Whenever I hear colleagues say “the Chinese” on the radio or television, as if it were a harmless circumlocution to talk about the Beijing regime, I can’t remember my swear words. And God knows there are plenty of opportunities to reference the Chinese government on the air these days.
However, we know very well that a President of the United States who spoke of COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” in 2020 was enough to fuel a wave of hatred. Except that beyond the toxicity of Donald Trump, there is a whole infrastructure, both in traditional media and social media, which has made it possible or not to establish an association between “the Chinese”, the pandemic, then all the evils of the world. Sometimes a particularly influential personality can radicalize a person. Other times, it is the accumulation of images, of expressions, in short of political and media discourse, which awakens the old prejudices hitherto buried deep in the conscience.
In 2019, 67 hate crimes involving people from East or Southeast Asia were reported to police in Canada. In 2020, 263 crimes were denounced: we are talking about almost four times more. And in 2021, police investigated 305 anti-Asian crimes. And this increase of 455% in two years, therefore, to be precise, represents only the tip of the iceberg.
The vast majority of hate crime victims continue not to report crimes to the police, and police forces are very rarely trained to take complaints seriously and respond appropriately when they occur. As the two phenomena reinforce each other, we must take the official statistics as a simple index of what is happening on the ground.
Yet, after such an increase in anti-Asian hatred directly correlated to an evolution of the topics covered in the news in recent years, it continues to be acceptable to say, at prime time, that it is time to be tougher on “the Chinese”. And it’s launched, like that, by people whose job is to choose their words and understand their power.
Allow me, therefore, to show my concern for the evolution of the social climate. Because the political rivalry between Beijing and Washington (of which Ottawa seems to be, on this specific issue, somewhat of a branch) does not seem to be abating any time soon.
Foreign interference in democratic processes is a very real problem that can lead to a breakdown in people’s confidence in their institutions. When you have your roots in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East, you know full well how the democracies of the North like to play puppets with actors from the democracies of the South… until they collapse. When we know all too well the results of interference elsewhere and we see that Moscow wants to pull the strings of the American elections or that Beijing seeks to help or harm local candidates, in Canada, according to their platforms in foreign policy, there is reason to be very worried.
It is however imperative to make the distinction between the investigation and the political pressure which allow a reinforcement of the institutions against any attempt at foreign interference, on the one hand, and the wind of panic which precisely harms democracy. In other words: President Xi does not need to do much to weaken Canadian institutions if, through partisan slippage, witch hunts and cynicism fueled by unsubstantiated allegations, we end up get there on their own.
When major Canadian media outlets start leaking secret service information to talk about interference in Canadian elections, it seems to me that there is a dire need to immediately explain to the public what intelligence is, why the value of each “information” may vary and why it cannot automatically be taken as a proven fact. The subject is too important, precisely, to be approached without absolute transparency on its journalistic ethics and the relative value of its information.
Seniors will remember the good old days of McCarthyism and its Canadian counterpart, when any “intelligence” about the links between a politician, intellectual, activist, artist or celebrity and communism was enough to disrupt a career. . If the nefarious intentions of the USSR towards the North American governments were very real, many innocent people were caught in the vice. Given the wind of concern blowing over the country, I would sincerely like someone to explain to me what we learned, in journalism and in politics, from the slippages of the Cold War.
We should also remember that the interest shown in the Trudeau Foundation in recent weeks also stems from this more than legitimate concern for foreign interference in Canadian elections. After several weeks of scandal, we reflect on the good or bad management of the Foundation, we repeat that “it doesn’t smell good”, that it’s not pretty, this portrait of the Canadian elites who all know each other. But it is not yet clear what the donation to the Foundation from businessmen linked to the Beijing regime has to do with a specific Canadian election, or even with any particular political decision on the part of the government of Canada.
We dig, we dig, and the main objective of the search is blurred. The result, again, is general cynicism, targeted distrust of “the Chinese”, but nothing specific, politically speaking. And it is in the vagueness, and the ripple effect of the group, that the breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and even in some cases hatred, becomes particularly fertile.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.