The Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank, is blaming a rise of anti-Asian violence in the United States on members of Congress who “inflate the geopolitical threat from China.”
In a video presentation posted Wednesday, two of the institute’s researchers said “anti-Asian violence is not an aberration that was conjured during the height of the COVID pandemic.” Instead, they suggest it is “a troubling phenomenon that runs through the course of U.S. history” caused by politicians who seek to combat China’s “malign influence.”
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is funded by George Soros and Charles Koch and routinely supports greater political and economic cooperation between the United States and China. Its scholars have denied that China is committing genocide against its Uyghur population and argued against holding Beijing accountable for the coronavirus pandemic.
Violent crime has been on the rise in the United States since 2014—well before the onset of the pandemic. The FBI reported 9,616 incidents of violent crime against Asian Americans in 2020, which accounts for 1 percent of the total reported cases. There were 279 incidents of hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2020—a 70 percent increase from 2019.
Scholars at the Quincy Institute have also echoed rhetoric used by Chinese propaganda outlets. In a May 2021 article, which was placed in Time magazine by the CCP-backed China Daily, a scholar affiliated with the institute praised China’s “rapid modernization.”
Senior research fellow Jessica Lee singled out the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate 68 to 32 in June 2021, as the kind of legislation that “encourages discrimination against Asian Americans” and panders to politicians “calling for an endless Cold War with China.”
China denounced the bill after its passage as being “full of Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee debated a companion piece of legislation in July called the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act, but talks broke down between chairman Rep. Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) and ranking member Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) before its passage. McCaul said the bill as it was written did not “take the generational threat posed by the CCP seriously.”
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