I’m not saying it can be. But that is one of the primary plans being considered and unless very bad things happen it is a plan likely to succeed domestically in creating a very bad atmosphere. Now I’m not saying you’re going to have the same amount of people feverishly invested in this paranoid mass hysteria as you did during the second red scare. I think you’re right that to a point that’s no longer possible. However it’s also not that important. If you can get all the politically interested people invested in your witch-hunt and nationalism then it doesn’t matter if say a fourth of the country or a third that doesn’t pay attention to politics isn’t on board and aren’t constantly checking out what their Chinese neighbors are doing from behind drawn curtains. So long as you can get a certain critical mass of the country to swallow and regurgitate the opinions and propaganda, for example online you can carry out what you want.

The way to do this is two-fold in the modern age, firstly you convince the Democrat-liberals that China is a massive human rights violator, is literally murdering millions of people, whatever so you get them to carry out an actual BDS type campaign against China that inevitably spills over domestically in racism against Asian people (this also serves the dual goal of disinvestment, companies don’t want to move but with enough human rights screaming they might reconsider). Secondly you get your more Republican-reactionary minded types hyped up on the Chinese communist threat, classic red-scare, red-baiting, etc and muh “no freedom” types of stuff. Importantly you use the Republicans and their accusations of complicity or sympathy with China against the Democrats to push them towards your hyper-nationalist positions and racist rhetoric, this was done in the second red scare. Once they’ve moved there you back off with those accusations and allow only the most fringe Republicans to whisper loudly about sympathies in the Democratic party while putting on a united front in public on this matter.

The importance is the invention of the new reality and the manufacturing of consent for that reality. You don’t have to have the citizenry themselves engaged in the kind of witch hunts you saw back then, you just have to have them convinced that feds wiretapping, surveilling, harassing, arresting, prosecuting Chinese and Asian people in the US on dubious grounds is a necessary evil and one they’re not going to push back against. Liberals will boycott Chinese brands while reactionaries lynch the Asian managers of the same companies, liberals of course washing their hands of the blood on them, of the inciting language like calling business people genocide enablers or whatever.

But how much of that can carry a campaign to manufacture consent for war?

You underestimate the propagandized, bloodthirsty, self-righteous temperament of most Americans. One of the liberal rationales for why we had to fight Hitler was to stop the Holocaust, one of the rationales for why the civil war was necessary was to stop slavery. If these liberals are convinced that China is committing atrocities, their history class has already primed them for what the solution to that is, that we must be morally brave, we must confront them before they become a greater evil and kill even more just as Hitler had to be stopped and so on. As to reactionaries, they don’t need much of an invented reason. You point them at the CPC, at China, tell them that it’s run by a Marxist-Leninist communist party, tell them that they took their jobs, that they used corrupt politicians and trade deals to take their jobs, their money, their country’s pride and power and that those commies are killing people and are an asiantic horde on the verge of washing over other nice anglo or anglo-puppet nations? They’ll be champing at the bit to take them down. They’re already racist, they’re already rabidly anti-communist. They’re already rabidly nationalist.

One question is desperation on the part of the bourgeoisie and the imperialists. Do they think that the gamble of attacking China either militarily or with much more open and hostile economic actions will result in a victory or at least better conditions and a truce with the Chinese bowed in submission? Or do they calculate as they have so far that it’s not a winnable scenario and they have to keep trying the atrocity propaganda and other slower, less direct methods because any overt attacks would hasten their own decline? Right now they are desperately trying to gather support for moving manufacturing and other critical operations out of China and to other countries. Because as long as we’re as economically entangled with them as we are we cannot afford to blockade them or stop trade, it would hurt us as much or more than them. But if we can move that stuff out and keep Chinese tech down, then you’ll see some really upfront moves, blockades, embargoes, real strong-arm “do not trade with China or we’ll fuck you up” type stuff.

The second of course is, are internal hatreds between parties too great to bridge at this point even with a full media propaganda blitz? It’s possible the US has maneuvered itself into a situation where while their politicians from AOC to Ted Cruz are in solidarity about destroying China, their voters are too busy ranting about the other party and its members to get whipped up successfully into a united nationalist front.