If you only just learned about China from speech and debate rounds, you’d think it’s a comic-book supervillain with a five-year plan to steal every American job, steal your credit card information off of a TikTok custom Labubu purchase, and personally cancel the American Dream. China in the speech and debate environment has turned from a country to a jump scare. Every time someone says “China,” suddenly the room fills with cries of cyberattacks, choking democracies, and the word “hegemony” pronounced three different wrong ways. 

It’s funny to joke about until you notice how often the joke has teeth. Because somewhere between the humorous rhetoric and the hyperbole, China stops being a topic and transitions into a target. Debaters throw around lines like “China doesn’t care about human rights” or “China wants to slaughter all democracies around the world” as if they’re neutral facts, not simply fluffed-up narratives to win ballots. And the more those phrases get repeated, the more they harden into a script: China as the “big bad wolf,” lurking behind every link chain and every nuclear impact.

But the issue is, that script doesn’t stay in the flow. It lands on people. Chinese and Chinese-American debaters sit in those rooms listening to judges nod along while their country, their families, their culture they’ve grown up with are turned into shorthand for oppression. We hear comments like, “Well, you’re from China, so of course you think that,” or jokes about propaganda, obedience, or surveillance that stretch reality or sometimes are just straight-up lies. What’s framed as “just debate” becomes permission to talk about their identity like it’s a flaw in their credibility. But the harm goes deeper than a few throwaway comments. For many Chinese-American students, these moments become quiet reminders that their belonging in the activity is conditional—secure only when the round isn’t about the place they come from. Students who already navigate stereotypes outside tournaments now hear versions of this prejudice in a speech and debate round. Instead of empowering them, the space quietly teaches them that parts of their identity are liabilities, not strengths.

And this persisting problem isn’t just offensive; it’s also lazy. “China bad” is the ultimate cheat code for many debaters. Why research internal politics, regional differences, or policy nuance when you can slap “authoritarian China = nukes = extinction” onto any scenario and call it a day? Sure, some judges may be “tech” judges, but even in rounds that are supposed to showcase real-world arguments, it happens again and again. I’ve seen tech rounds where the winning team’s impact by the end of the round was “China authoritarianism bad” with no warrants or implications, yet it was enough because of how ingrained these ideas are in our consciousness due to mindless and easy impacting. But these arguments aren’t just limited to the Chinese-American or Chinese community; they affect any group of people worldwide who’ve been marginalized and faced prejudice as a result of insensitive impact delivery and conformity. It’s easier to build a scary impact than a complicated argument. But every time we do that, we trade education for stereotype and complexity for caricature.

So when returning to the question—Has China “won”?—we can see the answer is not really. But ladies and gentlemen, what is winning is a storyline—a storyline where 1.4 billion people are compressed into a single villain archetype because it makes the ballot easier to justify. A storyline where “China” stops meaning a real nation with real people and starts meaning “whatever threat I need right now.”

The truth is, China isn’t a wolf nor a soft Winnie the Pooh. It’s a country, just like the United States, just like any other one—sometimes messy, diverse, contradictory, constantly changing. And the students connected to it aren’t simply “NPCs” in someone’s impact calculus. They’re human beings who deserve better than to have their existence treated as a disadvantage card.

So, fellow members of the speech and debate community, I’m not asking you to stop critiquing China, and I’m not asking you to pretend its problems don’t exist—as a Chinese-American I can tell you there are a lot of them, but that’s not all there is to China. What I am asking is for us to rethink how we build arguments. Instead of defaulting to the same reductive impacts, we can choose to research more deeply, differentiate between the Chinese government and Chinese people, and frame impacts with context rather than caricature. Judges can also help by rewarding nuance and clear warrants over fear-mongering, and by calling out rounds where impacts rely more on shock value than substance. Coaches can push students to interrogate their own assumptions and ensure that the debater actually understands what they’re reading rather than simply recycling talking points. None of this requires us to be softer on China—it just requires us to be critical thinkers who don’t confuse simplification for analysis.

Speech and debate claims to teach critical thinking. That has to include knowing the difference between critiquing a government and demeaning a people. If we can’t do that, the real loser isn’t China. 

It’s us.