Research While Chinese: A Theoretical Synthesis Linking Foreign Policy and Domestic Racial Marginalization

ABSTRACT

Race studies illuminate how social structures and institutions produce and sustain systemic racism, primarily within domestic contexts. Critical International Relations (IR) scholarship examines the role of race in world politics but rarely links foreign policy to domestic affairs. This paper bridges these fields by developing a theoretical synthesis that connects foreign affairs, domestic policy, and social inequality through a racial lens. We identify four interconnected mechanisms—racialized foreign‐threat framing, security‐driven domestic governance, media amplification, and public racialization—that together explain how international politics become racialized at home. Applying this framework to U.S. policy toward China, we show how national security discourse—echoing longstanding racialized repertoires such as the “Yellow Peril” and “Forever Foreigner” tropes—transforms concerns about the Chinese state into suspicion toward people perceived as Chinese, recasting the “China threat” as a racialized “Chinese threat.” The security framing enables racialized domestic policies such as the China Initiative. Through media amplification, racialized security discourse diffuses beyond policymaking arenas, stoking public hostility toward China and ethnic Chinese, which in turn generates support for more hawkish policies and rhetoric, creating a self‐reinforcing cycle of marginalization for Asians in the U.S. Overall, this study advances race studies and critical IR by demonstrating how racialized foreign policy reinforces domestic racial hierarchies, highlighting the multilayered and interconnected nature of racialization across domains.