A New Yorker article by Ian Johnson December 13, 2022
Two years ago, Jessica Chen Weiss made a phone call to her mother that changed her career. Her mother, a cancer researcher who lives in Seattle, told her that rising violence against Asian Americans was making her fearful of going outside. “She just didn’t want to walk around the streets,” Weiss said. “I was just shocked. It’s still something on her mind when she weighs whether to walk around downtown.”
Weiss wondered what was happening to her own country. “Growing up in Seattle, half Asian and half white, I never felt that my ethnicity or her ethnicity were an issue,” she said. A political scientist and professor of government at Cornell, Weiss had previously studied how China had risen in prominence as a campaign topic in the 2010 midterm elections, especially in terms of blue-collar jobs leaving the U.S. But she felt that this new wave of concern about China was of a different quality: it had become an obsession that could warp U.S. society.
In October, 2022 Jessica wrote an article entitled the China Trap in which she claimed, “Competition with China has begun to consume U.S. foreign policy. Seized with the challenge of a near-peer rival whose interests and values diverge sharply from those of the United States, U.S. politicians and policymakers are becoming so focused on countering China that they risk losing sight of the affirmative interests and values that should underpin U.S. strategy. The current course will not just bring indefinite deterioration of the U.S.-Chinese relationship and a growing danger of catastrophic conflict; it also threatens to undermine the sustainability of American leadership in the world and the vitality of American society and democracy at home.”
“In attempting to craft a national strategy suited to a more assertive and more powerful China, Washington has struggled to define success, or even a steady state, short of total victory or total defeat, that both governments could eventually accept and at a cost that citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders would be willing to bear. Without a clear sense of what it seeks or any semblance of a domestic consensus on how the United States should relate to the world, U.S. foreign policy has become reactive, spinning in circles rather than steering toward a desired destination.”
In the recent New Yorker article, Ian Johnson pointed out that “Although she chooses to speak out, Weiss carefully calibrates how she talks about her concerns. She has seen how other Asian American voices have been targeted for racial attacks and so tries to keep her argument as factual and policy-based as possible. Although she doesn’t feel that she is a victim of racism, she is concerned that rhetoric and attacks in the United States could escalate. She limits her use of social media, for example, having seen how other Asian Americans have been attacked and accused of dual loyalty and a lack of patriotism. And, of course, her mother’s fears remain on her mind.”
“I don’t want to become roadkill, but the stakes are too high to remain on the sideline of this conversation,” she said. “Although I’m an academic, I’m also a citizen, and I fear very much for the direction of this country and the growing enmity and confrontation with China. I’m not seeking that tension, but I want the ideas to take flight.”