 Hi folks who are joining us. Thank you so much for coming. We're gonna be starting in a minute or two. Thank you so much for joining us today, everybody. All right, I put a link to our campaign page in the chat as well as to the YouTube where you can also stream this live in case your connection is poor or any other reason. And we're gonna get started. So first of all, thank you so much everyone from the bottom of my heart for making out here on this Sunday afternoon. I know schedules are busy, burnout is high, it's a difficult time. So thank you so much for making the time to join us today. We've all really appreciate it. Welcome to Dragon Ladies, Sex, Nuclear Weapons and Death. This is a Code Pink panel on why stop Asian hate. The hashtag needs to include a radical understanding of anti-imperialism and critical race theory. This is part of a series of Code Pink webinars for the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign of which I am the campaign coordinator. Like I said, you can view this on Code Pink's YouTube live right now, youtube.com slash code pink action. Or you can also view the recording. This will be recorded and uploaded later to our campaign page and to the same Code Pink YouTube page that's linked in the chat. And check out our other webinars for China Is Not Our Enemy at codepink.org slash china. That's our campaign page. And you can see the ways that we're kind of dismantling the anti-China rhetoric led by the US and Western mainstream media on our campaign there. I also wanna give a content warning out of respect. There will be some explicit mentions of sexual assault, rape, violence and murder, possibly sexual slavery, et cetera. So please do take care of yourselves. Prioritize your sense of safety and your mental health above all else. So if you need to step out at any point, whether temporarily or permanently, we welcome that, there's no judgment. And I wanna thank our co-sponsors for this event for making this happen. The University of Massachusetts, Asian and Asian-American studies certificate program, our friends at World Beyond War, our friends at Child Collective, Pivot to Peace and the Feminist Foreign Policy Project. Please follow and support all of these wonderful organizations and programs working to expand our education on anti-racism and on anti-war and anti-imperialism movements. So this webinar will just be a panel. We won't be taking questions, but you're welcome to engage in the chat. And I'm gonna start by speaking a little bit and then we're gonna hear an excerpt of the article that our wonderful speakers here today published before this webinar. Since the Western construction of the Orient, when European colonialists first made contact with the East, dating back to 1492, Orientalism has always been framed in opposition to Western colonial dominance. In the late 1970s, Edward Said described Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. Said noted the confluence of Orientalism and sexism, stating, when woman's sexuality is surrendered, the nation is more or less conquered. Thus, the sexual conquest of Asia's woman, especially indigenous woman, correlates with the conquest of Asia itself. Throughout US history, imperialism in an even Western scholarship on Asia has been viewed in a sexualized context. In response to the recent rise in sinophobia and anti-Asian violence, many are pointing to COVID-19 and Trump scapegoating rhetoric for the US's incompetence in handling the pandemic as the sole source. But COVID was a convenient excuse for anti-Chinese rhetoric and we must also acknowledge that sinophobia has been building in the US for at least half a century now. And the buildup that this violence presents the existential threat of nuclear war, specifically now a potential nuclear war with China being invigorated and goaded on by the US State Department. As GM Park summarizes, yellow peril is the specter animating imperial sovereignty at a global scale. Anyone committed to developing revolutionary forces has to be committed to combating it as a catalyst for reactionary politics. These threats are not just political in nature, they have real embodied consequences for Asian people, particularly the most vulnerable among us as the Atlanta shootings are evidence of. To understand this violence, we must view it through a lens of a four-part intersectional axis of gender, race, class and the orientalist arm of colonialism. The historical and institutional dehumanization of Asian and Pacific Islander people as well as the fetishization of Asian and Pacific Islander women has made them uniquely vulnerable to sexual and physical violence. We cannot stress this enough. Asian and Pacific Islander women are targeted in the two most fundamental methods of white patriarchal and imperial dominance, rape, both interpersonal and through US military rape and war. In response to the Atlanta shootings of six working class migrant Asian women which we are still mourning to this day and which is an extension of that same violent dominance. Our panelists today wrote a fantastic satirical advertisement which conflates Asian massage workers and nuclear weapons published in Incstick Media recently and you can find it on the event page linked. So we're gonna have a little excerpt of that article which has the same title as this webinar. It was kind of the inspiration for this webinar before we begin to get today to kind of frame the conversation. And I'm gonna ask Molly Hurley, one of the co-writers of the article to read that excerpt, excuse me. Thank you very much. Yeah, so we're gonna brief excerpt from the article. I'll start, it's satirical. It's meant to be a type of advertisement for our massage parlor, if you will. And kind of jumping in the middle here, we say, if you're drawn towards the anime Wong style dragon lady based off of the female villain in the tale in the pirates comics, then believe me, nuclear weapons are where it's at now. These weapons are menacing yet alluring and ego boost to the highest degree if you can attain one. There's something to be conquered, particularly by the white man, to reign in their deviousness of course, but also to reign in the deviousness of others by showing them your power over these women, I mean weapons. If you're not careful though, the gratification can become addicting. Oh, but it won't be your fault. It's obviously the weapon's fault for being so intoxicating. Everyone has had bad days and deserves to let off some steam and everyone lets off their steam in different ways. I let off my steam by teasing the nuclear button while you let off your steam by going to massage parlors. Ideally Korean if you're allowed to be picky, but then again, it doesn't matter all that much because they all look the same anyways. But again, it's not your fault. Just be aware that sometimes a bad day can start to blur the lines between a lust to violate and a lust to murder. Perhaps that's what happened in Atlanta, but race has nothing to do with it, right? Not all of the victims in Atlanta were Asian and if we use a nuclear weapon against China, not all of the casualties would be Asian either. Any other old tourist or expat wandering around in the wrong place at the wrong time could get wiped off the face of the earth alongside a disproportionate number of Asian victims. Thereby, absolving the crime of any racial implications and any addiction to certain types of power fantasies are independent of race and history anyway. If we do end up nuking China, it's because they asked for it. They're a threat to world order, a true yellow peril whom we must knock down a peg or two through manipulation using our domestic or foreign policy. And if that doesn't work, well, then we'll just have to resort to more carnal measures. Thank you, Molly, for that excellent reading and for publishing that much needed article in the wake of the shootings and all of this anti-Asian violence. And yes, we are talking about the potential for a nuclear war with China right now. Just recently, Biden has released the budget proposal for 2022, which includes a 1.6% increase from the Trump administration, $715 billion for defense spending, and $4.7 billion specifically for increasing naval and military capacity in the Pacific, the Western Pacific. The main reason for this stated in the proposal is to deter a rising China to oppose the quote, perceived threat of China. So I'm gonna introduce the panelists now and we're gonna get started with this conversation. We have Lily Tang here today who is a senior studying political science and global studies at UMass Amherst. Her passion and focus are on bridging Asian-American studies and Asian studies by looking at the transnational experience and examining both disciplines through an intersectional anti-imperialist and racial justice focus lens. On campus, Lily founded UMass' Asian-American Film Festival and the Asian Asian-American studies certificate program student advisory board. Outside of UMass, Lily is a legislative intern for the Massachusetts State House and a research and policy intern for the Asian-American Commission, as well as a fellow for the Asian-American Woman's Political Initiative. Welcome Lily, and we have Jacqueline Wright or Jackie Waite, graduated in 2018 from Whittier College with the BA in Child Development and Music and she lives in East LA currently. She's the co-chair of the Woman of Color Advancing Peace and Security Human Rights Working Group, which works to provide professional development too and amplify the voices of and increase the leadership of Woman of Color in the field of human rights. At Beyond the Bomb, Jackie is a Spring 2021 fellow where she learns about the nuclear weapon system, advocates for nuclear non-piliperation and learns skills in digital organizing. She works as the Youth Services Coordinator at the Little Tokyo Service Center located in LA, California, where she plans and implements low-cost and free programming to youth in the Little Tokyo Service Center's affordable housing complexes and community. And we also have Molly Hurley, who we just heard. She's a Wagner fellow from Rice University, a nuclear program fellow with the Prospect Hill Foundation, a fellowship associate with Beyond the Bomb, excuse me, and she advocates for peace and educates on the impacts of nuclear weapons and proliferation. So thank you to all our speakers for being here today for this Code Pink China's Not an Enemy webinar. We really appreciate it. Let's just get into some discussion. All right, so I'm gonna start by asking kind of in reference to your article, which everyone should read. I linked it in the chat, it's very short. You draw parallels between the modern obsession with nuclear weapons, stockpiling and usage and the fetishization and sexual violence of Asian women. How do both of these ideas relate to sex, power and imperialism and colonialism? What are the ways in which colonization can be enacted on a body? Yes, it's really hard to talk on these issues without mentioning the patriarchy. Men are praised for the amount of women that they sleep with, whereas women are slut shamed. And just having power over bodies is another way of people having control and having dominance. Through a patriarchal society, we are taught that men are entitled to anything that they want. And women have to sacrifice even for things that they need, which includes their bodies. And in regards to Asian women specifically, there's this really long history of the dragon lady and lotus blossom stereotype, which we'll get into more later. But dragon ladies are seen as this sexually deviant woman and they weaponize their sexuality and must be slain in order for white men to gain sexual and egotistical gratification. And the lotus blossoms are seen as those that are sexually submissive. They're a virgin and they're quiet and cater to all the needs of white men. And these stereotypes just feed the white savior complex where white men believe that they're saving them from their struggles. And just conquering people and conquering a body are both ways of being stripped of autonomy, stripped of autonomy over our government and stripped of autonomy over our bodies. And it is manipulation into thinking that being conquered or the act of conquering means a better world. It means peace for us, but it's really only self-serving to the ones who are doing the conquering. And through this patriarchal and imperialist framework, we're stripped of having a say and are thus more easily dominated. And in the society, we're sold this idea that nuclear weapons are the answer to peace and security. And similarly, we're sold the idea that we must please white men to be saved and live a peaceful life, which again feeds into the white savior complex. And rather than really believing that we have to please white men to be saved, we're forced in order to survive in both regarding nuclear weapons and with our bodies. Yeah, and I'll go ahead and build off of that, specifically on the exotification and fetishization of Asian women. Something that I have first-hand experience with in my everyday life is the process of learning Chinese. I did not grow up speaking Chinese, so I have put in my own effort to learn it myself as a second language. And I have lots of memories of interacting with other white men learning Chinese. And while there is definitely nothing inherently wrong with anyone wanting to learn any other foreign language, I do think it's important that we are always cognizant of our relationship as a member of a specific demographic with the culture or country or people that we may be interacting with. And when it comes to learning Chinese, it kind of boils down to two things. Either one, they're like some kind of business economy major and they want to like cut deals with Chinese businessmen later in their lives. So it's all motivated really by profit. And or two, they have what is colloquially called yellow fever, it's a slang term for men who have an Asian fetish, essentially. Or they just love to date Asian women, Chinese women in particular, if they're learning Chinese. But kind of like we referenced in an article too, it doesn't make all that much difference. Kind of, we just kind of tend to think of Asian, this is blanket term for East Asian specifically, which is also something that we want to discuss later is the distinction between East and Southeast Asian and the erasure of South and Southeast Asians as Asians. But anyways, and then if we, to bring it directly into nuclear weapons, we can also, we can compare the portrayal of Chinese and Asian women in media also with the portrayal of nuclear weapons and the effects of radiation in media from the West or from the US versus for example, in America. It's pretty ubiquitous within America that there's this misunderstanding that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved over half a million American lives by ending the war and us not having to do another invasion via land or sea or whatever. But if you go back to records of our own military providing predicted estimates of the casualty count that we could incur from another invasion of Japan, it was nowhere near that 500,000 number. It's a complete overinflation that I'm not entirely sure where that number came from exactly. In addition, if there's lots of credible sources out there and scholars who can argue that Japan was on the brink of surrender anyways as soon as the Soviet Union slash Russia entered the war they would have surrendered. They wanted to surrender beforehand but Truman was all hung up on this like unconditional surrender such that they wanted to get rid of the Japanese emperor but that was like Japan's only condition that they would surrender but they wanna keep their emperor and Truman was like nah but then we bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrenders. You know what their surrender was? Their surrender was all right, we surrender but we wanna keep our emperor and the US was like all right, sounds good. So anyways, but back to the media portrayal. For example, if we just compare like for example Godzilla and like the original Godzilla not our new whitewash Godzilla but the original Godzilla out of Japan Godzilla was a product of radiation and nuclear weapons, nuclear warfare. And we can see from the story of Godzilla that the way Japan had sort of perceived the effects of nuclear weapons, nuclear war radiation was this monstrosity, this evil sort of this these very, very bad consequences. But if we look at our own media such as Big Hero 6, Spider-Man, Watchmen, all these series, these superheroes these superheroes are the products of radiation and nuclear technology. These superheroes who gave these like fantastic powers and they do all this good to try to benefit society and everything. And one particular example that I wanna use are these lesser known series of comics within the Big Hero 6 universe. I have copies right here actually. And in it, the villain is this ectoplasmic sort of being who comes about from, he's like supposed to be this like conglomeration of all the people who had died from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he originally comes about wanting revenge on America for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But by the time that Big Hero 6 comes into the picture, he has watched Japan for decades and he sees this giant economic boom and rapid development that Japan has in the second half of the 20th century. And he thinks, and there were the creators of Big Hero 6 have this villain think that, oh, Japan is thriving because of the destruction that they face from our atomic bombs. So who else could possibly think that someone would look at the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and be like, you know what, it was a good thing. It is the reason that Japan had this giant economic boost. This destruction, this genocide of these killings and everything, certainly not the people who suffered these actual tragedies but the perpetrators of these spinning the tail into something beneficial for Japan in the long run. And so it's the spin on the effects of radiation and nuclear technology and the use of nuclear weapons that the West likes to put on stories about these topics that really parallels how the West approaches topics of China, the rise of China, the existence, just the mere existence of Asian women and everything and how it's just another example of something that really gets spun in the Western narrative to serve the commercial interests of the West. Thank you. Right, yeah, this gross display of power with nuclear weapons and with gendered and racialized violence, there's certainly a parallel so we're grateful that you've brought that up. I wanna also ask, how would you place the Atlanta shootings within a larger context of white imperial violence against Asian women and Pacific Islander women, both in the United States and globally? And how would you also place it within a larger context of institutional racism against Asian Americans in the US? How does this white patriarchal desire to contain Asian female sexuality, also a symptom of the West's desire to contain Asia and the Pacific on a whole? What connections do you see there generally? So the Atlanta shooting and the subsequent police response to it highlights once again, the ways in which the police system in the US was created to uphold and coddle white supremacy. This is seen in how the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office captain basically said that Robert Erlong, the murderer and shooter was just having a quote-unquote bad day. And they also excused his behavior by saying that he was motivated by a quote-unquote sexual addiction and that his actions was not driven by racism, which blatantly ignores the long history of white men sexually abusing women of color and in this case Asian women and show how this is enabled also by the US military industrial complex. In our article, we touched upon how during World War II, American soldiers who occupied Japan committed mass murder and rape of Japanese women and how that aspect of history has been severely erased and brushed under the rug, especially in the way that the US teaches about World War II and the occupation of Japan. And to connect those back to our current reckoning that we're having in the US regarding police brutality and violence, I want to explicitly state that increased policing is not the solution and it does not make any of our community safe and that if policing may community safe, which is the argument of why we need policing, then America would be the safest country in the world, but it is not, right? The amount of money that we in America spend on policing is so overblown compared to how much other countries spend, yet we are not as safe as comparatively to other nations. And also we must reckon with how the police system in this country is literally built upon anti-blackness and that this same anti-black system of policing is also what hurts the Asian American community and also enables violence against Asian women. There are many examples of this, of how the police have targeted Asian-owned massage parlors in their supposed crackdowns on sex trafficking. And this increased policing does not make migrant sex workers safe because one, it perpetuates stigmatization of sex work and two, enables greater violence on these sex workers who are mostly women. So this is why it is super important to continue half this conversation and intersect the roles of racism and misogyny in the Lanto shooting and connect it with this greater discourse around how does the police state harm all people and especially marginalized people and people of color? And we need to call for the divestment from policing and reinvestment in actual resources that would uplift these communities like access to social services for non-English speakers, healthcare for recent immigrants and also respect for the labor rights of massage parlor workers and for sex workers which clearly the police does not do. Right, if I could jump in before the next speaker. Thank you so much for that responsibly. We know that the most vulnerable including the victims of the Atlanta shooting often are migrants, potentially sometimes undocumented. We know that whether or not those victims were sex workers they were perceived that way. And that's because of a history of imperial sexual violence against Asian women. The first contact that European Colonials had with Asian women was in the form of sexual slavery and sex work engagement. So that was the narrative that was brought back to the West. And just to highlight some of the other instances like you mentioned in the article, the War Bride Act in the context of Japan and American marriages, Japanese and American and how you say it's not like the importation of these women come with the importation of cultural stereotypes as well, satirically. We also have Korean War military brides. We have the Republic of Korea camp towns instances where sex workers are murdered as well as assaulted. We have in the Philippines a long history of US military sexual slavery, especially during the occupation in the Philippine-American War to the extent, to the graphic extent that American soldiers referred to Filipinas as quote, little brown fucking machines powered by rice. This is how human beings were perceived by American soldiers. And it really was that conquest of the Philippines that jump-started the sex entertainment industry in the Philippines. We have Vietnam as well, where there were R&R facilities that have now kind of been converted to sex tourism. 65% or so of tourists to Thailand are reportedly single men on vacation. And then of course Pacific Islanders, especially indigenous folks, are the most adversely affected by this with military servicemen from the US having no accountability, committing crimes with impunity. There were indigenous Okinawan children, as young as 12 years old, who were violently raped by US servicemen without any accountability, just kind of bringing up some of that history here. That all comes into play when we have that violence coming back home to roost in the United States. Anyone else want to respond? If not, it's OK. I'll throw in some quick comments about the role of class in these discussions and understandings as well, I believe, when there's discussion of racial oppression and economic disparities between races and stuff like that, particularly when we want to talk about the economic hardships that disproportionately affect the black population in America, white conservatives like to spew certain statistics that say that, well, it's not about race, because Asian Americans who are not white, they on average actually make more money than white people. And this statistic is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, in touting the statistic, it is perpetuating the model minority myth such that Asians. And I also want to point out that oftentimes 90% of the time when we are talking about Asians in the mainstream discourse, we're actually talking about East Asians, Japanese, Chinese, Korean. When in reality, Asians should be referring to all Asians, including South and Southeast Asians. But you say Asian to someone, and they immediately think of a Chinese person or maybe someone in a K-pop band or something, we think East Asians. And that's what that statistic is. Actually referring to it as well. That statistic is so skewed because it mostly derives from income data on East Asians. And it perpetuates the idea that if black people just acted more like Asians, they kept their head down, they shut up, they didn't complain anything. They just lived their oppressed lives in silence, basically. And they did whatever society wanted from them, regardless of the cruelty or the oppression that might be involved in whatever it is they're supposed to do to make it in America and everything. That's the right path forward. And so it drives this wedge between races. And it's exactly what happened with the Southern strategy in the early 20th century to break apart black Americans from teaming up with poor whites to overthrow the upper class, the bourgeoisie and everything. And then within the Asian community, the statistic that Asians make more money than white people, it's completely erasing South and Southeast Asians. If you look at income data from people like Laos, Cambodia, these little known Asian countries that no one even thinks about, maybe they don't even know that these countries exist, they, on average, will make less income than black people than Latinx. And I'm not trying to say this is a way to support this oppression Olympics so they suffer more than black people. No, the point is that Asian is an umbrella term. And too often it's used to erase the existence and the suffering of South and Southeast Asian people. Second of all, it's complete erasure of this class disparity that's happening as well. And if we're going to tie it back to police brutality, you can find lots of specifically, generally East Asian people who are in the bourgeois class who will support police. And they think that we need a higher police presence in our communities and that they provide safety. And we have to look at what kind of class background they're coming from and everything too to understand why they themselves do not see or have not yet experienced the racism and the classism involved in our current institution of police and everything. And we also wanna keep that in mind historically from the backgrounds of specifically Chinese families. Is this Chinese family here, been here for a few generations now because they genuinely like America or because they were part of the bourgeois class that was targeted by the Communist Party in China back in the mid 20th century. And so of course they would flee China. Of course they would have negative opinions on the Chinese Communist Party. And a similar sort of phenomenon happens with Cuban-Americans too who like fled Cuba from their communist revolution. And basically TLDR is that we really need to keep in mind the effect that a person's class background will have on their understanding and relationship of the world and race and economy and oppression and everything. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think class is huge here when we're talking about anti-imperialism and the Western imperialist block that is really just subjugating so much of socialist and global South nations generally who are trying to develop and survive in their own way against this capitalist imperialist domination led by the US. I'm gonna ask a little more about your article and how it makes a reference to the lesser known dragon lady stereotype. Some folks might know this from kind of the era of American neo-noir thriller crimes that stereotype was really highlighted. But I kind of want to know specifically how that stereotype, how you see it in relationship with the mythology of yellow peril and the fear and peril mongering of the need to contain disease and danger and deceit from Asia. Why is it important that we have a separate stereotype that refers specifically to the experiences of Asian women? Yeah, so it is important to negotiate the experiences of Asian women and unpack the intersections between gender and race and how these have shaped our experiences in the context of being in the US. So when we talk about the yellow peril, we mostly frame that in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which blatantly targeted and prohibited Chinese people, specifically Chinese men, from immigrating to the US in the late 1800s. This was in part due to thinking that Asian men were bringing in diseases, they were taking American jobs, kind of like the same old rhetoric that we hear play out again and again when it comes to immigration in the US. And in the 1800s, in the context was specifically about China and China is like labor population coming to US. However, when we talk about Exclusion Act, we oftentimes forget to bring into the picture the Page Act of 1875, which was created 77 years before the Exclusion Act. And the Page Act specifically prohibited immigration of Asian women, specifically Chinese women, because the US thought that these women are like prostitutes and that they're gonna come in and morally corrupt all the white people in the US, essentially, and that like these Asian women were like too much of a quote unquote sexual addiction for white men. So the law literally stated that these Asian women was coming here for quote unquote immoral purposes, AKA sex growth, right? So like this, again, this history of like criminalizing sex work, even though we know that white men partake in the exploitation of Asian women sexual labor. So as we can see from very early on, the US has this perception that Asian women are like overly sexual and they are sexualized beings that the US must restrict and legislate against. This also, this connects with the Oriental stereotype of Asia and Asian women. Orientalism is this critical concept to describe how the West commonly is contemptuous of the East and portrays them as this like other, right? And this stereotype literally perpetuates both socially and politically, what shows up in the stereotypes of the Dragon Lady, China Doll, Lotus Blossom. Like the very fact that there's like these like three different terms to describe like Asian women, like that white people have created. This wasn't these terms weren't like Asian women thinking of themselves as sexual beings, rather this is how whiteness saw us, right? So all three of these images clearly dehumanizes Asian women and makes them a product for whiteness to slay, consume and pick apart at their will. And this same better say, federalization of Asian women's bodies is what lead to people like Robert Aaron Long in Atlanta, murdering the six Asian women. And hence we must see Atlanta not just as like an outlier, but rather as another example of how white misogynist dick violence are perpetuated against Asian women. Thank you so much, Julie. Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing up the PAGE Act, which was the first anti-immigration legislation that targeted a specific nationality, the first restrictive federal immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act was one of the longest 60 years. And we see this like prefiguring of similar present day fears around disease with COVID-19, as well as stealing of jobs, that threat of economic insecurity. So back with the PAGE Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act we had Angel Island where Asian migrants, especially Chinese women were contained specifically because of this fear of disease, including during the SF plague, but also including STIs because of this association with hypersexuality. So once again, this goes back far before what we're seeing right now. It's really just a reinvigoration of that. And it really all just like entitles Western and white America to dominance over this seemingly savage culture that's been framed this way. The sheriff spokesperson in Atlanta, as we all know, said the shooter told investigators that the attacks were not racially motivated. And I'm gonna give a brief quote from what he said. He apparently, and he's referring to the shooter, has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places. And it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. So how does this shooter's attempt to justify mass murder by explicitly victim blaming Asian women, in particular immigrant working class, cultural service workers? How does that relate to or fall within this dragon lady stereotype that you are all mentioning in the article? Yeah, kind of like Lily had already mentioned, this idea that the shooter going to three Asian spas to eliminate his temptations did not just come out of thin air. These stereotypes of the dragon lady, the lotus blossom and the China doll have been around for a really long time. And it feeds into this stereotype that Asian women are sexually devious and alluring. And it definitely also perpetuates how we view people within different socioeconomic classes. For example, the model minority myth that Molly touched on earlier, through the model minority narrative, we only value the Asians that work white collar jobs, make an X amount of money, are obedient to society, et cetera. But when it comes to Asians that work blue collar jobs or fall below middle class, which includes sex workers, which by the way are way more common than the model minority Asian people that Molly talked about, they don't matter. They're erased and they're blamed for the injustices and tragedies that happen to them. They're dehumanized and for some reason, we excuse their deaths, their murders, because we don't view them as human beings because they don't follow this myth or they don't follow society the way that they should. And through the dragon lady stereotype, like we mentioned in our article, we blur the lines of lust and violence because of this. And because the immigrant working class and sex workers aren't to values, they ask for it. Or like the murder in Atlanta, our excuse for their actions. I wanna chime in really quickly as well that just by the way, sex and porn addictions are not recognized disorders in the DSM-5 within the psychiatric psychological community. There has been lots and lots of research on it and there has yet to be sufficient studies on it to show that it is a true addiction in the way that drug addiction, for example, or other like more legitimate, and I put quotes because legitimate addictions affect the brain in the psychology and the physiology of a person and everything. Instead, like honestly at this point right now and I personally, I'm gonna say that I don't foresee this changing. Sex and porn addictions are just excuses to just use as excuses for white men to perpetuate sexual violence against women or just like in general and everything. And it doesn't look like that's gonna be changing anytime soon. So sex addiction is not real. Thank you so much. I'm just gonna keep moving here. I'm really interested in your article in the portrayal of the white male body and the white male power fantasy as a type of weapon, a nuclear weapon at that. So can you talk more about this white male fantasy of domination, destruction, and this like perceived threat of Asian women and their sexuality? What I see is like the ramifications of all this is that Asian women and their bodies are constantly living through warfare, whether in an active country where there's war or not. It's a type of warfare. I can start and I'll tie this back to nuclear weapons again. But for example, if we can definitely see parallels in the way women and because our topic is Asian women, then definitely Asian women too. Like their relationship with power and control, particularly over their bodies and their sexualities versus a non-white country's relationship and control, or relationship with power and control and everything. So the US has around 58 or so hundred nuclear weapons that includes retired warheads and everything too. Russia's got maybe 6,100 or so. The next highest nuclear arsenal in the entire world is China, bringing in at about 320 max, like maybe 350, because every single country in the world right now is developing new nuclear weapons. China's arsenal is expanding. Regardless, China's arsenal is 120th the size of the US and Russia. And yet who in our media gets portrayed as the big bad wolf threat in the world? It's China with its nuclear arsenal. When Trump was trying to renew the very last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia called New START, he refused to do so or take any steps forward in the process unless it became a trilateral deal with China and China was like, no way. And there are practical reasons for this. The New START originally limited the number of active warheads of a particular size that the US and Russia could have, something along the lines of like 1500 or so. And so if the US and Russia were to renew this agreement and bring China into the talks, what purpose would it serve if there was a limit of like, even if we had this drastically reduced limit like a thousand or something? What purpose would that serve to China? Whose entire arsenal, including an inactive and retired warheads is no more than like 350 currently. So China was like, no way. And yet China gets portrayed as the bad actor as being uncooperative and they're this big threat. And this China threat theory has been around since the 90s and it's gaining more and more and more attraction in recent years. And so if we think about the parallels with women, yeah, white men or just men in general will go to Asian massage parlors and they'll exploit women for their sexuality and everything. And it's all about, it's all totally fine if the man has the power over the women to determine the nature of their relationship and the acts that they will engage in together. But when the woman starts wanting some power of her own, she wants to get fairly paid for something. She wants certain protections or something or she's just, you know, she doesn't even have to be a sex worker. She's just a literal woman dating a man and she wants to make her own decisions in the relationship or date someone else or something. All of a sudden it's not okay. And we can kind of see this with nuclear weapons too. Fundamentally a little different should anyone have a nuclear weapon. I personally don't think so. But, you know, China has an arsenal of 300 or so weapons. The US has an arsenal of like almost 6,000. And yeah, it's China who's villainized and who's the threat to world order and world peace and society and everything. And it's just when we see countries or people of color or women, whatever it is, any sort of demographic that has historically been villainized or oppressed or what have you, when they start to want to take control of their own image of their own livelihood and sovereignty or what have you, it's not okay. And now we have this Cold War starting, you know, these women in Atlanta just get murdered. And these were women that had no personal involvement with the shooter. They just were Asian and everything. And so, I mean, I think these Asian women in Atlanta are sort of great, hopefully not foreshadowing but metaphors for what's gonna happen if this Cold War with China from the US continues to escalate. Thank you. Yeah, I think we have the stereotype of the China doll which kind of predates the dragon lady and it's a little more the stereotypical subordination passiveness and the dragon lady is more the dominant sexual, hyper-sexualized image where there's a threat involved. There's something deceitful or untrustworthy about it. And typically that dragon lady stereotype at some point in a lot of media gets reverted back to the China doll which is exactly what you're talking about, Molly, where white Western ideology will not let a country or a person related to China and Asia maintain that position of power. It's just not possible. And then we see this use of hyper-sexualized stereotypes to victim blame, which is really just a deflection of accountability, like you've said. And that deflection of accountability just doesn't hold when it's placed in the context of nuclear weapons and violence. There can be no deflection there. It's murder, it's genocide, and it will put our planet into extinction in nuclear winter. So I know we're getting to the top of the hour. I'm gonna ask one more question and in respect of everyone's time, if everyone needs to leave right at the dot or right before, it's totally acceptable. So I'm gonna tie this back to China as well which you were already kind of doing, Molly. How do we see all of these attitudes of scapegoating, victim blaming, othering, psychological projection? Because we know that the US likes to project a lot of its own failings onto other nations in ways that are not realistic and are distorted. Containment, dominance, all of these ideas, how do we see them being played out towards China and Western mainstream media and US state attitudes towards China right now? How does this connect to the US's new Cold War today, especially for nations like China and North Korea in relation to the US, which seeks to maintain global supremacy at all costs, including white supremacy and including racial capitalism? Yeah, I can go first. So I think it's important to understand like US aggression against China, not as some sort of like benevolent saviorism or any sort of like US human rights agenda because if the US truly cared about human rights, they would look internally and address its internal issues and its internal like human rights violations that is literally happening here in this country. Example, ice deportations, Islam, phobia, et cetera, right? So I think it's like we need to take our, like we need to reframe the way that we understand US's like agenda for scapegoating China. And we need to understand this as a way that in which the US is using this narrative to continue to prop up US hegemony and power and to also continue to perpetuate its like neoliberal agenda on a global level because fundamentally as like a socialist country, China is essentially like presenting an alternative modernity to US version of like neocapitalism, which is all about exploiting other countries versus China attempts to what they call like people-centered approach and model and that very much is the emphasis to the US model in a lot of ways. So, and also we also have to think about how the US always have to have like this like kuangku enemy to fight in order to one, like justify to the American people why they're spending like billions of dollars on like weapons in the military, right? Like I think sometimes like to the US taxpayer, like they need to be like, yes, we have this like big bad wolf that we need to continuously like fight against and this is where your money is going and essentially, and it's like interesting because we always hear this like this theory that and like what Molly said, that China is the aggressor but like also what Molly has stated like the numbers pretty much sell a very different story on a budget level like the US in 2019 spend around $732 billion on military spending while China only spent 261 billion. So literally like tripled amount of what China is spending yet China is the big, big bad wolf in this case, right? Like it doesn't make sense. Additionally, like this year, even as Biden is promising to withdraw troops out of Afghanistan, he has continued to pivot to China which pretty much occurred under the Obama administration and continued during Trump's and now Biden and going so far as to pressure Japan's prime minister and asking Japan to take a harder stance on China as well. So we can see this way in which the US is literally manipulating geopolitics in order to position all these other countries against China, right? But for what, right? Like there's like nothing that like China is doing that is inciting all of this. So as such, like we should not be surprised that like this anti-China rhetoric that's happening on this global scale shows up as violence and hate against Asian-Americans at home, right? Like I think it's like very ironic when Biden is saying like, oh, like stop Asian hate, but then goes and like spouts all these like anti-China rhetoric. And a very good example of how literally this is coming home is that on April 1st, 2021, so literally a few weeks ago, a store in Louisiana, very much away from like foreign policy what we think of, right? Like a literal store in Louisiana put up a sign stating like proudly refusing a minutes to any Chinese communist mojos. And then like this person obviously got called out on social media and then the owner of the store in this interview quoting him stated, I wanted to kick the Chinese communist party in the teeth. And this is one very bizarre because how do you know who's part of the CCP? Like what person in Louisiana is going to his door and being like, yes, I'm from the CCP. And two, like this is this clear signophobia and xenophobia is like deeply embedded in the psyche of the US to the point where like this random store owner in Louisiana is like thinking about China and being like clearly scientific, right? And anti-Asian. And so we need to like negotiate racism against Asians like along these lines and clearly like explicitly state that we are not okay at this increase of anti-Asian China rhetoric because it will lead to more violence against Asian Americans and be like very clear and upfront about that. Yeah, thank you so much. We also see in some anti-Asian violence rallies which Code Pink co-hosted a national day of action on March 27th against anti-Asian violence and China bashing. One of the actions in DC this year had anti-CCP protesters who like counter-protested and raided the protest and we're seeing pulling Chinese flags out of demonstrators' hands. So there's this violence where there's a conflation of the government with the people and there's critics who say we need to separate that but the problem is Americans, your average United States citizen can't separate it at this point because of what you said, Lily. It's so deeply embedded in everyone's psyche. Does anyone have any final notes? Thank you so much to these panelists. We have Lily Tang, Molly Hurley, Jackie Waite. Please check out their work and their organizations. And please check out codepink.org slash China to hear more about our campaign. China is not our enemy. We need to do all we can right now to kind of dismantle this propaganda, this anti-China rhetoric and show solidarity with other communities of color. Really just grateful to everyone for being here and we will see you all another time.