Red scare: How do negative perceptions of China impact Americans’ attitudes toward Asian Americans?

Abstract

How does great power competition affect domestic affairs? This paper investigates the effect of the perceived threat of China on Americans’ attitudes toward Asian Americans. To do so, we conducted three survey experiments. Participants engaged with vignettes that manipulated different aspects of the China threat. Then they evaluated a diverse set of fictitious Americans applying for a job in the U.S. The experiments yielded several insights. The vignettes related to Chinese domestic policy had no impact on the evaluation of the target groups. However, the vignette about Chinese espionage caused participants to give Chinese Americans lower ratings when the job was marketing analyst (experiment 1) and IT specialist (experiment 2). That vignette also caused participants to give Russian Americans, but not other Asian Americans, lower ratings as well. However, on average, participants did not rate the target groups any differently when the job was American history teacher (experiment 3). The vignette about economic competition between China and the U.S. mostly had insignificant effects. Together, the findings show that discrimination is present but limited in size and scope.