President-elect Donald Trump’s first term was associated with the start of the deadly global Covid pandemic and spike in a hate crime against Asia Americans. Yet Asian Americans – particularly Chinese Americans — may face a new round of racist threats for different reasons in the new year: deepening stress in U.S.-China relations and a crackdown of Biden-era undocumented immigrants that could target Chinese, a leading China expert said recently.

“We saw an incredible increase in hostility toward Chinese Americans and Asian Americans particularly during the Covid period,” said David J. Firestein, president and CEO of the Houston-based George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations. “Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see movement back in that direction,” Firestein told a summit organized by the China Institute in America in New York last month.

Hate crimes picked up in Trump’s first term as he labeled Covid as a “Chinese virus,” a description the then-president said wasn’t racist. Trump has been criticized for calling his former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao by “Coco Chow”; her family runs one of the world’s largest privately held shipping companies, the Foremost Group. The wife of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, Chao resigned the day after Jan. 6 chaos at the U.S. capital in 2021. Earlier, she was labor secretary under George W. Bush, the first Asian American women to serve in a presidential cabinet.

“I was proud to be among the very first leaders of a U.S.-based nonprofit to come out and say publicly that the way that President Trump at that time (during Covid) was speaking about China and – and therefore about Asian Americans in the minds of many — was deplorable, shameful and beneath the dignity of the office of president of the United States,” Firestein said.

Suspicions toward Chinese scholars in the U.S. during Trump’s first term had earlier been stirred from a “China Initiative” intended to protect U.S. technology from theft; it was later derided by critics for racial profiling with meager results that hurt U.S. economic interests by encouraging American-trained Chinese scientists to go home. Prominent ethnic Chinese billionaires that lead U.S. technology companies include Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Zoom founder Eric Yuan and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

The United States has approximately 24 million Asian Americans including 4.7 million Chinese Americans, according to a report this year by the Pew Research Center, citing U.S. Census data from 2022.

About two thirds of Chinese Americans face at least one form of discrimination in an average month, according to a survey released this year by New York-based Committee of 100. Committee of 100 members include East West Bank Chairman Dominic Ng, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Hang Lung Properties Honorary Chair Ronnie Chan, and Golden Eagle International’s billionaire CEO Roger Wang.

Looking ahead, a promised Trump crackdown on a wave of undocumented immigrants, mostly from the Americas, allowed under President Joe Biden will also target a relatively small number of mainland Chinese who entered during the same period and has stirred worries of an increase in racism, NBC reported last month.

“Undocumented immigrants from China who are deemed to be of military age will be among the first groups targeted for deportation by the incoming Trump administration” based a potential risk to national security, the network said citing sources close to the Trump campaign. “Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, the number of undocumented Chinese nationals crossing both the northern and southern borders has tripled from just more than 27,000 to more than 78,000,” NBC said.

Washington and Beijing currently face trade and tariff disputes as well as geopolitical and military strains involving the South China Sea and Taiwan. Trump has nominated “China hawk” Marco Rubio to serve as Secretary of State in his new cabinet.

Yet presenting China as an oversized cause of U.S. problems can be appealing to some U.S. politicians because of the overwhelming negative view of the Asian country among Americans, Firestein noted. Some 80% of Americans have unfavorable views of China and about 50% say they regard China as the greatest enemy of the United States, according to recent U.S. public opinion polls, Firestein said.

Embracing and articulating “an adversarial framing about China allows a candidate for office and an incumbent to cast himself or herself as tough,” he said. “It allows that person to bludgeon their political opponents in the primaries and general elections, as weak.”

“To the American political establishment, China is much more valuable as a problem unsolved than it is as a problem solved,” Firestein added.

The Committee of 100 also found that about two thirds of Chinese Americans face at least one form of discrimination in an average month. Many also are verbally insulted (27%) or physically threatened or harassed (21%) in an average month, it said.

Firestein’s Houston-based group is named after former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who early in his career was head of the U.S. liaison office in China. Neil Bush, the third son of President Bush is the founder and chairman of the board of directors, and Carla Hills, the U.S. Trade Representative under Bush, is the honorary chair. Among Firestein’s previous posts, he was the founding executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s China Public Policy Center and a diplomat in 1992-2010.

Founded in New York in 1926, the China Institute in America is a U.S. nonprofit organization that promotes understanding of China.

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