration of yellow peril, it emerges from
and is made possible by an already existing repertoire of racial tropes that
are now coalescing to forge the consolidated phantasm of the Chinese
contagion, spy, and technological behemoth as national security threat.
All along, our goal has been to illuminate the intensive and enduring
ideological work that undergirds the shifting political-economic agenda
of U.S. racial capitalism.
We conclude this essay by returning to the ever-unfolding scenario of
this techno-Orientalist moment. The recent legislations restricting entry of
certain international graduate students to the United States and prohibit-
ing U.S. residency to all international students whose curriculum is fully
based on remote learning reflect not only the continuation but also the
extension of the anti-China campaign into immigration policies. Reminis-
cent of the late nineteenth century anti-Chinese era, we are witnessing a
similar consolidation of racial tropes that have constructed Chinese bodies
as presenting multiple forms of threat. Yet, unlike the previous era, such
policies are targeting the educated elite rather than the working class. The
effects, however, have been similar in instilling fear and anxiety, though
of different kinds, among both Chinese and non-Chinese Americans alike.
As we enter into the unchartered territory of this next phase of the U.S.-
China face-off, what will be the position of Chinese/Asian Americans in
this national and global order? If crisis moments offer an opportunity to
reimagine, transform, and rebuild, what kind of future do we want when
we emerge from this current “crisis”?
438 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

Acknowledgements
Lok Siu thanks Sandhya Shukla and Kathy Chetkovich for their generative
feedback.

Notes
1. Seashia Vang, “U.S. Government Should Better Combat Anti-Asian
Racism,” Human Rights Watch, April 17, 2020. https://www.hrw.org/
news/2020/04/17/us-government-should-better-combat-anti-asian-
racism.
2. Vang; Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil, “Asian Americans Report Over 650 Racist Acts
Over Last Week, New Data Says,” NBC, March 26, 2020. https://www.nbc-
news.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-report-nearly-500-racist-
acts-over-last-week-n1169821.
3. Suyin Haynes, “As Coronavirus Spreads, So Does Xenophobia and Anti-
Asian Racism,” Time, March 6, 2020. https://time.com/5797836/coronavi-
rus-racism-stereotypes-attacks/.
4. Naaman Zhou, “Survey of Covid-19 Racism Against Asian Australians
Records 178 incidents in Two Weeks,” Guardian, April 17, 2020. https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/survey-of-covid-19-racism-
against-asian-australians-records-178-incidents-in-two-weeks.
5. Geneva Sands, Kylie Atwood, Stephen Collinson, and Kevin Bohn, “US
Government Report Assesses China Intentionally Concealed Severity
of Coronavirus,” CNN, May 3, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/03/
politics/mike-pompeo-china-coronavirus-supplies/index.html.
6. “Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19.” Office of
the Director of National Intelligence. April 30, 2020. https://www.dni.gov/
index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-
statement-on-origins-of-covid-19.
7. Nsikan Akpan and Victoria Jaggard, “Fauci: No Scientific Evidence that
the Virus Was Made in a Chinese Lab,” National Geographic, May 4, 2020.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-
no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/.
8. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996); Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and
American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).
9. Daniel Métraux, “Jack London, Asian Wars and the ‘Yellow Peril,’” History
News Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/123122.
10. Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Fu Manchu and the Rise of China-
phobia (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2014); John Kuo Wei Tchen and
Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Brooklyn, NY: Verso
Books, 2014).
11. Lye, America’s Asia (above, note 8), 10.
12. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic
Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 168.
 YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 439

13. Ibid., 169, 170, 172.

14. Edward Said, Orientalism (NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).
15. Betsy Huang, David S. Roh, Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining
Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 2015).
16. Ibid.
17. Joan Trauner, “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco,
1870–1905,” California History, Vol. 57, No. 1, The Chinese in California
(Spring), pp. 70–87. (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press in association
with the California Historical Society, 1978).
18. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s
Chinatown, (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2001).
19. Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles,
1879–1939 (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2006).
20. Peter Waldman, “The US is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers from Top
Institutions,” Bloomberg Business, June 13, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.
com/news/features/2019-06-13/the-u-s-is-purging-chinese-americans-
from-top-cancer-research.
21. Jon Cohen and David Malakoff, “Scientists Caught in U.S. Crackdown on
China.” Science 364, no. 6443 (2019): 811–12. https://doi.org/10.1126/
science.364.6443.811.
22. Nick Anderson, “Scrutiny of Chinese American Scientists Raises Fears of
Ethnic Profiling,” Washington Post, July 19, 2019. https://www.washing-
tonpost.com/local/education/scrutiny-of-chinese-american-scientists-
raises-fears-of-ethnic-profiling/2019/07/19/ffc5b292-a276-11e9-b8c8-
75dae2607e60_story.html.
23. Eric Bock, “‘This Theft is Real’: NIH Investigates Foreign Influence at US
Grantee Institutions.” NIH Record. Vol. LXXI, No. 20. Oct. 4, 2019. https://
nihrecord.nih.gov/2019/10/04/nih-investigates-foreign-influence-us-
grantee-institutions.
24. Jeffrey Mervis, “Fifty-four scientists have lost their jobs as a result of NIH
probe into foreign ties,” ScienceMag.org, June 12, 2020.
25. Waldman (above, note 20).
26. Rafel Reif, “Letter to the MIT community: Immigration is a kind of oxygen,”
MIT News, June 25, 2019. http://news.mit.edu/2019/letter-community-
immigration-is-oxygen-0625.
27. Waldman (above, note 20).
28. Ibid.
29. Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration
Camps (Seattle, WA: Univ. of Washington Press, 1996).
30. Daniel Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America (Champaign, IL: Univ. of
Illinois Press, 2003); C. Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The
Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle, WA: Univ. of Washington
Press, 1981).
440 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 23.3

31. Bevin Fletcher, “Huawei Slams D o J Indictment as Political Persecution,”

Fierce Wireless, Feb. 14, 2020. https://www.fiercewireless.com/regulatory/
huawei-slams-doj-racketeering-trade-secret-theft-indictment-as-political-
persecution.
32. Arjun Kharpal, “Op-Ed: America Has Limited Options on 5G to Fend off
China’s Huawei Challenge,” CNBC, Feb. 25, 2020. https://www.cnbc.
com/2020/02/25/america-has-limited-options-on-5g-to-fend-off-chinas-
huawei-challenge.html
33. Emily Feng, “FBI Urges Universities To Monitor Some Chinese Stu-
dents And Scholars In The U.S,” NPR, June 28, 2019. https://www.npr.
org/2019/06/28/728659124/fbi-urges-universities-to-monitor-some-
chinese-students-and-scholars-in-the-u-s.
34. Jonny Ball, “What’s Really behind the US’s Huawei Ban?” New States-
man. Nov. 1, 2019. https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight-america/
cyber/2019/11/whats-really-behind-uss-huawei-ban
35. Brian Fung, “TikTok sues Trump administration over looming US ban.”
CNN Business, August 24, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/24/tech/
tiktok-legal-challenge/index.html
36. United States. White House. “Executive Order on Addressing the Threat
Posed by TikTok.” August 6, 2020.
37. Ibid.
38. J. S Tan, “A New Era in Tech Nationalism,” The Jacobin, Nov. 3, 2019. https://
jacobinmag.com/2019/11/microsoft-defense-department-jedi-contract-
china
39. Johns Hopkins University, WHO and Health Authorities.