Portraying Attractive Chinese Women as Potential Spies Will Only Worsen Racial Stereotyping

The young Chinese woman in the photo is certainly a beautiful one. In a recent social media post I came across, the poster spoke of how the woman, the girlfriend of a fellow American engaged in cutting-edge technological research in Japan, may be a front for Chinese state-sponsored spying. His evidence? That the attractive woman is just way out of his friend's league, and that her being enamored with him cannot realistically be possible without some sort of ulterior motives. Through the story, the poster cautioned others to stay far away from overly enthusiastic Chinese women in their midst.

Let's set aside the fact that he is so publicly throwing shade at his supposedly unattractive friend. The damaging stereotype in the story is not that of the nerdy white men with no hopes back home successfully fetishizing Asian women. It is that of an increasingly prominent one about Chinese females: back in the days, they latched onto Western men for the hope of riches through immigration and the social status of international marriage. Those yearnings have now been eclipsed by a much more sinister one about how they are willing to sacrifice their bodies to prove loyalty to Beijing.

That stereotype may, once again, change how ethnic Chinese people are perceived in Japan, the US, and other countries where China is increasingly perceived as the enemy. The idea of the Chinese being a fifth column has been years in the making, rising alongside China's political, economic, and technological profile. But so far, that threat has been overwhelmingly male. The Western public saw spies for the Chinese military, government, and leading firms as middle-aged men in lab coats, sharp suits, and even the uniforms of group tours.

But with Western opinion clearly turning against the presence of (overwhelmingly male) Chinese experts in anything science and technology, efforts to stamp out remaining means of China's siphoning off Western intellectual property have gradually acquired a distinctively gendered component. Just as the Soviet Union trained professional female spies to honeytrap Western diplomats, getting them to hand over classified information in exchange for sex, a new theory is emerging that, in a new Cold War, China is only too willing to do the same.

Pity the young Chinese women who venture abroad for studies and work. Their innocent desire to learn and live a better life now has to be even more tempered than before. Political correctness used to prevent those lusting after them from openly making racially patronizing comments. Now, many more in their host countries will openly make vulgar romantic gestures, convinced that giving themselves up to the most attractive ones will only make the women's "job" of spying for valuable information easier. No need to see the Chinese women as equally emotional beings when they are there only for unsanctioned transactions.

And paradoxically, the Chinese women will also start to bear the brunt of casual racism that Chinese men have so long become used to. At some point in the past, their femininity served as a cushion, almost exempting them from the supposed vices of Chinese men.  The belief, particularly true in Japan, that foreigners are a source of crime did not used to hit the females as much, with many justifiably believing that the foreign men were responsible for much of the negative consequences of immigration. But if women are tools for an evil government, they may be even more immoral, and thus criminal.

Even sadder than the new stereotype that Chinese women have to contend with, there is now one fewer way for people-to-people exchange between Chinese and non-Chinese people. In a world where it is increasingly common to portray China as uninterested in coexisting with others in peace, intercultural romance between Chinese women and non-Chinese men often provided the most everyday empirical evidence to the contrary. These relationships enabled many non-Chinese to personally see China and Chinese people as not wholly equivalent to what mainstream Western media would say.

But if the attractive Chinese women willing to openly communicate with non-Chinese men are all spies in it for information, can we still believe in true love? And can we still believe that the Chinese are not "normal" human beings who simply want to connect with others, get to know them as people, rather than to gain some sort of leverage and power over them? If we so readily start to believe that beneath the big smile of the Chinese woman in the photo, there lies a monster helping a government screw over foreigners without a tinge of remorse, what can stop Chinese people living outside China from being more isolated?