Federal anti-China sentiment is increasingly seeping into state laws

Anti-China sentiment is reaching new heights in state capitals across the country. 

In Texas, Senate Bill 147 would bar Chinese citizens from buying land and House Bill 4736 would ban universities from admitting Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and Russian citizens. 

In Michigan, a plan to offer state subsidies to Gotion — the U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese parent company — for the construction of a $2.3 billion electric vehicle (EV) battery plant faces backlash. Tudor Dixon, the defeated 2022 GOP nominee for Michigan governor, calls the project, “one square mile of CCP (Chinese Communist Party) right in the center of Michigan.”

These examples are part of a growing trend. As we find in ongoing research on subnational U.S.-China relations, state legislatures proposed or adopted more than 100 pieces of anti-China legislation between 2020 and 2022, up fourfold from the 2017 to 2019 period. Many states that once pursued official partnerships and business and educational ties with China are now backpedaling.

While it is important for state and local policymakers to weigh the risks of engagement with China, policymakers do their constituents a disservice when they engage in China-bashing for political gain. Blanket anti-China measures and messaging are harming American communities. And uncoordinated state and local measures are unlikely to be effective in addressing national security issues that are truly national in scope.

Fearmongering about CCP influence has several negative effects. First, rhetoric that describes an omnipresent Chinese menace rather than detailing specific threats hurts millions of people. Stop AAPI Hate, which compiles statistics on harassment and assaults against Asian Americans, received reports of nearly 3,800 such incidents between March 2020 and February 2021 alone. 

Researchers find that citizens echo the Sinophobic speech they hear from politicians and that racist terms like “Chinese virus” lead citizens to view Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners,” leaving them vulnerable to discrimination. 

Bills like Texas’s HB4736 imply that all Chinese students are potential spies; this racial scapegoating makes Texas less safe for all of its nearly 2 million AAPI residents.

Second, policies that indiscriminately punish people and businesses with PRC ties harm states’ and localities’ economic prospects. Chinese talent has been a vital ingredient in the excellence of U.S. universities and businesses, and American innovation is suffering under U.S. policies that deter Chinese university students, hinder U.S.-China cooperation on basic science and cause a growing number of scientists and engineers from China to consider leaving. Restricting access to the most sensitive laboratories and projects is prudent, but alienating Chinese talent across the board is bad for state and local economies.

Third, blanket anti-China policies delay states’ and localities’ shift to a lower-carbon economy. Love it or hate it, Chinese firms dominate many parts of the clean energy supply chain. For the U.S. to compete effectively in the EV sector and to adopt green technologies fast enough to avert disastrous levels of climate change, we can either import heavily from China or allow more Chinese-backed production in the U.S.

Screaming “not in my backyard” to Chinese companies is good politics but poor policy. When Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) prevented Ford from building an EV battery factory because it would have licensed technology from Chinese firm CATL, he did little to make Virginians safer — the factory would have been fully owned by Ford, an American company. Youngkin did, however, prevent Virginians from accessing an estimated 2,500 jobs and a key link in the EV supply chain. 

It is important to be clear-eyed about the risks that state and local engagement with Chinese government entities can pose. U.S. states and localities must take data security seriously and should be prepared to stand up to pressure from Chinese official counterparts to avoid engagement with Taiwan or parrot talking points from the People’s Republic of China. 

Confucius Institutes — Chinese government-funded language and culture centers that opened at hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities — gave PRC officials too much control over China-related programming, and it is appropriate that most have closed. But in an integrated U.S. economy where state boundaries have little bearing on flows of people, goods and information, a patchwork of state and local measures is hardly the best way to address national security threats.

A better way to manage these risks is to further strengthen mechanisms for coordination across all U.S. states and territories and between states and the federal government. The recently created special representative for city and state diplomacy office in the State Department, and ongoing dialogues between businesses, universities and federal security agencies, offer good foundations to build upon, but expanded efforts are needed. 

Establishing a common floor and, ideally, a common ceiling of security protocols to manage state and local business and educational engagement with China will reduce risk while letting states focus on the things they do best. Otherwise, states may find themselves in a new and pernicious race to the bottom as they compete over anti-China credentials.

Kyle A. Jaros is an associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His research examines the politics of urban and regional development in China and the role of subnational actors in U.S.-China relations.

Sara A. Newland is an assistant professor of government at Smith College. Her research focuses on local governance in China and Taiwan and on the role of subnational diplomacy in the U.S.-China-Taiwan relationship.