The form reached my inbox as part of routine paperwork, but I sensed a tinge of accusation. I had been invited to speak at a national laboratory. In order to access the facility, I was required to attest that I wasn’t a participant in a foreign talent recruitment program. China, my birth country, topped a short list of “countries of risk.”
I found the vigilance slightly amusing. I was going to give a talk! In a dash of mischievousness, I thought of scrawling over the form: “D-I-S-S-I-D-E-N-T!”
I have never liked the word “dissident” or claimed to be one, though others have labeled me as such. The point of the story is not that I’m special, but that I should have nothing to prove in the first place. No amount of public critique of Beijing’s policies or the personal cost dissent exacts can spare me from the extra scrutiny. As a Chinese person living in the US, I’m often treated as a potential spy before I’m seen as a human being.
Espionage was once considered antithetical to American individualism. The term invoked imperial European courts—the word spy originated from Old French, espie—and British secret agents, symbols of an old world that the young republic was trying to break away and distinguish itself from. The carnage of World War II shattered America’s isolationist proposition. Joining its newly founded clandestine services was lauded as patriotic. In the long shadows of the Cold War, the enemy agent in the popular imagination was someone hiding a Russian accent. Three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, as China emerges as a new superpower and contests US hegemony, the face of foreign espionage in the West has become Chinese.
It’s not just that Chinese students and scientists are routinely depicted as puppets of Beijing and conduits of intellectual property theft. The tint of racialized suspicion has seeped into anything “made in China.” Communications equipment from Huawei and ZTE are lurking in the airwaves. TikTok is “the spy in Americans’ pockets.” US authorities deem Chinese-manufactured cargo cranes a possible national security threat; in the words of a former head of counterintelligence, “cranes can be the new Huawei.” The acquisition of American farmlands by Chinese firms has also been met with alarm: The properties could be used as a “perch for spying,” so the argument goes. When a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon flew across parts of the US before it was shot down over the Atlantic, the mass hysteria had less to do with the balloon itself—even the Pentagon acknowledged it posed minimal risk—and more to do with the state of the national psyche. The floating object was the materialization of a constant dread, the embodiment of an alien intrusion.
Each time an objectionable act becomes racialized, such as how “crime” is coded as Black and “terrorism” as Muslim after 9/11, the problem is not that every individual from the minority group is innocent but that the collective is regarded as uniquely guilty, and anyone who shares the identity is implicated by association. The ethnicization of espionage in the US as a distinctly Chinese threat is rooted in centuries-old Orientalism and reinforces racial stereotypes. The rhetoric is weaponized to expand state power and advance special interests. The illusion of protection by discriminatory means obscures fundamental questions about our relationships with technology and the state, as well as how to navigate between our intimate and communal selves. In a world of privatized commons and militarized borders, who sees or cannot be seen? For whose benefit, and to what end?
A prominent 19th-century science manual instructs that a person’s “faculty of Secretiveness” can be measured by how much the shape of the nostrils resembles that of a Chinese nose. Published in New York in 1849, the book asserts that the people of China “are the most remarkable people in the world for secretiveness.” This view, widely held at the time, was echoed by the American diplomat and travel writer Bayard Taylor, who claimed that “the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth,” whose “character cannot even be hinted.”