The anti-Chinese racism of Project 2025
Team Trump’s plan applies race essentialism to Chinese people, calls them naturally aggressive, and proposes a White Man’s Burden solution
Project 2025 is a blueprint for governing under a second Trump term, organized by the Heritage Foundation, whose president Kevin Roberts said its goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism." In the section on how Team Trump would make policy toward China (page 180), there is this striking nugget:
This is pure essentialism. To be more specific, race essentialism, the belief that “racial categories are associated with distinct, fixed, and stable cultural patterns (e.g., values, beliefs, practices, and lifestyles) [which] definitively and permanently shape the psychological characteristics of individuals within a racial group, and differentiate them from members of other racial groups.”
Project 2025 is saying that there is something essential within Chinese people, due to their history and culture, that determines they can’t be ‘normal.’ That’s racism.
The paragraph starts out with a common sense and widely-held view that our difference are with the government and not with the people. But as if to clarify that the authors seek to distance themselves from the non-racists who hold this consensus view, they add the “That said…”
…which declares that the “nature” of Chinese aggression is due to 5,000 years of Chinese “history, ideology and institutions.” It asserts that that today’s challenges from the People’s Republic of China flow from deep roots in “China’s strategic cultural.” And in its most stunning phrase, it claims that “internal culture and civil society will never deliver a more normative nation.”
Project 2025 asserts that there is something essential to the Chinese people that makes them aggressive and prevents them from constituting a ‘normal’ nation. That’s racism.
Further, it finds that China’s inherent aggression can only be fixed by “external pressure” -- that Chinese people are incapable of acting in a normative way. In other words, the Chinese need to be civilized by outsiders (i.e. Americans).
This is White Man’s Burden for the 21st century. It evokes the colonial, imperialist, and Western supremacy tropes that we properly assign to earlier manifestations of this concept. That’s racism.
Essentialism is the antithesis of, and a malignancy on, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that “[e]veryone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
To assert that a people, as Project 2025 does with the Chinese, are by their particular nature unable to enjoy or assert their inherent human rights, is a rejection of the entire concept of universally-applicable human rights. To claim that only external actors can fix these intrinsic Chinese traits is to deny agency to the Chinese people. And that’s racism.
Project 2025 is a detailed plan for how a second Trump Administration would govern, including the elements that would inform its policy toward the People’s Republic of China. And this paragraph tells us that one of those elements is to treat the Chinese people as an “other” -- a people less sovereign and more aggressive than the authors of this plan think of themselves. I think we need to debate and reflect on this.
This is second in a series on Project 2025. Part 1, Project 2025: a blueprint for CCP-style governance of America, analyzed the similarities between the plan’s consolidation of executive power in the Party Leader and imposition of Party control over federal agencies and personnel and the CCP model. Part 3, Team Trump’s gift to the Chinese Communist Party on human rights shows how it mimics the CCP by redefining international human rights to suit its Party ideology , providing a gift to the CCP and corroding the cause of human rights globally.