m*****n
发帖数: 4015 | 1 这篇文章对可行性研究进行了分析。
The next internment: Would Chinese in the U.S. be rounded up during a war?
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/29/the-next-internment-would-chinese-in-the-u-s-be-rounded-up-during-a-war/
By Giacomo Bagarella
Best Defense office of future operations
Present U.S. leadership seems both to make war more likely through its
bellicose rhetoric and to heighten the risk that the conflict would lead to
violence against the American-Chinese population.
As the title of one recent book on the subject has it, the United States and
China could be “destined for war.” This eventuality has received ample
coverage in the media, in academia, and among statesmen, and both militaries
have planned for a possible Sino-American conflict.
Not so the Chinese in America. The unspoken consequences of such a war would
bring suspicion, surveillance, and possibly persecution against the
hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals who live in the U.S. With
knowledge of some of American history’s worst excesses in mind, is there a
possibility that some, or all, of the country’s foreign-born Chinese will
be interned?
Estimating the size of the affected population proves difficult. A
Department of Homeland Security study calculates that, on average, 240,000
Chinese nationals resided within the U.S. on any given day in fiscal year
2014. Summing this figure to the estimated 268,000 unauthorized Chinese
immigrants yields a lower bound of roughly half-a-million Chinese citizens
living in the U.S. The upper bound might be closer to one million, if one
halves the 2.3 million foreign-born Chinese in the country in 2015 to
account for naturalized citizens — who constitute 48 percent of foreign-
born residents — and lawful permanent residents. (Chinese law generally
prohibits its citizens from holding dual nationality.)
Such numbers are likely to feed fears of “bad Fu Manchus,” saboteurs and
fifth-columnists ready to take Beijing’s fight to the U.S. This would not
be the first instance of homegrown anti-Chinese prejudice: Following decades
of racism, China’s “fall” to Communism during the Cold War further
enflamed American paranoia on the Chinese. Iris Chang concludes her history
of the Chinese diaspora, The Chinese in America, by noting ruefully that,
even in the 21st century, the acceptance of Chinese-Americans “was linked
to the ever-shifting relations between the United States and China rather
than to their own particular behavior.”
Worryingly, present U.S. leadership seems both to make war more likely
through its bellicose rhetoric and to heighten the risk that the conflict
would lead to violence against the American-Chinese population. As a
candidate and president-elect, Donald Trump accused China of “raping” the
U.S. and spoke approvingly of the internment of Japanese-Americans during
World War II. His surrogates have repeated this reasoning, and senior
advisers such as Stephen Bannon and Peter Navarro are transparent in their
animosity towards Beijing.
In this toxic context, how plausible is it that Sino-American war would lead
to massive retaliation? Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the
U.S. government used its power against the designated domestic foe, leading
to the forced relocation and internment of more than 120,000 American
Japanese during World War II. The recipe for this outcome, which the writer
Richard Reeves describes in Infamy, entailed a mixture of racism,
incompetent or power-hungry leaders in politics and the military, an
enabling media and civil society, greed from those who stood to benefit
economically from the response, and a widespread feeling of threat, whether
real or imagined.
Tempted as they may be, the president and his sycophants would run into
various obstacles. Only some of Reeves’s preconditions exists, though the
media and civil society seem poised to be strong watchdogs of government
excesses. The Chinese population today is also much larger, in both relative
and in absolute terms, than the Japanese one in 1940. Additionally, Chapter
18 of Title 10 of the United States Code prohibits members of the armed
forces from conducting searches, seizures, and arrests unless “otherwise
authorized by law.” The threat of internment thus rests on the executive’s
ability to mobilize citizens and key institutions into a systematic anti-
Chinese policy.
However, in the shadow of great-power war, the equilibrium between restraint
and reprisal leans heavily towards the latter. A threatened nation is more
likely to lash out, as when the machinery of government and the public’s
worst instincts responded to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by
targeting Arabs, Muslims, and those mistaken as members of those groups.
History shows that racist reactions in times of war are not just a bug in
the American system — they are an unavoidable feature. Trapped between two
superpowers and rapacious leaders, the ethnic Chinese population in the U.S.
faces significant uncertainty and travails in the looming duel between
Washington and Beijing. | y****i
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