Community leader calls for Sino-U.S. cooperation, fighting bigotry

A Chinese American community leader called for U.S.-China cooperation and an end to bigotry at a webinar held on Thursday.

Lillian Kwok Sing, Northern California's first Asian American female judge, said the climate in the United States is a frightening one for Asian Americans and reminds her of what happened in history when Chinese Americans were terrorized simply because of their origins.

The webinar was organized by the Commonwealth Club of California with the theme of halting bigotry in its tracks.

Sing, who retired in 2015, reviewed the dark era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1882 to target Chinese and restrict Chinese immigration to the United States.

"Whenever there's a crisis, they have to find somebody to blame," said Sing, who is also the co-founder and co-chair of the San Francisco-based Comfort Women Justice Coalition.

The Chinese have been blamed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is especially dangerous, she noted. "There are so many hate crimes going on right now."

In response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Hate Reporting Center to collect and track incidents of anti-AAPI hate violence.

"They started on March 19 and in two months they got 2,000 reports of hate incidences," Sing said.

"The American dream sometimes turns into an American nightmare when this ugly head of racism and discrimination is raised," she said.

Sing also called on the United States and China "to work together to solve the world problems like this pandemic."

"We cannot split up."