Naming the threat: The China/Chinese discursive construct and the rhetoric of anti-Asian racism

This essay investigates the discursive mechanisms that sustain anti-Asian racism in the United States by critically examining the potent and unstable symbol of Chinese. Through historical, ideological, economic, and geopolitical examination, we demonstrate how the conflation of China with Chinese operates discursively to collapse race, ethnicity, and nation-state. We introduce the concept of the China/Chinese discursive construct to reveal instances of intercultural communication where the term Chinese implicitly references Mainland China and to explain how the insinuated affiliation between Chinese and China goes beyond mere factual inaccuracy. By unpacking the strategic deployment of Chinese in public discourse, we expose how the elision of China in Chinese is a crucial feature of contemporary yellow peril discourse — a slippage that evokes the threat of a foreign state without explicitly naming it. Our analysis illuminates the ideological power of rhetoric in shaping harmful narratives and sustaining structures of domination. We conclude by advocating for a critical and reflective mode of communication that resists the normalization of racialized language, positioning the China/Chinese construct as a tool for communication intervention and rhetorical disruption.