On June 4, 2025, U.S. federal authorities announced that two Chinese nationals, Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, had been indicted for attempting to smuggle a dangerous crop pathogen – Fusarium graminearum – into the United States. The fungus, which can destroy staple crops like wheat and corn, was allegedly brought into the country without authorization, raising alarm bells in intelligence and agricultural security circles.
While the Department of Justice has not declared this a confirmed act of bioterrorism, officials and lawmakers quickly framed it as a potential agroterror plot with geopolitical implications. One lawmaker called it “an attack on America’s food supply.”
This incident is only the latest flashpoint in a mounting series of China-related national security concerns in the United States. The same week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed that the United States would begin “aggressively revoking” visas of Chinese nationals studying in sensitive technical fields. In particular, students with perceived links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or its affiliated institutions are being targeted under new executive restrictions announced by President Trump.
While such policies are often justified in the name of national defense, they are not without domestic consequences. Our recent study explores how Americans’ views of the “China threat” influence ethnic discrimination in the U.S. Through a set of survey experiments, we found evidence of bias against Chinese Americans in a U.S. labor market context, though the impact is limited in size and scope.
A Controlled Experiment on Everyday Bias
In a nutshell, we recruited around 2,000 Americans to read a series of short vignettes about global events. The final vignette was randomly assigned and primed one of several topics on China, such as Chinese espionage in the U.S., the Chinese government’s regulation of religion, the China-U.S. economic rivalry, etc.
Following this, participants evaluated a set of 18 fictitious job applicants for an entry-level position. Each applicant had a name, photo, U.S. birthplace, and a set of qualifications tailored to one of three job roles: marketing analyst (experiment 1), IT specialist at a government contractor (experiment 2), or U.S. history teacher (experiment 3). The applicants represented a diverse cross-section of racial and ethnic backgrounds.
We find that exposure to Chinese domestic policy issues did not influence attitudes toward any of the applicants. However, exposure to reports on Chinese espionage significantly decreased participants’ ratings of Chinese American applicants on personal characteristics like friendliness and trustworthiness, particularly in jobs involving corporate or national security risks (marketing and IT roles). Notably, these effects did not appear when participants rated applicants for a public school history teacher role – a job perceived as symbolically sensitive but not high-stakes in material terms.
News Narratives and Policy Statements Matter
The correlation between such reports and ethnic prejudice matters now more than ever. The narrative of Chinese espionage is no longer confined to think tanks or classified briefings. It is playing out in mainstream media headlines and presidential executive orders.
The FBI recently highlighted China’s use of artificial intelligence to enhance cyberattack capabilities, posing significant threats to U.S. critical infrastructure. Simultaneously, cybersecurity firm Resecurity reported increased cyber threats to energy and nuclear facilities from state actors, including those linked to China. A Wall Street Journal report from May 2025 detailed that Chinese scientists in the U.S. are facing heightened scrutiny, with instances of terminations and visa revocations, reflecting a renewed wave of suspicion.
Such stories, amplified across cable news and social media, create the very climate of suspicion that our research shows leads to discriminatory decision-making. This is not merely theoretical. In a job interview or promotion evaluation, a Chinese American candidate may be subconsciously downgraded.
Moreover, there is a potential spillover effect. In our experiments, participants exposed to the Chinese espionage vignette also gave lower ratings to Russian American applicants. This suggests that threat-based priming may not only trigger ethnically specific prejudice but can also extend to other groups seen as geopolitically adversarial. The underlying dynamic is not just about race, but about how national security narratives, when framed in terms of covert threat, activate exclusionary instincts in ordinary citizens.
Beyond Espionage: Broader Impacts on Civil Rights
The consequences of geopolitical suspicion extend well beyond employment discrimination. When national security narratives highlight threats from specific countries, they can reinforce stereotypes and inflame public bias, generating wide-ranging repercussions across society. Discrimination tied to geopolitical fears can contribute to political alienation, mental health burdens, and community distrust within Asian American populations.
Research has shown that racial microaggressions – everyday slights or indignities based on race or ethnicity – are associated with elevated levels of depression and anxiety among Asian Americans. Such experiences are not confined to isolated incidents; they can become chronic stressors that erode emotional well-being and reduce engagement with broader society, especially when accompanied by a sense of cultural invisibility or scapegoating in times of crisis.
More recently, racialized political rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a marked shift in partisan affiliation among Asian Americans. Candidates and elected officials who used terms like “China virus” or “Kung flu” may have unintentionally activated exclusionary attitudes that alienated Asian American voters. Research finds that this type of elite messaging, when combined with perceived social exclusion, led many in the community to realign politically, moving away from Republican candidates and toward the Democratic Party.
Avoiding the Next Red Scare
Throughout American history, moments of geopolitical tension have often been accompanied by a troubling domestic pattern: the marginalization of minority communities cast as security threats. The Palmer Raids of the early 20th century saw Italian and Eastern European immigrants targeted under the pretext of communist and anarchist threats, fuelling xenophobic panic and draconian immigration policies. During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated under Executive Order 9066, despite the absence of evidence suggesting collective disloyalty. Following the September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans endured increased surveillance, racial profiling, and the curtailment of civil liberties, leading to lasting distrust between Muslim communities and law enforcement agencies.
History unfortunately repeats. In the context of rising China-U.S. tensions, Chinese and broader Asian American communities have faced renewed suspicion under the mantle of national security. The “China Initiative,” launched by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2018, aimed to counter Chinese economic espionage but led to a disproportionate number of investigations involving ethnically Chinese scientists and academics, often with little evidence of wrongdoing. Several cases collapsed or were dismissed, prompting widespread criticism from civil rights groups and calls to end the program, which was officially shut down in 2022 under the Biden administration.
These recurring dynamics underscore a critical tension: how to address legitimate national security concerns without eroding the rights and dignity of vulnerable communities. History suggests that in times of fear and uncertainty, democratic societies must work harder to uphold the very liberties they claim to defend. Overreaching policies that cast suspicion along ethnic or racial lines not only threaten civil rights but also weaken the moral foundations of democracies.
Going forward, policymakers must act deliberately to avoid repeating these mistakes. First, national security protocols should be grounded in transparent, evidence-based criteria that avoid ethnic profiling. Second, institutions engaged in sensitive hiring – especially in government and defense – should implement robust bias training and accountability mechanisms to guard against implicit discrimination. Third, the media must be more responsible in framing coverage of foreign threats in ways that do not stoke racialized fear.
Finally, it is essential to foster public remembrance of past injustices not merely as history lessons, but as active warnings. As the United States reorients itself in an era of strategic rivalry with China, it must do so in a manner that preserves constitutional rights and affirms the equal citizenship of all Americans. This is not only a legal imperative but a strategic one: an America that succumbs to fear at home undermines its credibility abroad.
