The Scene Called Concern About Chinese Land "Racist." Then Quoted a Democrat Raising It.
The Blackburn ad is cheap and coded, and worth criticizing on exactly those grounds. But the Scene's column collapses "the Chinese government" into "Chinese people," then cites a Tennessee Democrat attacking Blackburn for going easy on a Chinese land purchase. Both of those can't be true.
Let's give the Scene the ad. It's bad. The gong, the lucky cat, the fortune cookies getting crushed. Fortune cookies are a Japanese-American invention, not a Chinese one, which makes the imagery both offensive and sloppy. A campaign that wanted to talk about the Chinese Communist Party and reached for chop-suey iconography earned every bit of the mockery it's getting. Criticize the ad. We'll hold your coat.
That's not what the Scene's column does. It uses the ad to make a much larger claim, and the larger claim falls apart inside its own paragraphs.
The move
The column's thesis is that concern about Chinese government activity is itself racist. Not the imagery. The concern. Worrying about Beijing buying American farmland, the argument goes, is "Sinophobia" dressed up as policy.
This requires collapsing two different things into one: the Chinese Communist Party, a surveillance state that jails dissidents and bans foreigners from owning Chinese land outright, and Chinese people, who are owed exactly the same dignity as anyone else. Criticizing the first is not bigotry toward the second, any more than criticizing the Kremlin is bigotry toward Russians, or opposing the Saudi government is bigotry toward Muslims. The left insists on this distinction everywhere. It insists on it correctly. It just suspended it for one column.
The tell is in the Scene's own text
Read further into the same piece. The column notes that a Chinese-owned company operates a coal mine in East Tennessee. It then quotes Democratic state Sen. Heidi Campbell attacking Blackburn, not for fearmongering about China, but for not doing enough about Chinese purchases.
- If concern about Chinese government land ownership is racist, then the Scene just published a column that quotes a Democrat being racist and presents her as the reasonable one.
- If concern about Chinese government land ownership is legitimate, which it plainly is, since a Democrat is raising it, then the thing wrong with Blackburn's ad is the imagery, not the topic.
- It cannot be both. The concern doesn't become racist when a Republican voices it and responsible when a Democrat does. Either the subject is fair game or it isn't.
The story the Scene actually had
There is a real hypocrisy story here, and the Scene fumbled it. The largest single donor to Team Tennessee, the PAC backing Blackburn's run for governor, is Jeff Yass. Yass's firm owns roughly 15 percent of ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, and his personal stake runs into the tens of billions. Blackburn opposed a TikTok office in Nashville in 2024, citing its ties to the Chinese government, and called the app a national security threat. Her biggest financial backer is TikTok's biggest investor.
That is the actual contradiction: the anti-China candidate bankrolled by the man with the most to lose from cracking down on China's app. It writes itself, it's devastating, and it requires no stereotypes and no stretching. The Scene gave it one passing line and spent the rest of its energy on "racist." It had a scalpel and reached for a slur.
Where the Scene is right
The ad trades on stereotype, and stereotype in political advertising deserves to be called out. The Scene is right that the imagery is ugly and that Blackburn knew exactly what she was doing when she chose it. A campaign can raise a legitimate issue in a bigoted way, and this one did.
But "the imagery is bigoted" and "the concern is bigoted" are different sentences. The first is true. The second smears a few million Americans, including Tennessee Democrats, who worry about a hostile government buying up land near military bases and have nothing against their Chinese neighbors at all.
Why it matters
When you tell voters that a concern they hold is not just wrong but racist, you don't change their minds. You confirm that the people calling them racist aren't interested in the concern. Most Tennesseans can hold two thoughts at once: the ad is stupid, and foreign-adversary land ownership is a real question worth asking. The Scene decided they can't be trusted with the second thought because they laughed at the first.
Criticizing the Chinese Communist Party is not racism. The Scene knows that. It quoted a Democrat proving it in the same column.
What you can do
Read the column, then find the paragraph where it quotes Sen. Campbell. Ask yourself whether the concern she raises is racist or reasonable. Whatever you answer, answer it the same way when Blackburn raises it. That consistency is the whole point, and it's the thing the Scene set down to write a headline.