“I mean, every campaign has hired Chinese staff, right?” longtime political consultant David Ho said. “Everyone’s learning to capitalize on their campaign. It’s almost like a political-industrial complex in The City.”

The Stop Asian Hate movement is generally defined as when a nationwide surge in hate incidents, vandalizations of businesses, assaults, and other attacks against Asian Americans in 2020 and 2021 prompted a string of demonstrations and increased political and community engagement.

Dozens of the incidents, including some attacks on elders, were caught on video and spread across social media, further galvanizing Asian Americans and their allies to speak out against anti-Asian racism. Among the most tragic and galvanizing cases were a mass shooting at an Asian-owned Atlanta spa in March 2021 — in which the shooter killed eight people of Asian descent — and when Vicha Ratanapakdee, a 84-year-old Thai man, was assaulted and killed in San Francisco two months earlier.

It came amid xenophobic attitudes tied to the coronavirus’ origins in China, such as former President Donald Trump’s racist reference of it as the “China Virus.”

Most politicians and community leaders have acknowledged that Stop Asian Hate helped spread key awareness about the historically rooted racism Asian Americans continue to endure.

“I’d say about a decade ago, there used to be all this talk about whether Asian Americans are white adjacent or honorary whites,” explained Karthick Ramakrishnan, executive director and founder of AAPI Data. “The pandemic and the hate crimes and hate incidents put an end to that kind of speculation.”

“There’s been much stronger consciousness of being Asian American, what that means, and the racism and bias that we do face, both on a day-to-day basis and on a systematic level,” said Claire Lau, a community activist with the Chinese Progressive Association. “And I think part of it too is the realization that Asians have been kind of left out of the conversation around race for a long time.”

Jaynry Mak, a longtime attorney and political activist in San Francisco, added that the movement “changed community building” in The City by forging alliances between local agencies and the community.

“It really has helped build partnerships between merchants and residents and the different city departments — including the police department — and with the different nonprofits,” Mak said.

Former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim called the movement the continuation of Asian American community building which had been gaining momentum in The City over the preceding 10 years, whether it be through representation at City Hall or the standardization of bilingual election services and materials.

“Stop Asian Hate was another inflection point where Asian American communities flexed their power,” she said.

Now, campaigns are rushing to tap into that power, as evidenced by the four mayoral frontrunners all prioritizing holding Get Out The Vote events for Asian American residents the weekend before Election Day.

But arguably one of the most impactful trends born from the movement is the collection of young people who went from disinterested in local politics to immersed in it due to fears for their family, friends and neighbors.

“[Stop Asian Hate] activated and galvanized a whole generation of Asian American activists,” Kim said.

Alicia Wang, former chair of the Chinese American Voter Education Committee and a Democratic Party activist, called the violence and fears a “wake-up call” for Asian Americans both young and old.

She compared the moment to the fallout following the killing of Vincent Chin — a Chinese American autoworker who was beaten to death in 1982 by two white men who blamed the loss of American jobs on Japanese imports.

Chin’s death caused an uproar among Asian Americans and across the country, and it is largely thought of as a turning point in the fight for Asian American civil rights.

“The randomness of the AAPI hate crimes brought us back to the era of Vincent Chin,” Wang said. “Young people are beginning to realize that you have to be politically active. Politics is like toothpaste. It’s part of your life. That’s how you make things work.”

Take Lily Ho — no relation to David Ho — for example.

Lily Ho, who was on the front lines rallying support for the recalls of Chesa Boudin and San Francisco school board member Allison Collins in 2022 and is now a member of the Democratic County Central Committee, said she was indifferent about San Francisco politics prior to the pandemic.

“I didn’t think twice about local politics,” said Lily Ho, who worked in the tech and banking industries up until 2020.

But Lily Ho said the social climate during the pandemic pushed her into city politics and grassroots organizing.

She called the rise in Asian hate crimes a “catalyst” for people like herself, a large, but not the only, source of anger contributing to a feeling that Asian Americans’ concerns have not been heard by local politicians.

Jade Tu, who is the campaign manager for former interim San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell, has a similar story. She worked in the health-care industry, before she said fears over her grandparents’ safety during the pandemic ignited her involvement in San Francisco politics.

Both Lily Ho and Tu founded nonprofits — Delta Chinatown Initiative and Dear Community, respectively — dedicated to empowering Asian Americans.

Lily Ho said there are dozens of people like them who are scattered and mobilized throughout San Francisco politics and who have been highly influential this fall.

But not everyone says they see the new crop of activists have been a net positive. As The Examiner previously reported, it’s at the core of a growing divide between moderates and progressives in San Francisco’s Asian American political space.

Kim, a progressive, described the Stop Asian Hate movement as paving two different roads of community and political engagement.

She said it bolstered donations and staffing at existing community organizations, like Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian Law Caucus.

But she also argued it created another strain of activists who were taken advantage of by “conservative forces” that saw a political opportunity.

Kim and other progressive politicos accused big money political action groups, such as TogetherSF Action and GrowSF, of weaponizing the new generation of activists.

“[Moderates] were able to turn their anger and frustration into advocacy for law and order,” he explained. “I do feel bad for these young people because in their mind they really think that they’re waging an honorable moral fight on behalf of the community.”

But at the same time, the progressive advocates were self-critical, pinning much of the blame on the lack of organization within San Francisco’s Asian American progressive coalition.

David Ho said they are “losing the war of attrition” with the moderate groups who have been able to attract many of these impressionable activists towards their cause.

He credited moderate political actors for creating a space where young and driven activists felt accepted.

“[Progressive organizations] should have a more open doors approach to some of these young activists,” David Ho said. “There’s no reason why these [Stop] Asian Hate activists are specifically working for the moderates. It makes no sense.”

Lau agreed that organizations like hers, the Chinese Progressive Association, need to do a better job of attracting up-and-coming political activists.

But she also blamed the increasingly influential tech donors for giving moderate candidates and organizations resources that the progressive side can’t compete with.

“We don’t have the resources to organize the middle class … I think a weakness, or something progressives need to figure out is how to compete in this space, and it’s hard without resources,” Lau said.

At the same time, several progressive politicians doubted whether this new generation of activists will have staying power.

David Ho has derogatorily called Lily Ho and Tu the moniker “pandemic pop-up activists,” predicting they won’t be in the political space for the long run.

California Assemblymember Phil Ting, who will term out at the end of the year after representing San Francisco’s west side in the state legislature for a dozen years, claimed he’s already starting to notice activism that started during the pandemic fade.

Ting, who authored state legislation which funded groups combating racism against Asian Americans, flatly said he didn’t think Stop Asian Hate impacted city politics because it, as time will show, failed to create anything permanent.

“I’ve been doing this for a living for 25 years, being a full-time public servant,” he said. “[The new activists] didn’t give up their jobs. It’s all part-time. Ultimately, that’s not a sustainable model.”

But Lily Ho, Tu and others like them remain steadfast in their commitment to the movement and, more importantly they say, what is a changing tide in San Francisco politics which will lead to an upheaval of progressive-leaning incumbents this week.

“I think in the older camp they don’t just doubt us, they fear that their positions of power that took them decades to build are ending,” Lily Ho said. “They’re becoming irrelevant because people don’t trust them.”

When told that some politicians have accused conservative forces of weaponizing people like herself, Lily Ho scoffed.

“Weaponized? Yeah, I think they’ve got that backwards,” she said. “We’ve weaponized them.”