The geopolitics of anti-Asian racism: A critical discourse analysis of dominant Western narratives on China in the COVID-19 era

Abstract

Over the past decades, dominant Western institutions have increasingly perceived China as a challenge to a US-centric world order and framed it as a threat to Western values. We propose that understanding the synergies between these institutions’ messaging on China and the reported growing number of incidents of anti-Asian racism can illuminate what drives the latter, especially in the COVID-19 era. We draw from theories of globalization, political socialization, and stigma to identify dominant narratives on China during COVID-19 through a critical discourse analysis of public documents, spanning close to three years, from governments, civil society entities and actors influential in public policy, and Western mainstream media. We show that the dominant Western narrative is that China is a threat to Western values and to humanity, both perceived as interchangeable. This narrative is constructed through double standards and the omission of relevant geopolitical contexts that might help Western publics to develop a more nuanced perspective of China’s role in world affairs. The ideological work of “othering” China and whoever refuses to condemn it is all but inevitable, as is the message of “Us versus Them” with the potential to legitimize anti-Asian racist beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. Discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue) […] in analysing discourses, one sees the loosening of the embrace [between] words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality […] but the ordering of objects [performing] a work that […] displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses as groups of [signifiers] but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue). It is this 'more' that we must reveal and describe. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 1972, P. 48 & 49