Our Comments to The Nation

In light of its selective reporting, Qiao Collective has decided to republish our full comments submitted for The Nation’s recent article on China and the U.S. left.

In December 2021, Qiao Collective received an email inquiry from David Klion, requesting our comments for an article on China and the U.S. left, to be published in The Nation. Klion conveyed that others interviewed for the article had repeatedly brought up our work. He posed the following questions:

How, when, and why did the Qiao Collective form? Who were the key individuals responsible for organizing it?
How is the Qiao Collective funded?
What is the current active membership? (And what does it mean to be a member? How does one become a member?
What is the Qiao Collective's relationship (if any) to the Chinese Communist Party?
How is Qiao governed/managed?
How is a group consensus formed?
Finally: the Critical China Scholars published an open letter criticizing Qiao's position on Xinjiang in late 2020. Do you have any response to that letter?

What follows is Qiao Collective’s response to those questions posed. Given the accusatory nature of the questions, we did not respond to each one comprehensively. Additionally, we included further context about our Collective’s theory of change and our stance on the responsibility of the U.S. left to unequivocally oppose U.S. imperialism. The majority of this context was left out of the final article, which was published on January 8, 2022. We take issue with Klion and The Nation for making ample room for wild accusations of our supposedly “authoritarian, fascistic” position, while declining to let us speak for ourselves in our own words. In light of this selective reporting, and as an open invitation for interested readers to engage our work and come to their own conclusions, we are publishing our response to Klion’s questions in full:

Qiao Collective formed in January 2020 in response to our concern over anti-China propaganda during the early days of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We are a group of students, artists, researchers, and young professionals in the US, UK, and Canada who contribute as volunteers in our spare time. Our members all belong to the broader Chinese diaspora, with family connections to mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout Southeast Asia. We do not receive funding outside of our Patreon account, and we have zero institutional affiliation. Qiao Collective does not maintain any formal relationship with any political party, be it in China or the countries in which our members reside, including the Communist Party of China. Despite this lack of institutional support, we are thrilled by the rapid growth and attention we have gained in the less than two years since our founding, which we attribute to the hunger in English-language media spaces for critical left commentary on China that challenges dominant Western media narratives.

With regards to the Critical China Scholars letter: Although Qiao Collective is not affiliated with any academic institution, we are glad that our work has received attention and support in and out of academic and political circles. Our goal is to challenge imperialist, orientalist narratives that dominate Western circles, which have historically and continue to manufacture consent for aggression against China. The Xinjiang resource list we compiled, to which Critical China Scholars was responding in their letter, includes a variety of perspectives ranging from both state and non-state Chinese sources (including testimonials by Uyghurs living in Xinjiang) as well as Western-based media and media criticism. We encourage readers to engage with the resource itself and come to their own conclusions.

We believe this is a crucial time for left forces in the US and beyond to come together in principled opposition to the warmongering escalation against China and its peoples. The suspicion and slander afforded to overseas Chinese who question the Western “common sense” about China is part of a broader orientalist discourse that denies political agency to Chinese people who are committed to safeguarding the legacy and gains of the Chinese revolution. We continue to insist that the first priority for left anti-imperialists in the US is to oppose and undermine their own nation’s imperial violence, not to delay anti-imperialist action with hand wringing about the social contradictions of Global South nations caught in the crosshairs of Western imperialism. The myriad contradictions facing 21st century China are real and pressing, but they cannot be resolved through imperialist intervention or disconnected engagements from Western onlookers.

The Revival of Capital and the Left Turn of the Mental Laborer

Can The Chinese Diaspora Speak?