The Distinction Nashville Keeps Refusing to Make
A government is not a people. Blackburn's ad blurs that line in one direction. The Scene blurs it in the other. And both, in the process, erase the Chinese dissidents, Hong Kongers, and Uyghurs who were the Communist Party's victims long before they were anyone's talking point.
There is a difference between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese people, and almost no one arguing about Marsha Blackburn's cookie ad seems willing to hold onto it for a full sentence. It is not a hard distinction. We make it about every other country on earth without strain. Criticizing the Kremlin is not an insult to Russians. Opposing the Iranian regime is not contempt for Iranians. Marching against apartheid was not bigotry toward Afrikaners. The government is the thing that governs. The people are the people. One can be hostile while the other is entirely innocent, and usually is.
Somehow, when the subject is China, Nashville loses the ability to keep those two nouns apart. And it loses it in both directions at once.
The ad blurs it one way
Blackburn's commercial is the obvious offender, and it earned the mockery it got. It wanted to talk about the Chinese government buying farmland and it reached instead for a gong, a lucky cat, and a plate of fortune cookies, which are a Japanese-American invention anyway. That is the blur running downhill: a message about a foreign government dressed in the costume of an ethnicity. When you make an ad about Beijing and fill the screen with chop-suey iconography, you have quietly told the viewer that "China" means the family running the restaurant on Charlotte Pike. That is the error, and it is a real one.
The column blurs it the other way
But the response has its own blur, running uphill, and it has gone almost entirely unremarked. The Scene's coverage treats concern about Chinese government activity as "Sinophobia" more or less by definition. Worry about the Party buying land near a military base, and you are not raising a security question, you are indulging a racist Red Scare.
Watch what that does. It takes "the Chinese Communist Party," a one-party surveillance state that jails its critics, disappears its lawyers, runs influence operations on foreign soil, and forbids foreigners from owning Chinese land outright, and it folds that entity into "Chinese people," so that any hard word about the first becomes an ethnic slur against the second. It is the exact same collapse Blackburn's ad performs. It just runs in the opposite direction, and it flatters the person performing it instead of embarrassing him.
Who disappears when you do that
Here is the cost, and it is not abstract. When you declare that criticizing the Chinese government is racism against Chinese people, you have just erased the millions of Chinese people whose entire lives are organized around criticizing the Chinese government.
- The Uyghur whose relatives are in a camp in Xinjiang, and who would very much like Americans to say a hard word about Beijing.
- The Hong Konger who watched the Party crush the freest city in Asia and fled, and who is now told that his anger is a "Red Scare."
- The Tiananmen survivor, the disappeared human-rights lawyer, the underground churchgoer, the Falun Gong prisoner, the Taiwanese who simply wants to keep voting.
These are Chinese people. They are the Party's first and most numerous victims. And a frame that says "anti-CCP equals anti-Chinese" writes every one of them out of existence, because it cannot account for a Chinese person who hates the Chinese government. The framing that imagines itself the most sensitive to Chinese dignity is the one that cannot see the Chinese dissident at all.
Nashville, of all places, should know better
The Scene itself has written, more than once and rather beautifully, about the small Chinese community that put down roots in Nashville in the 1870s. Laundries, families, a whole immigrant story that predates Marsha Blackburn's arrival in Tennessee by a full century. That history is real and worth honoring, and it is precisely the reason the distinction matters here.
Because the honoring and the vigilance are not in tension. A serious city can welcome its Chinese neighbors without reservation and be clear-eyed about a hostile foreign government in the same breath. The one has nothing to do with the other. Your neighbor on Charlotte Pike did not build the surveillance state, is not buying the farmland, and is very likely more appalled by the Party than you are. Treating her as a stand-in for Beijing, whether to frighten voters or to score a column, is the actual insult.
Why it matters
The cheap ad and the cheap column are mirror images. One says Chinese people should scare you because of what their government does. The other says you may not criticize the government without insulting the people. Both refuse the same distinction, and both, in refusing it, do the same violence to the same group: the Chinese men and women who oppose the Party at real cost and are told by one side that they are the threat and by the other that they do not exist. A city that actually respected its Chinese residents would learn to say the two words separately.
A government is not a people. Nashville keeps arguing as if it never learned the difference, and both sides are counting on you not to notice.
What you can do
The next time someone tells you that worrying about the Chinese government is racist, ask them what they would say to a Uyghur. And the next time someone waves a gong at you to talk about farmland, ask them the name of a single actual Chinese official responsible for a single actual policy. The people who have done the reading can tell you. The people running a bit cannot. That is how you sort the serious from the performative, on both sides of this.