“YO VIRUS-BOY! Don’t infect us!” So Andrew Zhou, a Chinese-Canadian in Vancouver, has been taunted in the school playground. On February 8th Hao Chunxiang, a Chinese university student in the Netherlands, complained on Facebook that the lift in his dormitory had been spray-painted with the words “DIE CHINESE”. In Japan the hashtag #ChineseDon’tCometoJapan has been trending on Twitter. Rhea Liang, a doctor in Australia, tweeted that one of her patients had refused to shake her hand because of her ethnicity.
Amid global anxiety about the spread of the new coronavirus, first detected in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the tens of millions of ethnic Chinese living outside China and Taiwan are particularly uneasy. Anecdotal evidence abounds that fear of the virus is generating racial phobia against them. The virus has so far infected more than 70,000 people and killed more than 1,700.
Political leaders have expressed concern. The prime ministers of Canada and Australia, which have large ethnic-Chinese populations, have publicly condemned anti-Chinese racism resulting from the outbreak. So, too, has the Chinese government. Its foreign ministry has repeatedly warned against discrimination by foreigners, referring both to ethnically targeted attacks and to perceived insults to China itself. A cartoon in a Danish newspaper of the Chinese flag with its stars replaced by coronaviruses was one cause of outrage, including on Chinese social media, where many called the artwork racist. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, responded that “we have freedom of expression in Denmark—also to draw.” The World Health Organisation has come up with a name for the disease, covid-19, that is intended to avoid any association with China.
Ethnophobia triggered by the virus is sometimes subtle, and hard to separate from overblown fears of the pathogen itself. A waiter at a Chinese restaurant in London’s Chinatown says business is down “by at least 70%” since the virus began to spread globally in mid-January. Far fewer customers who are not ethnic Chinese are turning up, he says. A Malaysian student at University College London says he decided to skip class for a week in late January because “half the class is Chinese”. He worried that some students may have received infected relatives from China over the lunar new year holiday.
Some ethnic Chinese are fighting back. A social-media campaign in France, using the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus (“I am not a virus”), has inspired hundreds to share their own stories of rudeness. Some are non-Chinese Asians who say they have suffered collateral damage. In Australia, some ethnic-Chinese have launched a petition accusing two newspapers of using racially offensive language in connection with the virus. Tens of thousands of people have signed it.
Ethnic Chinese themselves sometimes indulge in virus-related profiling, by fearing or suspecting people from Hubei province where Wuhan is—or even mainland Chinese in general. On February 2nd, when America banned the entry of any non-American who had recently been in China, many Western commentators complained about its discriminatory undertones. Canada did not follow America’s lead. But Ryan Zhang, who lives in Burnaby, a Canadian city where a third of the population are ethnic Chinese, says most of the ethnic Chinese in his community want Canada to do so. He says they have a paranoid fear that travellers from China wanting to enter America might first stop in Canada for a while and infect others before going on.
Perhaps the biggest fissure within the diaspora relates to hostility among people from Hong Kong towards those of mainland origin. Recent pro-democracy unrest in the territory has exacerbated such tensions. One Canadian of Hong Kong origin refers to mainlanders who buy up surgical masks in Canada as “locusts”. This is a popular epithet in Hong Kong for people from across the border who go on shopping sprees in the territory, emptying shelves of goods. Ethnic solidarity is sometimes absent even within China itself.
