No Chinese Allowed: The New Alien Land Laws w/ Russell Jeung
Capitalizing on current, widespread anti-China sentiment in the United States, lawmakers in nearly 30 states have proposed or have passed legislation banning foreign nationals, governments and companies from purchasing land, particularly farmland or property near military bases.
Although they ostensibly aim to protect America’s national security, they have other dangerous consequences – stoking xenophobic biases and targeting of Asian Americans for further racial profiling and exclusion.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/07/04/land-ownership-bans-china-racist-us-history-repeats/70352009007/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm joined today by, just to be honest, an incredibly distinguished guest, and that is Dr. Russell Jung.
So I'll just first say, Russell, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
So a lot of people out there are going to know who you are, but let me just tell them a little bit about you.
You've been teaching at the San Francisco State for quite a while now.
You are the author of numerous works, and those include Family Sacrifices, The worldviews and ethics of Chinese Americans, moving movers, student activism, and the emergence of Asian American studies.
At home in exile, finding Jesus among my ancestors and refugee neighbors.
You're also one of the co-founders of Stop AAPI Hate.
And so that's something that I'm sure many people listening will be aware of and understand.
you're also just a frequent contributor to places like NPR and various documentaries and programs.
So I'm sure folks have seen you in print, on TV, in their earbuds.
But today we're here to talk about something that you've just written, and that's an op-ed for USA Today on what are, in essence, new alien land laws.
And so let me just start at the very basics, if you don't mind.
Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of folks are quite aware of what is happening with these new laws and the proposed legislation that's going on across the country.
Would you just give us a little bit of an introduction to what prompted you to write the op-ed and what's happening in places, notably Florida, Texas, and other states around the country?
Sure.
So again, thanks for having me, Brad.
Glad to be on this program.
And what's going on really does have to do with white nationalism.
Currently, 30 states have either passed or have proposals to ban Chinese from buying land in the United States.
And these are what we call alien land laws.
And the ostensible aim is to prevent Chinese government from spying on the United States and to protect America's food security.
They're concerned that maybe by buying American agricultural land, Americans won't have enough food to eat as if they need more food to eat.
The problem with all these laws is that there is no real security threat.
China isn't buying lands.
Agricultural lands aren't being purchased by the Chinese government.
Chinese, if they wanna just buy, probably could find better ways of spying.
And so these laws like the wall at the border are just sort of symbolic legislative attempts to say that these legislators are strong against China.
And so overall, there's a huge movement, primarily a Republican movement, to say we have to protect the U.S.
against its primary adversary, its existential threat, China.
And the way we're going to stop China is by preventing them and Chinese citizens from buying up our land.
I want to come back to the symbolic versus the functional nature of these laws, like will they actually do anything versus are they just sort of a symbolic gesture in The GOP's culture wars and various ways that they want to sell themselves to voters and to the public.
But I want to come back to something that's a big part of the op-ed that you wrote, and that is your family's history with such laws.
These kinds of alien land laws go back a century and a half in this country.
Would you mind just sort of going through how these kinds of laws have touched on your own family's history here in California?
Sure.
These laws aren't new.
Alien land laws were always originally designed to protect, again, the interests of white citizens in the United States, to protect their economic interests.
And so as early as the 1860s, 1870s, Chinese were banned from being able to purchase property in Oregon and California, they actually included it in the state constitution of part The foundational laws were that Chinese can't own property.
And later on, Chinese were then declared aliens and eligible for citizenship.
And so that categorization, aliens ineligible for citizenship, led to future bans as a racially coded term on alien.
And so when Japanese Americans became the next target of legislators, they said California created alien landlords saying aliens couldn't purchase land.
And again, aliens primarily were coded words for Japanese Americans were not allowed to buy farmland.
These early bans, again, were made by whites to protect their economic interests, to stop competition from other racial groups, especially in the agricultural arena.
And so they were actually later ruled unconstitutional.
It's basically, clerically, discrimination by national origin, but those Federal rulings only cover the western part of the United States, and so other states outside the western United States can still now, today, institute alien landmarsh.
One of the things that I've noted on the show before is that in Florida, of course with DeSantis as governor now, Florida is always on our minds.
The alien land law in Florida, if I'm not mistaken, was only repealed in 2018.
And so it seems what happened is you have these laws pass and The late 19th century and early 20th century in a place like California or in Oregon, and then they spread across the country based on fear and based on this idea of being symbolically against those who would, quote unquote, threaten the United States and so on and so forth.
In the most recent iterations, I'm just going to quote here from what you've written.
You talk about Ron DeSantis and Ron DeSantis said that his state is, quote, taking action to stand against the United States' greatest geopolitical threat, the Chinese Communist Party.
We then have Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who said in December that the threat of the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate the United States continues to grow.
While the federal government holds the ultimate responsibility for foreign policy issues, the state also has the responsibility and opportunity to protect itself.
My question is, what do these laws, in your mind, do on the ground?
If I am in Florida, I am an Asian American person, I'm an Asian person, I'm a Chinese American person, so on and so forth, how do these laws stoke what is already a climate of AAPI hate in the country stemming from COVID and other factors over the last couple of years?
Yeah, that's a great question because a lot of proponents of these laws say, we're not really targeting Chinese individuals.
We're not necessarily being racist and targeting Asians in America.
The laws are basically to protect against the Chinese government from a purchasing plan.
The problem with that argument is that in America, people don't separate the Chinese government's actions from its people.
They conflate the two.
So studies have shown that if people have the perception that China is America's greatest threat, they share the stereotype that Chinese are immoral and untrustworthy, that they go hand in hand.
Again, they link the Chinese people with the Chinese government.
This is the way Asians are racialized.
We're all sort of lumped together in this homogenous, evil, yellow peril perspective.
Then what happens is that research has shown that if people have stereotypic views about China being a threat about Chinese people, they extend that stereotype to Chinese in the U.S.
So Chinese Americans are also seen to be immoral, untrustworthy, and dangerous.
Research also shows that the same people Don't only complete Chinese government and Chinese people, they homogenize Asian people of Iran.
So Chinese in the U.S., the Chinese government are equated with Asian Americans.
So again, if China is the enemy, then what happens is that Asians in America become the enemy within.
They have the Japanese-Americans in World War II, Japanese-American incarceration after 9-11, with South Asians, Arab-Americans, Muslims being seen as terrorists.
And today, Asian Americans will get locked together with China being America's greatest enemy as enemies within the United States.
That leads to two forms of discrimination.
One is clear.
If you're trying to buy property and it's illegal for Chinese to buy property, real estate agents will want to work with you.
You're not a good customer.
It's unlikely that people will want to sell to you.
And so you have that discrimination as being The second consequence, more broadly, is that again Asian Americans will be seen as the yellow peril and will face the generalized racism
That we've seen during COVID-19, that again, we're disease-carrying people, that we're threats to the American economy, that we're communists who are bent on taking over the world.
All those stereotypes coalesce in this yellow peril fear that's getting stoked by politicians.
So, I've mentioned this on the show before, but I want to just ask you if this seems to sort of cohere in your mind.
I'm imagining a scenario where, as you say, because Asian and Asian American people are associated with China and associated even more intimately with the Chinese government,
If an Asian American family goes to buy some property, goes to buy a house in Jacksonville or in Pensacola or in Tallahassee, and they are of Vietnamese descent, they are of Korean descent, does not matter.
What happens if they do buy the house and their kids start to ride bikes in the neighborhood?
What happens if any Asian American person, including Chinese Americans, All the way to South Asian folks.
It doesn't matter.
What happens on the ground, right?
When you are a kid riding a bike in that neighborhood, when you're out at the neighborhood barbecue, when you're walking your dogs, when you are jogging in the morning, what are the comments you get as a result of this?
I guess what I'm driving at here is sometimes we hear that politics is downstream of culture, But in this case, if politics sets a law, it almost feels like it's going to set the tone for a culture or at least ramp up the tone to the point that being an Asian person, a person of Asian descent in one of these neighborhoods will just be a climate of even more intimidation than already exists today.
Yeah, what it does is when the government breaks these policies that are antagonistic towards a group by national origin or by race, is that for Asian Americans, it's always meant to exclude us.
And you asked about my family's history in the past.
Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and that actually, that policy sanctioned further violence against Asian Americans.
in the US by the people.
So government actions can actually exacerbate sanctioned green light, exclusion of Chinese through mob violence, through bullying, through microaggressions.
And so what happened in 1882 is, like, just three years later, they had a period, what we call the Yellow Terror, where over 160 Chinese communities were actually forcibly driven out by mob violence.
My great-grandparents were driven out of Monterey, California, by a fire that destroyed the entire village.
If you fast forward to today, your state passes bills that say Chinese aren't allowed to buy property, then that sort of attitude of, we need to exclude Chinese that are all suspect of being spies, on the ground level, kids are told to go back to death in China.
Yeah, that in Stop API Zeta, one out of five incidents, people are told to go back to China, you effing chink.
And so these policies get translated on the street level to schoolyard bullying, towards spitting on grandma on the streets, towards mass shootings.
So, government actions really have clear consequences on what is considered normal behavior in broader society.
Again, President Trump's angry rhetoric became license for America to unleash anti-Asian hate.
But that's the danger of government or political Yeah, it seems to give license for people to hate and to express the kinds of vitriol that you just mentioned.
I want to zoom out a little bit to this set of laws, these alien land laws, as part of a kind of bundle of initiatives That if viewed through a certain lens, really are seemingly designed as anti-Chinese, as anti-Asian kind of initiative.
So I'm thinking about things like the TikTok bans that we're seeing, things related to prohibitions on money to universities coming from China and other countries.
Would you help us sort of see that?
You know, if I'm somebody who's not aware of these things and really not versed in In this content, in this area, how does the alien land laws of 2023 fit into a kind of package of things that are really aimed at the same purpose?
Yeah.
So on each individual level, you could look at a piece of legislation or a policy or a political ad and say, okay, that makes sense.
The intention of a policy is to protect American interests.
But if you take a step back and look at what's been happening in terms of U.S.-China relations, it's at its all-time low.
And politicians see that, and politicians recognize we can capitalize on the negative attitude towards China.
We can actually mobilize around the fear of China.
They do so because of work.
We see it throughout American history that if you create an enemy, target the outside enemy like China, it does two things.
It riles up your base and gets them out to vote.
So people often going out to vote against anti-CRT efforts, which they think are Marxist, which equates to being communist, which equates to being Chinese.
They've been mobilized to vote against woke culture.
So one thing they do is they mobilize all of the yellow peril fears because it works.
What they also do then is that they create policies that, again, Individually don't seem innocuous, but together create not only fear, but an overall policy approach that's dangerous.
And so you've mentioned the TikTok bans.
The government had a Chinese initiative to surveil and racially profile Chinese scientists.
There's been book bans on Chinese American authors.
There's currently a bill That every government agency in the federal government will have a point person to surveil and to guard against undue Chinese competition.
So that point person then will be... Their job is to be suspicious of any U.S.-China relation.
So anyone who has economic ties, political ties, or even familial ties that China will become Profiled and suspected.
So all these policies all together, and there are hundreds of COVID bills blaming China and making China responsible.
So all these bills, health bills, trade bills, ship bills, military policies, they all target China as America's greatest threat.
Both parties use that fear of China to mobilize their base.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't criticize or be concerned about China, but the over-exaggerated effect of this fear is that it leads to anti-Asian hate.
And I've been studying just anti-Asian hate, you know, ever since we couldn't stop AAPI hate.
And just the direct correspondence that China bashing leads to the bashing of Chinese and American, and to Asian Americans.
It's just felony.
It's obvious to me that we have to stop the fear mongering.
We have to stop the rising U.S.-China antagonism because it doesn't do anybody any good.
It doesn't really work.
And our nation's economies are so intertwined.
We have so many global issues that require international cooperation, like the climate crisis, that unless we address U.S.-China relations, We're the real existential threat is that we're destroying our environment and we need to work with other countries rather than make other countries the scapegoat and blame of global problems.
So many thoughts I'm having as I've just listening to you here.
And one of them is.
It seems to me, and totally happy for you to chime in on this and correct me if you feel like I'm off base, but we hear a lot about white privilege these days, almost to the point that people sometimes don't actually pay attention to what that might mean on the ground.
One of the things that seems to be a privilege of being white in the United States is that you as a person, an individual, are not racialized to the point that your identity is melded with what is assumed to be your country of origin.
So what I mean by that is that when it comes to somebody who's say German-American or Italian-American or Irish-American, nobody assumes that their actions and their character and their morality is tied to the Irish government or the German government, right?
But what you said earlier really struck me is that one of the things that is true about American history is that people of Asian descent have been Associated as individuals with the governments of their presumed places of heritage or of descent, right?
And so I'm thinking about Japanese Americans during World War II, my own family, and the ways that Japanese people in the United States, Japanese Americans, people of Japanese descent, were assumed to sort of be carrying out the wishes of the Japanese emperor or something.
And here we have the same thing with what you're talking about with Chinese Americans and people of Chinese descent in the United States, where When the rhetoric about China is ramped up because of how Asian American folks and Chinese and Chinese American folks have been coded in the country, it leads to a direct increase in the antagonism, harassment, and marginalization of Chinese Americans and people of Chinese descent in the United States.
Does that make sense to you just in terms of the ways that these macro factors then Uh, impact individuals on the ground as they're living in Florida or California or Ohio or anywhere else.
Yeah.
I think you summarized it really well.
Again, broad policies create enemies and target groups as being the enemy.
Get followed down on the individual level, people from those nations.
And that's a particular form of Orientalism or how Asians face racism.
I don't think like Russian American states backlash of Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But if China attacked Taiwan, you're going to see this huge backlash against Chinese and Asians in America.
And so Orientalism is this notion that I think is really important.
It's that the East is East and the West is West, and they're polar opposites.
So the West is superior, democratic, whereas the East is inferior and authoritarian.
The West is normal.
The East is exotic.
The West is rational.
The East is superstitious.
The West is freedom-loving.
The East is communist and, again, authoritarian.
So when you have that sort of broad view of Orientalists, that comes from a white nationalist perspective.
You tend to think of any—you lump Again, Asians with their country, and if the country is enemy, then the outsiders should be excluded.
The dangerous yellow peril.
What I'm going to argue though is that in Orientalism, Westerners have this view of the East.
It's that view that either or view, East is East, West is West, was created by academics, but also represented in art and literature.
You'll see it in movies.
Our cultures are opposite.
But what Edward Said said is that Orientalism is more about how, not how the West viewed the East, but how the West saw itself, right?
That the West saw itself as normal, progressive, superior, by creating, again, an outside, inferior culture.
I'm going to argue that the yellow peril here that we see now in America, that China is authoritarian, that China is too much of an anti-economic competition, that China is too large and authoritarian with its harsh COVID policies.
This yellow peril fear isn't so much about how Americans feel about China.
The yellow peril fear that we're seeing, the US-China policies that we're seeing, are more reflections of how America feels about itself.
That we're just, as Americans, projecting all our national anxieties, all our national insecurities, all our national fears onto China, when in reality, America is just sort of unsure about its economic state.
America is unsure about its global standing.
America is anxious about how it handles its COVID response.
And so with all the demographic changes, and yeah, this is basically the research about white nationalism, all of these fears that whites have leads to Trumpism and leads to, you know, yellow peril policies.
It seems true that whether it's an individual or a community or a nation, projection is easier than introspection.
And it does not matter if it's me trying to be a better dad or a nation trying to come to terms with its own anxieties, it's easier to project onto other people than it is for us to do actual introspection about our own insecurities and fears and shortcomings.
My last question will be this.
On this show, we talk a lot about a fictional Uncle Ron.
Uncle Ron is a white American guy at the barbecue who listens to various talking heads and comes to the barbecue ready to argue and he wants to spew his opinion.
So here's what Uncle Ron is going to tell somebody at the barbecues listening.
Uncle Ron's going to show up and say, What's wrong with these laws?
All we're trying to do is keep the Communist Chinese government from getting land near our bases and infiltrating American economies and cultures.
What do you expect us to do?
Is there something else you could do that would be effective, or is there something else that one might do that would actually be helpful?
If somebody's listening, what would you say is a good one-minute answer to Uncle Ron while you're trying to eat your hot dog at the barbecue?
Uncle Ron, I can understand your concerns about the American economic state.
I can understand your desire to protect America's borders, right?
So those concerns are valid, and I think they're deeply felt.
I understand that a lot of Americans, especially farmers, economic standing is really unstable at this moment.
But we're talking about projecting our fears.
As a victim of that projection, don't blame me for these large issues of economic instability, of inflation.
Don't blame me for issues of America's loss in jobs.
Instead, what we need to do is, like our cousin Brad over here said, is we need to introspect and say, How are we really going to get at the root issues of our national issues of economic stability and also address global issues like pandemics, like climate change?
And for me, the best way is to work together with other nations to stabilize our economy.
The best way is to work with other nations to address climate crisis.
the best way is to work with other nations patiently rather than creating wars that don't actually address your economic issue.
So Uncle Ron, just work with us, work with whom you think is the enemy and instead target the real sources of our problems. - Yeah, unfortunately, Uncle Ron doesn't usually listen.
It's always nice to have an answer.
So we've just done a study on how do you help people on the other political side, like US-China relations, like climate change.
The best way with Uncle Ron is, again, What we call developing deep empathy by really hearing him and listening to him, because again, his concerns are valid.
And if we get to the root of the problems and his concerns and fears, Uncle Ron and Cousin Brad and I often have similar feelings, but we just sort of project those fears and antagonisms in different places.
I think that's so important, and I think that's something that is hard to do in practice, but is something that if one disciplines themselves and cultivates that practice can be so effective.
Because, you know, I understand if somebody says, well, I've read about spies who have made their way into the various rooms.
With Congress people or with the Trump organization or whatever.
And I've heard about this and that I'm afraid and I want to protect my country, my family, my country, or my state, my community, whatever.
And as you're saying, there's a way to listen to someone's fears while also hopefully helping them understand why projecting those fears onto various individuals, various communities with kind of.
What are short-sighted answers to those fears is actually really hurtful to a lot of people and leads to violence and exclusion and marginalization and so on.
And so, all right, we'll leave it there.
Can you tell us where's the best way to link up with you and all of your work?
You're always publishing something new.
You always have a new book coming out.
So how can people be abreast of what's to come from you?
I don't have a good social media because I don't, I don't really know the brands.
So they can email me if they want.
They can Google me and find me at San Francisco State Asian American Studies.
I'd be happy to speak to groups.
I've been doing this a lot.
Um, and, uh, thank you for this time.
Well, your brand is the anti-brand.
I like that.
I love that.
That's like the best, that's the best kind of brand is to not have one.
All right, friends.
Well, as always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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