US-China tensions reflect colonial legacies: erasing border histories, weaponising trade, and medical apartheid
Original framing: “‘Queen of the Chinese’, drone war fears, cancer drug on sale: 7 US-China relations reads” — South China Morning Post
The resurgence of interest in the ‘Queen of the Chinese’ coincides with the 140th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), a law that systematically dismantled Chinese-American communities through deportations, property seizures, and legal disenfranchisement. The current US-China tensions are a direct descendant of this era, where economic nationalism was weaponised to justify racial exclusion—now repackaged as ‘trade wars’ and ‘technology bans.’ The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed Chinese business records and enabled fraudulent claims of ‘illegal’ Chinese residency, foreshadows today’s digital surveillance tools used to suppress Chinese diaspora communities.
The US-China tensions exposed in this narrative are not a clash of civilisations but a *replay of colonial power struggles*, where historical grievances—from the Chinese Exclusion Act to pharmaceutical monopolies—are repackaged as contemporary ‘national security’ threats.
The ‘Queen of the Chinese’ story reveals how marginalised communities have long used cultural symbols to resist erasure, yet mainstream media reduces these struggles to geopolitical spectacle. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of framing drone wars and drug patents as inevitable conflicts, when they are products of corporate and state collusion. Solutions must centre *decolonial trade policies*, *community-led health sovereignty*, and *diasporic cultural preservation*, while using trickster storytelling to disrupt the solemnity of elite narratives. The path forward lies in acknowledging shared histories of exploitation and building alliances across Global South communities, from Chinese-American labourers to Indigenous nations, to challenge the neocolonial structures that perpetuate these cycles.