48 BEIJING REVIEW MARCH 12, 2020 http://www.bjreview.com
ESSAY
The author is a UK-based op-ed contributor to Beijing Review
Copyedited by Sudeshna Sarkar
Comments to [email protected]The Rise of
Coronavirus Racism
By Laurence Coulton
I
n recent years we’ve grown accustomed to a fa-
miliar phenomenon. A human tragedy is followed
by a groundswell of global support and sympathy
online. Yet the spread of COVID-19 has seen the op-
posite, with a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment and racist
incidents in several countries.
Social and news media abound with reports of
East Asian individuals experiencing racism in the
weeks since the virus hit the headlines.
Some 80,000 people have been infected in China
alone with more than 2,800 deaths. In scale this is
one of the worst human catastrophes of recent times
and yet the response has been a world away from
the collective outpourings of grief familiar for other
recent tragic events.
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media was awash with fundraisers and posts mourn-
ing the destruction of the country’s precious wildlife.
Last April, when the iconic Notre Dame cathedral was
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nated in the donation of $835 million in just 10 days
after the event.
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for the tragedy. Fake reports began appearing on so-
cial news websites speculating about the origin of the
virus. There were implicit, sometimes explicit, sugges-
tions that death and disease were an inevitable and in
some way deserved consequence of Chinese culinary
practices.
These allegations were justified with fake re-
ports, most notably a video of Chinese vlogger Wang
Mengyun eating a bat. These articles failed to men-
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of Palau in Micronesia.
These early reactions on social media created
an environment of hostility toward ethnic Chinese.
Actually, the roots of this Sinophobia extend beyond
the current epidemic.
In the 19th and early 20th century, anti-Chinese
propaganda often cast China as heathen and un-
sanitary. In 1878, the editor of an American medical
journal.
The literature of the time often depicted Chinese
communities as an existential threat to Western
civilization. The exact shape of this threat was usually
left vague, a dangerous imperceptible invasive force.
There are important parallels here with how we con-
ceptualize the spread of disease.
Although decades-old, these tropes continue to
inform and underlie perceptions of Chinese in the
West and provide the foundations for dangerous
stereotypes and allegations about a people and place
most Westerners know little about.
These racial dogmas are given further cred-
ibility by the response of powerful actors in the
media and government, providing an environment
for racial intolerance to thrive. Heavy-handed travel
bans lend political weight to the prejudices of or-
dinary people. So do decisions by institutions such
as schools in Italy and Wales to temporarily exclude
pupils of Chinese heritage.
The complexion of contemporary news me-
dia means that most Western public only hear
about bad news in China. Everyday Chinese
voices and good news stories are seldom heard.
This may be changing, but the consequence is
that ordinary Chinese people are conflated with
the actions of the state in ways citizens of other
countries are not.
These optics, while themselves not acts of rac-
ism, systematically dehumanize Chinese people in
the eyes of the Western public, allowing dangerous
generalizations about China and Chinese people to
go unchallenged in ways unimaginable for other na-
tionalities and ethnicities.
The coronavirus outbreak has already become
a global crisis. As governments and organizations
scramble to contain it, the actions of everyday
people will largely dictate what happens next.
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times ahead easier to bear. Racism and intolerance
will not. QThe coronavirus
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Compassion
and cooperation
will make the
difficult times
ahead easier
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intolerance
will not