How individual incidents are gaslighted into anti-China paranoia

Last week, a row broke out between a musician called Brendan Kavanagh and some Chinese tourists, who did not want to be filmed on his YouTube livestream. The row initiated a media firestorm, which of course was quickly astroturfed by the mainstream media and unsurprisingly depicted as an "influence" campaign that was somehow trying to enforce Chinese laws on British territory.

This is a classic example of how Sinophobia and yellow peril is pushed by the mainstream media into public discourse. No matter how small the incident or row may be, the human dynamic of the event is roundly dismissed or overlooked in favor of gaslighting it into a grand political conspiracy led by the highest echelons of the Chinese state itself.

Modern anti-China paranoia, as originating from the United States, is a form of McCarthyism. Distinct, however, from the McCarthyist era of the former Soviet Union and the initial Cold War, this new form of McCarthyism uses anti-Communism as a mask and vehicle to justify a wide range of prejudices against China and its people, in order to make it appear ideologically and morally acceptable.

For example, we've seen how a long-held prejudice over China and disease, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, was transformed by both media and politicians, into an anti-Communist grandstanding which sought to frame the pandemic in light of the a cover-up and of course other conspiracy theories such as a lab leak.

Likewise, this mindset is applied to Chinese people too, while the commonly used line goes "hate the Chinese government, not the people," the reality is that such anti-Chinese discourse never makes any discrimination between the state and ordinary Chinese people when it seeks to push paranoia.

For example, when all Chinese students are viewed as spies and infiltrators, or scientists and academics are baselessly persecuted, or of course during incidents such as this where even public confrontations are presented as the will of the state. Under such logic, every single occurrence or development is framed by the media as being the absolute imposed will of China or Party agencies, depriving them of any other cause or explanation.

This subsequently dehumanizes the Chinese people and misleadingly frames everything as a mere extension of a grand Chinese plot to take over the world and surpass American hegemony.

This in turn, of course, is then used in the political arena to control the debate and discourse around China, because whosoever argues for a nuance and balanced perspective is subsequently framed as being compromised in some way and deprived of the legitimacy of an equal and respected opinion. Hence, look how easy it is for certain figures to link a random confrontation in a train station about a video to senior British political figures, such as Jeremy Hunt.

Of course, what we have seen from both the China and Russia cases is that this form of McCarthyism often takes even the most benign links or ties an individual might have with a country and uses them to astroturf grand conspiracies of interference, which then interweaves with the domestic debate as an incentive to discredit one's opponents.

In this case, we should not view a confrontation at a train station as a monumental geopolitical conflict, but that's exactly how the media frames it as such, and as time goes by and presumably throughout this year, there will be many more such examples.

(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)