Prior to the epidemic, in early 2019, the news of the attack on Yik Oi Huang, an 88-year-old Chinese woman in Visitacion Valley, San Francisco, sparked an uproar among AsiAn-Americans and intensified media attention on anti-Asian hate crimes.
During the pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes in California soared from 89 in 2020 to 247 in 2021, according to English-language media reports. In 2022, that number dropped to 140, according to the California Department of Justice, which appears to have improved. But a review of racially motivated hate crime data, which California has been tracking since 1995, shows that long-term concerns remain.
In the late 1990s, there were about 150 hate crimes a year against Asians. In the 2000s, the number dropped sharply, hitting a low of 19 in 2014. Last year's 140 cases were nearly seven times the 2014 figure, and in fact, only eight years have passed.
Yik Oi Huang died a year after the attack. The man who attacked him, 18-year-old Keonte Gathron, has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
The violence has put neighborhoods with large Asian populations like Yik Oi Huang's Visiting Valley district on alert. According to the 2023 San Francisco City Survey, the Visiting Valley area has one of the three lowest safety ratings in the city.
According to the 2021 American Community Survey, of the 41,695 residents in the Valley, 23,890 are Asian, accounting for more than half.
Over the past 40 years, experts have pointed to the murder of Vincent Chin, an ethnic Chinese man, in the 1980s and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, as the cause of the surge in anti-Asian hate incidents.
In addition, Lok Siu, a professor at the University of California, said that tensions between the United States and Japan in the 1990s also contributed to the increase in anti-Asian hate incidents. As for the reasons for the decline in anti-Asian hate incidents, Xiao Le said it was related to economic growth. From the early 2000s to the 2010s, China was seen as a market for American products and technology, with rapid and steady growth, and in such an atmosphere, racial discrimination was difficult to occur.
Xiao also said that when the economy is not good and people start to face problems such as unemployment, they start to blame each other. She sees parallels with the 1990s, except now that the blame for unfair trade and economic competition has shifted from Japan to China. From seeing China as a market for American business 20 or 30 years ago to now, Americans' perception of China has changed a lot, she said. "China has never been seen as an ally of the US," she said.
