The current period of sinophobia in America began on February 13, 2018, when FBI director Christopher Wray cast suspicion on every Chinese person in America as a potential spy. The key quote from his comments to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing is:

One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.

Wray later elaborated at an April 2018 event at the Council on Foreign Relations:

No country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat than China. China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations. They’re doing it through Chinese intelligence services, through state-owned enterprises, through ostensibly private companies, through graduate students and researchers, through a variety of actors all working on behalf of China. At the FBI we have economic espionage investigations that almost invariably lead back to China in nearly all of our fifty-six field offices, and they span just about every industry or sector. …Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense. And to be clear, the United States—our country is by no means their only target.

In August 2018, Politico reported comments by President Trump at a private dinner at his New Jersey resort:

At one point during the dinner, Trump noted of an unnamed country that the attendee said was clearly China, “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.”

In April 2019, another senior U.S. official emphasized the racial nature of some of the thinking animating conversation in the American capital. From the Washington Examiner:

“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology and the United States hasn’t had that before,” Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the State Department, said Monday evening at a security forum in Washington, D.C.… …“The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way it was a fight within the Western family,” Skinner said, noting Karl Marx’s indebtedness to Western political ideas. “It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

The fact that Skinner herself is black, not Caucasian, was the cause of some amusement for the wags on Twitter, but of no comfort to many Chinese people in the United States who have not forgotten the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist piece of legislation designed to do what it says, signed into law in 1882 and only repealed in 1943, just one year after the U.S. began forcing innocent Japanese-Americans into internment camps.

On July 16, 2019, Donald Trump repeated, without evidence, an inflammatory insinuation from billionaire investor Peter Thiel about Google committing “treason” by “working with the Chinese government.”

On July 20, 2019, the New York Times reported that “A new Red Scare is reshaping Washington,” citing the increasing influence of the racist and xenophobic views of people like Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, and organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger, a Cold War relic whose revival Bannon has spearheaded.

On July 23, 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray slightly rephrased his earlier remarks, and said of the Chinese espionage threat, “It’s kind of an all-tools approach by them, and it, therefore, requires an all-tools approach by us.”

On July 30, 2019, Marie Royce, a senior U.S. State Department official, made remarks titled “The United States Welcomes Chinese Students.” But Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed reported that some parts of the remarks were received more as a warning that perpetuated stereotypes of Chinese students.

On August 27, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham made an incendiary — and hugely popular — statement on Twitter accusing “the Chinese” of cheating, citing no evidence and making no distinction between Chinese people and the Chinese government.

On April 26, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton said, “I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America’s intellectual property as it relates to the virus that they unleashed on the world,” and suggested that Chinese students should not be allowed to study science in the U.S. as a result, per the New York Post.

On May 28, 2020, Senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn and Representative David Kustoff, also of Tennessee, introduced legislation that would bar Chinese nationals from all STEM graduate-level programs in the U.S., Inside Higher Ed reports.