It really sucks when your "ancestral country" is doing these horrific things that stand at absolute odds with everything you care about. I've caught myself several times trying to downplay the fact that I'm ethnically Chinese, and I feel ashamed when I do so because there's so much history and culture to be proud of, but the state that's supposed to represent that history is also the perpetrator of some of the worst censorship and human rights abuses in the modern era.

I'm not going to pretend to know how ethnic Germans or Japanese in the US felt during WWII. But I feel like I'm getting a bit of an idea. Thankfully it's not in a discriminatory sense, as the vast majority of people I've met are smart enough to be able to distinguish ethnicity from nationality, but again, it's a little tough. I imagine it's the same for plenty of other ethnic Chinese people outside of China.

I fully expect China to try and inflame ethnic tensions in the US, Australia, etc. between the general populace and ethnic Chinese people to try and build distrust. Ethno-nationalism is pretty huge in China, and in the eyes of the CCP, if you're ethnically Chinese, then you should identify as Chinese first.

Frankly, I don't think it'll work super well, because China's foreign propaganda department is famously inept, and because I think most Chinese-Americans (at least, myself and the ones I know) identify more with the larger Asian-American community rather than exclusively with other Chinese-Americans. Still though, I think it's important for everyone to be careful to distinguish between "China", the nation, "China", the state, and ethnic Chinese people.

One thing I love about the US is that while my family has only been here for one generation, I feel as accepted as anyone else, while when I visited China, I felt completely out-of-place. I don't know if it was because of my uncle yelling about how China is going to overtake the US, or the not-so-subtle communist imagery everywhere, or the (absurdly high) amount of tobacco smoke, or the people staring at me for speaking English, but... I don't know. I'm not quite sure how to finish that thought.

I do hope that one day China will become a productive player on the world stage and contribute to human rights and freedom the way Germany has done since WWII, though I'm not holding my breath.