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By Russell Flannery

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.

To read the entire article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeschina/2024/12/10/will-trade-war-immigrant-crackdown-stir-new-asian-hate-in-us/