This year's election saw candidates on both sides of the aisle running ads stoking anti-Chinese hysteria. We've seen this story before -- and it doesn't end well.

The midterm elections are over, and America has shown its dismay with two years of Democratic control by reelecting a bunch of people whose policies royally screwed up the eight preceding years. And if you think the legislative gridlock we've seen so far is bad (who knew 40 percent constituted a majority?) -- well, the worst is yet to come.

But despite the fervid heat of the campaigns, in which the Dems and Repubs each spent billions of dollars to make the lucid political argument that the other was the Party of Douchebags, there was one subject that managed to inspire bipartisan agreement: China.

As the New York Times reported on Oct. 9, a startling percentage of those billions in campaign funds went toward advertising portraying China as the new Great Global Evil Empire -- and tarring those associated with it, no matter how marginally, as traitors to the republic. Worse yet, the cues used to invoke China's ominous rise were a familiar hash of discordant symbols: Great Leap Forward-era images of Mao. Looming shots of the Forbidden City's brass-bound gates. Factory lines of masked, dronelike workers. Rippling seas of revolutionary red. Twanging zither music, punctuated by the booming accents of opera gongs.

The sheer scale of China's awkward symbiosis with the U.S. would seem to caution against simplistic, knee-jerk demonization. After all, China is America's second-largest trading partner behind Canada, and following a heavy series of T-bill purchases over the past six months, the largest holder of our foreign debt -- nearly $870 billion worth and counting. That's not even considering the fact that China's burgeoning population of 1.4 billion people is poised to become the globe's second-largest consumer market in the next few years, with a roiling appetite for Western consumer goods (cars, liquor, luxury goods, iAnything).

These mutual dependencies -- and make no mistake, they are mutual -- have produced a world-straddling, tail-chasing, two-headed beast that historian Niall Ferguson has dubbed "Chimerica." Both America and China need the other to survive in order to thrive, yet each has recently had the tendency to play off fear and anger of the other in order to distract their populaces in times of unrest and anxiety.

The difference, of course, is that unlike China, our political system is founded on democracy, and our society is rooted in diversity. It's chilling to see American candidates run not against each other, but against the looming specter of a foreign country. It's even more alarming when one considers that a large and growing proportion of the U.S. population traces its heritage back to this newly ordained Ultimate Enemy -- or at least looks like it does. (As we've seen in the past, amped-up fear and rage have a way of blurring subtle distinctions like ancestry and ethnicity.)

No greater example of the perils of this China-baiting wave can be found than in a political advertisement that arguably has had the highest profile of any this electoral cycle: The ad titled "Chinese Professor," from the ostensibly nonpartisan deficit-hawk group Citizens Against Government Waste.

The commercial features a smirking lecturer in a high-tech, near-future classroom in Beijing, holding forth on the reasons why empires fall: The Romans, the Greeks, and yes, the Americans. Apparently, the reasons involve passing healthcare reform and fiscal stimulus -- guess it's time to reread your Plutarch! -- leading to massive deficits. It ends with the Chinese Professor noting that as a result of China's control of American debt -- "Now they work for us." Cackling evil guffaw, followed by droning unison laughter from his listeners. Cue urgent voiceover exhorting viewers to join the resistance: "You can change the future. You have to." And ... cut and wrap!

The ad began as a viral video on YouTube, but after gaining momentum online -- it passed a million views a week ago -- CAGW began airing it on traditional TV. In fact, West Coast viewers of CNN's electoral coverage on Tuesday would have seen the ad in all of its xenophobic glory, smack-dab in the middle of primetime.

The future is Mao

Any science fiction fan worth his soy will find the sensibility evoked by the ad, particularly its final lines, familiar -- the call to "change the future" is a persistent meme in speculative fiction, from Isaac Asimov's classic "Foundation" novels to teevee cult fave "The X Files."

The latter even had a near-letter-identical catchphrase in its waning days: "FIGHT THE FUTURE." And in fact, the storyline of "X Files" (at least, when there was a storyline) had much in common with the one intimated by the brief runtime of "Chinese Professor." After all, "X Files" is about an alien race that insidiously seeks to conquer America (and thus, the world) by planting sleeper agents, subverting trusted institutions, and leveraging vast political and economic power through a mysterious set of high-placed collaborators.

The comparison is made even stronger by the bleak, dystopian lighting of the ad, the emphatic, triumphalist delivery of the Professor (all in clipped Mandarin Chinese, naturally -- the better to make him seem as foreign and exotic as possible) -- and the dead-eyed stares of the otherwise attractive, all-Asian audience. The Prof doesn't whip out a pack of Morleys at the end of his lecture and light up in true Cigarette-Smoking Man fashion, but he may as well have: He's clearly a harbinger of a forward era -- the date provided is "2030 A.D.," well within most of our lifetimes -- that Americans are meant to find terrifying.

And judging from comments on YouTube and other sites that have posted the ad, many of them do. As "The Atlantic"'s chief China-watcher James Fallows points out, it's a phenomenally effective ad, in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- its reliance on outrageously misleading statements and gut-level emotional manipulation.

But it wouldn't be so powerful if it hadn't been preceded by a long historical tradition of imagined Asian tomorrows -- most of them more hellish than heavenly.

In the introduction to "Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future" -- a special issue of the academic journal "MELUS" that explores the depiction of Asians in science fiction and fantasy -- Stanford University Asian American Studies professor Stephen Sohn notes that visions of an Asian-dominated future stretch back to the roots of the modern speculative fiction genre, the era of pulp novels and penny dreadfuls.

He cites by way of example Jack London's 1906 short story "The Unparalleled Invasion," set in what was then the far-distant year of 1976; it chronicles a rising China, empowered by the incredible fertility of its people to become a ravening horde that threatens to overrun the "civilized" nations of the West. The "Chinese problem" is neatly solved by genocide, in which the allied Western Nations bombard China with volleys of infectious disease, whose catastrophic impact on the population is described by London in ornate detail.

As with most works of speculative fiction, London's account was merely a reflection and extrapolation of the zeitgeist. This was the era in which hostility towards China reached its zenith. It was just a few decades after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and a year after the formation, in San Francisco, of the Asiatic Exclusion League, whose stated purpose was to spread anti-Asian propaganda and fight for legislation intended to limit the rights and liberties of Asians in the U.S. The League's first act was successfully demanding that the San Francisco Board of Education segregate Asian school children from white classrooms; by 1908, the League boasted 231 affiliated organizations -- 195 of them labor unions.

(Three years later, the nation would be swept by paroxysms of anti-Chinese violence as scandal rags hyped the stranger-than-fiction murder case of Elsie Sigel, a 19-year-old white Chinatown missionary whose strangled corpse was discovered in a trunk in the apartment of one of her students, a Chinese man named Leon Ling. Complicating the story -- and adding a salacious twist -- was the suggestion that the murder might have been the result of an interracial romantic triangle: Sets of love letters written by Ms. Sigel were later found in the keeping of both Ling and another New York Chinatown resident, restaurant manager Mr. Chu Gain.)

Not coincidentally, this era also saw the creation of a pulp icon with a long and menacing shadow -- Sax Rohmer's "devil Chinaman," Dr. Fu Manchu, colorfully introduced as follows: "Tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man."

Dr. Fu's wicked machinations were narrated in a dozen books penned by Rohmer between 1913 and 1959, and in 10 movies based on the character, the most recent, "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu," coming in 1980 and starring Peter Sellers.

But the evil doc's influence has reached far beyond the world of his own stories: Rapidly evolving into an archetype, the diabolical Asiatic mastermind has spawned countless clone-progeny who've gone on to plague generations of square-jawed Caucasian heroes -- from James Bond's archfoe Dr. No, to Flash Gordon's nemesis Ming the Merciless, to comic-book crime kingpins like Batman's Ra's Al Ghul and Iron Man's Mandarin.

It's a lineage that leads directly, by extension, to CAGW's Chinese Professor. Because though he's merely introduced with a simple academic title, the way he's depicted, surrounded by menacing iconography and hyperadvanced technology that he manipulates using sweeping theatrical gestures, is no different from his antecedents. (Though he must have disappointed his parents in not achieving that all-important "Dr." before his name -- that's what you get for going into the humanities, Chinese Professor.)

And it shows how today's fear of a Chinese future is no different from yesterday's -- anchored in national chauvinism and nativist populism, colored by racist imagery, distorted by half-truths and pulp fantasy.

The U.S. faces very real rivalry for resources, talent and geopolitical influence with fast-emerging markets like China and India -- a challenge best met by enacting policies that make us better and more competitive, rather than the childish creating and baiting of straw-man stereotypes. Both of those countries have invested heavily in basic research and education; meanwhile, the World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. 48th out of 133 countries in math and science education, near the bottom of all developed nations.

Ironically, the biggest new investments in research and education in generations have come in the past few years, courtesy of the 2009 economic stimulus bill -- the same bill that CAGW largely blames for a future under China's iron heel.

Is it too much to ask that the same politicians and interest groups who spent millions in the past election cycle crafting China-bashing science fiction would put their resources and efforts behind helping American kids learn science fact?

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The history of the "imagined Asian future" is actually a lot longer (and more fascinating) than the abbreviated account I was able to fit into this column. It should be noted, for instance, that Asia was "outer space" long before people imagined traveling to the stars. As Keith Chow, one of my co-editors of the Asian American graphic novel anthology "Secret Identities," puts it, "'The East' has always been a depicted by Westerners as the ultimate exotic, unknowable, alien place" -- it's the "far, far away" of Western storytelling tradition, a make-believe world of weird magic, bizarre beasts and even stranger people.

In the modern-day fairy tales of science fiction, magic has been replaced by silicon and software, which is why you frequently see Neo-Asia -- Japan, and to a lesser extent, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea -- depicted as techno-Orientalist never-neverlands in works like William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," Ridley Scott's Philip K. Dick pseudo-adaptation "Blade Runner," and David Wingrove's eight-volume series of dystopian doorstops, "Chung Kuo" (due to be re-released next year in an even more epic and indigestible expanded, 20-volume set).

Oddly enough, though secondary characters and scenery of these works all have Asian accents, the primary protagonists of these cyber-Asian (cyberian?) works are non-Asian, or only nominally so: for instance, the Asianness of the biracial lead of "Snow Crash," Hiro Protagonist, is evident only in his puntastic name and lethal samurai sword. The pinnacle of the Asian Future Without Asians is undoubtedly Joss Whedon's critically acclaimed and fan-beloved TV series "Firefly," which postulates a future reality where the "Chimerica" -- a fusion of the U.S. and China -- is ascendant. Naturally, there isn't a single Asian to be found in the main cast, although several, like Summer Glau's "River Tam," have Chinese-derived names and backstories. (This has even led to the urban legend that Glau -- referred to in jest as Summer G. Lau -- is part Asian, though her background is actually Scottish-German.)

"I'm sure Joss Whedon thought he was being very progressive and clever to incorporate Chinese culture throughout 'Firefly,'" says Chow. "In fact, whenever the topic of the series comes up in my circle of non-Asian nerd friends, that's usually how they defend it. But when I bring up the shocking lack of Chinese people in Whedon's vision of the future, no one really has an explanation. And the explanation, of course, is that Whedon, like most speculative fiction creators, is white" -- and, as a result, writing to his default identity.

That's what makes the anthology "The Dragon and the Stars," edited by Asian Canadian novelists Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, so intriguing. Published by legendary speculative fiction house DAW Books, "Dragon" is the first collection of speculative fiction by English-speaking writers of Chinese descent, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Beyond common heritage, the 18 tales are also held together by Mak and Choi's request that the stories incorporate authentic elements of Chinese (and Chinese diasporic) culture. "Being Chinese is written in our face and DNA, regardless of where we were born or where we live," says Choi. "We thought it would be interesting to see how the Chinese diaspora imagined the world, through that perceptual prism."

The writers have taken that mandate and run with it, crafting a dozen and a half tales that in small and big ways transform and subvert Chinese tradition, pop culture, folklore and history, from a first-person (and fantastical) perspective. One of the most provocative inclusions: "Going Down to Anglotown," by veteran speculative fiction author William F. Wu, which imagines what America would have been like if the Chinese Exclusion Act was never passed -- and the Pacific Coast was predominantly Asian in population, dotted with small ethnic enclaves presenting ersatz Anglo heritage for the tourist trade. Think of it as the opposite of the Asian Future Without Asians -- written from an affirmatively Asian American perspective.

A final note: That's the kind of reinterpretation the bloggers behind leading Asian American culture hubs Angry Asian Man, Reappropriate, 8Asians and Disgrasian are looking for in their Evil Chinese Professor Meme-Off contest, asking people to download word-stripped footage from the CAGW ad here and overlay their own (hopefully stinging and hilarious) messages on the clip. More than 150 people have already downloaded the footage, and dozens have submitted entries to win an unspecified set of prizes, plus worldwide renown. The ultimate goal: Turning "Chinese Professor" into an Asian version of "Hitler Is Angry" -- a parody phenomenon that ends up bigger than its source material. Give it a shot!