The tragic 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit is a devastating historical example of how the “Buy American” movement and anti-Japanese auto sentiment fueled deadly anti-Asian scapegoating.
During the early 1980s, the American auto industry was struggling heavily due to the rising popularity and superior fuel efficiency of Japanese-imported vehicles. The “Buy American” movement and intense rhetoric blaming Japanese automakers for domestic job losses in manufacturing created a volatile, racially charged atmosphere in cities heavily reliant on the auto industry, such as Detroit.
On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was out celebrating his bachelor party in Detroit, Michigan. He encountered two laid-off white autoworkers, Ronald Evans and Michael Nitz. Assuming Chin was Japanese, Evans and Nitz harassed him, blaming him and the Japanese auto industry for the massive lay-offs occurring in the auto industry. They chased him down and beat him with a baseball bat. Before slipping into a coma from which he would not awake, Chin’s last words were, “It’s not fair.”
Arrested and released that same night, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz were charged with second-degree murder which they pled down to manslaughter. They denied the brutal attack was racially motivated and received three years’probation and a $3,000 fine. The judge offered the following explanation: “These aren’t the kind of men you send to jail. . . You fit the punishment to the criminal, not the crime.”
They never served one night in jail. Meanwhile, Chin was buried on what was supposed to have been his wedding day.
The most significant reaction to the decision was the galvanization of the Asian American community. Its reaction was so powerful, and the coalition it formed so broad-based in terms of class, ethnicity and age group, that it is likely no coherent Asian American political identity truly existed before this moment.
Vincent Chin’s murder and the xenophobic hysteria whipped up by politicians and union leaders is a horrific lesson that is unfortunately still relevant in this moment.
Today, Trump’s tariffs —taxes on imported goods into the United States—on countries across the world – are sowing divisions among nations, but more crucially among the global working class. Public acceptance of the tariffs relies on that same xenophobia and vilification of working people in other countries that promoted the violent hatred inflicted upon Vincent Chin.
We know of union leaders who infamously think today’s tariffs will help protect jobs. International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ president Sean O’Brien believes the tariffs will bring back jobs for the next generation, and has come out strongly for tariffs on foreign films. UAW President Sean Fain has said: “The point of tariffs is to eliminate the race to the bottom, where we’re exploiting people. And…the point of this is to actually bring our base back here, have jobs back here and actually create decent-paying jobs, …where Americans can sustain a living instead of having to work two and three jobs just to scrape to get by paycheck to paycheck which is where a lot of people are today.”
In actuality, however, Marx and Engels, engaging in these debates in the 19th century, can still inform how we approach this question and recognize the fallacy of Fain’s and O’Brien’s position.
Marx and Engels understood that free trade is really the freedom of capital to “crush the worker.” Marx insisted that free trade “breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. And they took the same approach to tariffs. They understood that tariffs were an economic weapon deployed by the state. “The system of protective tariffs places in the hands of the capital of one country the weapons which enable it to defy the capital of other countries,” they wrote.
They also pointed out the hypocrisy of advanced powers. Leaders of nation states demanded free trade, while sheltering their own emerging industries through protective duties and forcing monopolies on colonial markets.
This analysis is vital for responding to Trump’s tariff wars. Trump pushes tariffs as an instrument to dominate weaker economies, to raise revenues and to restore US industrial growth. Companies pass these costs onto working people, degrading our living standards.
Trade wars cause slower growth, higher inflation and the risk that falling demand for US products abroad will lead to higher unemployment. In the 1930s, protectionist trade wars led to real wars—wars that are only too much a continued possibility and – in some cases – a reality today.
This economic protectionism of tariffs also ties workers to their bosses. Marx argued that protectionists tell workers, “It is better to be exploited by one’s fellow countrymen than by foreigners.”
Neither protectionism nor free trade will solve capitalism’s economic crisis. Trump has started the trade war as part of his “America First” agenda and claims that tariffs will help “return” manufacturing jobs to the US. The Western leaders’ opposition to Trump is based on support for free market policies that have failed millions of working class people around the world. And their response is based on stoking nationalism—partly in the hope of deflecting anger against them.
The danger of this is that instead of building international worker solidarity so crucial to emancipating workers, the left and trade unions line up behind their “own” governments in the trade war.
This strategy of supporting the bosses to supposedly “protect jobs” allows the bosses to squeeze more out of workers and blackmail them into taking worse pay, terms and conditions.
There is no such thing as a “national interest” between the super-rich and the rest of us. Workers in the United States have more in common with workers in Japan, in Canada, in China than with their own bosses and politicians.
Politicians push the idea to paper over class divisions and make working class people think that “foreigners” are their real enemy.
So in the tragedy of Vincent Chin, rather than fighting for real change, Chin’s murderers Ebens and Nitz took a baseball bat to another American worker. “Buy American” can and has led to such tragic outcomes at the individual level, and nationalistic fervor has indeed led to wholesale violence toward other countries in the form of actual wars that kill millions of workers and their families.
Free trade versus protectionism is a false choice for the left and working class people. They don’t save us workers. They are simply different ways for the bosses to compete with one another and maximize profits on the backs of workers. It is a devious, dishonest way of portraying US [or, fill in the blank] workers as the enemy: Chinese workers are the enemy, immigrant workers are the enemy, Vincent Chin is the enemy.
As socialists we must work to educate our coworkers about the universal need to put people before corporate profit and to unmask the xenophobia that allows for the billionaires to become trillionaires, by dividing us and breaking our international solidarity. In order to really protect workers, we need to stand together and fight for the interests of all workers, not the interests of our bosses. Let us learn this lesson in honor of Vincent Chin.
Virginia Rodino
References:
Marx21 US 