The next US election cycle started earlier than usual last month when Mark Amodei, a Nevada special election congressional candidate, ran a campaign advertisement featuring a Chinese newscast from the future called “Imperial News.”

In the fictional report, a Chinese newscaster described how America fell apart due to uncontrolled spending and borrowing from China. She finished by saying, “Their independence became a new dependence. As their debt grew, our fortune grew. And that is how our great empire rose again.” 

An image showing the Chinese flag hoisted over the US capitol building with the People’s Liberation Army marching by closed the report as Mark Amodei faded in to say, “It’s not too late to stop this nightmare. As your congressman I’ll never vote to raise Obama’s debt limit and risk our independence.” 

This was the first xenophobic advertisement of the coming election cycle to target China, but it certainly won’t be the last. 

During last year’s mid-term elections in the US, at least 29 US congressional candidates made campaign ads emphasizing their strengths and their opponents’ weaknesses on Chinese threats to US. With an upcoming presidential election and Osama Bin Laden out of the picture, the practice of using exaggerated threats from China to create fear-based support only looks to worsen.

Jumping across the Pacific, similar tactics exist. These operate under a very different government structure, so they  aren’t as obvious as a campaign ad stamped with the politician’s approval on it. In China, however, leaked directives and consistent blame toward the US for domestic problems also ride the wave of xenophobia. 

Conjuring up a foreign menace and then promising to serve as the protector and savior from it is a political tactic as old as politics itself. 

Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command in Nazi Germany, once explicated the strategy by saying, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”?

US senator Joseph McCarthy took this to heart and attained huge political influence in the 1950s with his campaign against a phantom conspiracy of communist spies. But in the process he ruined the lives of many innocent people and created an atmosphere where Americans suspected their neighbors could be Soviet operatives bent on destroying America. 60 years later, some leaders are still clinging to the same principle and still doing so to the detriment of their countries. 

Rather than telling their constituents the hard truth and outline realistic plans for improving their nations’ circumstances, these leaders have chosen cheap political tricks as their path to power. Unfortunately, it works far too easily. 

The tactic wouldn’t be successful if there wasn’t already an inclination in the public to fear the other side and an eagerness to put responsibility for their ills on somebody else. But by fanning these nationalistic flames, politicians simply lead the next generation to share the same ignorance.

The coming year will already be difficult enough for Sino-American relations without the benefit of scapegoating. Leaders in both countries should look back to the last time the world’s two greatest powers kept their people ignorant and fearful of one another. A half-century Cold War that sparked several very real proxy wars could have been mitigated if leaders hadn’t stoked resentment in an attempt to hold power a little longer.

There are certainly plenty of legitimate concerns that America and China have about one another, and politicians have every right to discuss those issues with their constituents, but they need to separate fact from farce. PLA troops occupying Washington and CIA agents orchestrating ethnic unrest have no place in the discourse of reality.

If politicians intend to call themselves leaders, they need to ditch the crutch of xenophobia and lead the people on their own two feet.

The author is a master’s candidate of Global Business Journalism at Tsinghua University. His blog: sinostand.com. ericfish85@gmail.com.

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