trump used. a reader wrote “The Chinese virus is not racism, it’s pacifism.” My opinion is that there is no need for a made-up moniker when there is already a well-known name for a virus. He, Riddle and Piccolo (2023) Check out what happened after the term was popularized.
source: He, Riddle, Piccolo (2023).
The authors estimate regressions of hate crime counts on a constant, time, a dummy variable that takes a value of 1 after March 16, 2020, and a time trend from March 16, 2020.
The time coefficient (one observation per week) is 0.075 with a standard error of 0.056. The authors concluded that none of the coefficients were statistically significant using a two-tailed test. Note that the t-statistic of 1.32, yes For the one-tailed t-test, significant at 10% msl, this is somewhat more significant if one considers that the relevant alternative hypothesis is that crime rates rise faster after using terms like “Kung-flu” or “Chinese virus”. Appropriate. Note that these are results based on data for four major cities, as described in this article.
Aggregated 2020 national data from the FBI here (but may be biased downwards for AAPI groups).
source: FBI (February 2023).
Hate crimes against individuals of Asian descent in the United States increased by 77% in 2020.
Here is a time series showing discrete jumps in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020.
figure 1: Anti-Asian hate crimes (blue) and anti-Black or anti-African-American hate crimes (tan), cumulative percent change since 2016 (log term). source: FBI Crime Data Browserand the author’s calculations.
In contrast to Han et al. Research suggests there is some evidence of persistence of reported anti-Asian hate crimes.
For more discussion of the limitations of the FBI’s hate crime data and findings from other datasets, see here Vox Discussion.
