Two Chinese Communist Party intelligence officers sit across from each other in a windowless room, incense smoke curling up from a ceramic vessel. They’re discussing their newest asset, US congressional candidate Jay Chen.
“This Jay Chen for American Congress, he’s perfect for China,” one of them says. “He’s one of us, a socialist comrade who supported Bernie Sanders for Supreme Leader!”
“Sanders loves Mao, Chen loves Sanders,” his partner responds, before they both throw their heads back and cackle.
The two men were actors in a 2022 election ad, not spies in a B movie. Then-US congresswoman Michelle Steel, a Korean American Republican from pastel-blue Orange County in southern California, ran a campaign that stood out nationally for its McCarthyist zeal in a cycle when inflation and the economy dominated most voters’ minds. Steel, gambling that invoking Chinese communism would be enough to defeat her Chinese American opponent in an Asian-plurality district, won by nearly five percentage points.
Republicans campaigning to represent Asian American communities in Congress, state legislatures, and city councils across the country have used similar playbooks, while also exploiting interethnic tensions and fears over anti-Asian violence by tarring their opponents as soft on crime. The red-baiting strategy assumes that first- and second-generation Asian Americans from countries like China and Vietnam, where ruling parties still claim a “communist” banner despite embracing state-led capitalism, as well as people from neighboring Cambodia, South Korea, and Taiwan — whose politics are shaped by proximity or past experiences with self-styled “communist” leadership — will recoil at any mention of communism or socialism.
Such attacks build on a long tradition of Asian American leaders stoking and exploiting anti-communist feeling — from Kuomintang-friendly publications urging fervent opposition among Chinese immigrants against the mainland…
Auteur: Nicholas Liu
