According to techno Orientalism, people rationalize Asian nations’ economic and technological developments as still being owed to their citizens’ servile, subhuman nature, resulting from that a place of sub-humanity.
“You had to feed a kind of logic that explains away the reality,” says David S. Roh, one of three academics (alongside Greta A. Niu and Betsy Huang) who put together the 2015 book Techno Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. “So you had ‘Japanese people are good at stealing; they’re machines, so they can work really hard, they don’t ask for human rights or the same working conditions as we, the Western people do.’”
The book Techno Orientalism enumerates some of the ways these dehumanizing ideas are taught to your average Westerner, from its origins as paranoid propaganda surrounding the Japanese military’s (supposed) technological mastery during the Russo-Japanese War to a 2010 commercial by a U.S. PAC that depicts a Matrix-like future wherein the United States has fallen to the Chinese. That video has garnered over two million views on YouTube.
Roh recalls a conversation with what he describes as an intelligent, thoughtful military officer in a civilian setting, who couldn’t help but reiterate techno-Orientalist tropes, namely that China was “good at copying other ideas, but couldn’t create things on their own.” “That’s the same stuff they said about Japan,” says Roh. “It was so internalized that it shaped his thinking, and that could eventually have real consequences for our national security — that uncritical approach to those tenets which shape policy.”
With the numerous sweeping shifts in the global economy and society at large, techno-Orientalist narratives play an outsize role in coronavirus-fueled anti-Asian racism. A standout example is the popular conspiracy theory peddled by Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh suggesting COVID-19 is the product of a Chinese bioweapons program — an intentional or unintentional release of a biological weapon pioneered by scientists in Wuhan stationed 10 miles away from the food markets most commonly posited as the site where the disease originated.
While this theory, like many others by Jones and Limbaugh, can be dismissed out of hand as highly unlikely, it gains traction for the same reason viral videos of “bat soup” and coughing Chinese people gain traction: The West philosophically generalizes the Chinese through harmful tropes.
It does so not out of mere carelessness but to continuously fuel the West’s identity of itself and its mission. Toward the end of Techno Orientalism, the book’s writers describe its titular subject as “account(ing) for — and then dismiss(ing) — Eastern modernity as both process and product of dehumanization, of which the West is an economic and ontological beneficiary.”
In order for us to quell anti-Asian narratives, we first must reflect on how shallow our collective understanding is, not only of Asian people themselves, but of the nature of violence toward them. “Many people don’t want to recognize that these narratives exist and they’re harmful because it conflicts with their worldview,” says Roh.
Part of the solution, Roh asserts, is for newsrooms and classrooms to continue to diversify, not only in their personnel but in their scholarship. “The fluidity with which the conversation changes almost every day speaks to the power and the adaptability of Orientalism and techno-Orientalist discourse,” says Roh. The ramifications if they don’t are all too real: “That dehumanizing effect gives you license to inflict violence, justifiably, because you don’t think they’re human,” Roh says. “They’re some kind of alien force that needs to be eradicated.”