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9/2/2020 The Coronavirus’s Xenophobia Problem - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-covid19-xenophobia-racism/607816/ 1/8

GLOBAL

e Other Problematic Outbreak

Activists in Nantes, France, denounce racism related to the pandemic with a sign that reads “Coronavirus: It has made more people racist than sick.”  (ESTELLE RUIZ / NURPHOTO / GETTY)

When news of a novel coronavirus began to trickle out of the Chinese city of

Wuhan in early January, Eunice began wearing a face mask. ough she lives more

than 7,000 miles away, in New York City, she reasoned it would nevertheless be an

ideal way to protect herself, especially on public transport. A Hong Kong native

who lived through the 2003 SARS outbreak, she understood wearing the mask to

be more than a simple precaution.

“When you wear a mask, it’s a symbol of solidarity to other people,” Eunice, who

asked to be identi�ed only by her �rst name, told us. “It’s [a way of ] saying, ‘I

understand that things are scary, but here is a thing that I’m going to do to protect

myself and to protect all of you.’”

As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism.

YASMEEN SERHAN AND TIMOTHY MCLAUGHLIN MARCH 13, 2020

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Not everyone around her, however, shared this understanding. In the weeks that

followed, Eunice said she began experiencing multiple forms of xenophobia, such as

people overtly distancing themselves from her on public transit or making racist

comments—including a death threat. “Every time something like this happens to

me, I always have a �eeting thought of, like, Should I not go out in a mask anymore?”

she said. “I should not have to choose my safety over my health.”

Wherever a pandemic goes, xenophobia is never far behind. Since the outbreak of

the coronavirus (and the disease it causes, COVID-19) began, reports of racism

toward East Asian communities have grown apace. (More recently, this has

expanded beyond East Asian populations: ailand’s public-health minister

yesterday appeared to lash out at white foreigners who he said were dirty and

spreading the virus in the country, adding that people should be more afraid of

Westerners than Asians.)

e denigration of certain populations is a familiar symptom of viral outbreaks.

Disease, after all, fosters fear, which in turn fosters discrimination. During the 1853

yellow-fever epidemic in the United States, European immigrants, who were

perceived to be more vulnerable to the disease, were the primary targets of

stigmatization. During the SARS outbreak, which originated in China, East Asians

bore the brunt. When the Ebola outbreak emerged in 2014, Africans were targeted.

For this reason, the World Health Organization, which has overseen the global

response to the coronavirus outbreak, opted against denoting a geographic location

when officially naming the new virus, as it did with Ebola (named after the river in

the Congo, where it was �rst detected) and the 2012 Middle East respiratory

syndrome, known simply as MERS. “Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than

the virus itself,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, stated

recently. Still, some media outlets and U.S. leaders continue to refer to the disease

as the “Wuhan virus.”

[ omas Levenson: Conservatives try to rebrand the coronavirus ]

at the coronavirus has spread far beyond China hasn’t diminished the spate of

East Asian prejudice. Brian Wong, a Rhodes Scholar from Hong Kong who is

studying in Britain, has also experienced stigmatization on public transport.

Jonathan Mok, a student from Singapore, was the victim of a violent attack on the

streets of London. Restaurateurs in San Francisco’s Chinatown report that business

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has dropped since the start of the outbreak, and a Vietnamese artist was disinvited

from a London art fair because of fears she would be perceived as a carrier. “If you

are seen to be Asian,” Wong told us, “even if you are not coughing or displaying

symptoms, people naturally walk away from you.”

As the coronavirus spreads, the xenophobia it foments quickly intertwines with the

political conditions in the countries it touches, coloring the responses of

populations and their governments. Right-wing parties in Europe, for example,

have latched onto the outbreak to reiterate their calls for tougher immigration

restrictions—Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini was among the �rst to exploit

the virus for his own kind of pandemic populism, erroneously linking the outbreak

to African asylum seekers and urging border closures. Similar calls to suspend

Europe’s open-border system, known as the Schengen Area, have been made by far-

right politicians in Germany, France, and Spain. In the U.S., President Donald

Trump pointed to the outbreak as further reason to construct a wall at the Mexico

border.

[ Read: Italy’s coronavirus response is a warning from the future ]

In Hong Kong, where the virus �rst appeared in January, the territory’s chief

executive, Carrie Lam, resisted calls to fully close the border with the mainland,

arguing that such a “discriminatory approach” would only stigmatize mainland

residents (though the number of border crossings between the two has drastically

reduced since). Even without travel bans, intolerance persists.

Distrust and suspicion toward mainlanders, already deepened by months of

prodemocracy protests sparked by fears of Beijing overreach, have grown. e

Society for Community Organization, a local human-rights group, said last week

that it had identi�ed more than 100 restaurants where owners refused to serve

Mandarin speakers and nonlocals (Hong Kong’s native language is Cantonese).

Minnie Li, a sociology lecturer at the Education University of Hong Kong who was

born in Shanghai, reached out to the owner of Kwong Wing Catering, a popular

restaurant chain that has aligned itself with the prodemocracy movement and said it

will not serve Mandarin speakers, to try to discuss the company’s position. ough

she was unable to secure a meeting with the chain’s owner, she and a small group of

Mandarin-speaking friends visited two of its restaurants and brought along face

masks, to donate, as well as a collection of articles written by Mandarin speakers

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who support the prodemocracy movement. But the outreach efforts were largely a

disappointment, she said. Kwong Wing Catering did not respond to a request for

comment. e chain’s position was rebuked by the government’s Equal

Opportunities Commission.

“To associate a disease with a group of people and believe that banishing,

quarantining, and segregating members of this group would be a sound protective

measure will only distract us from the real threat,” Li wrote in a series of Facebook

posts about her experiences. “e lived experiences of those who are scorned,

feared, driven away, and unfairly labeled as ‘infected’ may show us how the climate

of fear we have created could in fact cause far more serious damage to society than

the epidemic itself.” Her writings garnered widespread attention, but “the negative

comments outweighed the positive ones,” she told us. People disagreed with her

tactics, saying she was trying to start trouble. Others accused her of being a

“colonist from China.” e comments were particularly pointed given that Li is an

active and well-known participant in the pro-democracy movement. During

protests last summer, she took part in a hunger strike, eventually collapsing and

being rushed to the hospital. Even people who participated in the strike alongside

her, she said, chastised her for confronting the restaurant.

Roger Chung, Li’s husband and an assistant public-health professor at the Chinese

University of Hong Kong, described the chain as taking a consequentialist approach

that ignored important, difficult questions. “In public health, we talk about the

ethics behind the measure; it is not enough just to talk about the measure,” he told

us. “What about the rights of people? Are you upholding any virtues and values?

ere are other things that we need to think about.”

e latest effort to curb the virus’s spread has come from the U.S., where President

Trump announced a month-long ban on travelers from more than two dozen

European countries, excluding the United Kingdom, in an effort to “keep new cases

from entering our shores.”

e problem with these measures, aside from social cost, is that they don’t totally

work. In previous outbreaks, “things like travel bans haven’t materially stopped a

disease getting into a country—they’ve simply delayed it,” Clare Wenham, an

assistant professor of global-health policy at the London School of Economics, told

us. Viruses don’t respect borders, and no efforts to fortify them are foolproof: A

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person from an affected country could arrive via a location that is not on the

banned list, for example. Transmission could also be occurring in unrestricted

places. Efforts to contain the disease are likely to prove even more futile in places

where it is already spreading. In the case of the U.S. travel ban, there is nothing to

suggest that restricting European visitors will prevent new cases from emerging:

After all, the disease is already there.

e fallibility of these measures has been on full display in Italy, which, despite

being the �rst European country to suspend �ights to and from China after the

virus appeared, became the outbreak’s epicenter on the Continent. Now Italy is

under lockdown, and other countries are banning Italian visitors. e U.S., which

was also among the �rst to restrict entry for Chinese travelers, is facing a substantial

outbreak of its own in Washington State.

If travel bans and border closures aren’t always effective, then why do countries

resort to them? Wenham said that while governments primarily impose these

limitations to slow the spread of the virus, they also do so to reduce panic among

the population. e more people worry, the more “you want to see your

government doing something like that, because it makes you feel safer as an

individual,” she said. And governments, to prove their capacity to handle the

outbreak, oblige. It’s “security theater.”

[ Read: e coronavirus is more than just a health crisis ]

Still, the WHO hasn’t necessarily advised countries against enacting these measures.

“It’s a judgment call, and it will, of course, be in�uenced by the political context,”

David Nabarro, a WHO special envoy for the global COVID-19 response and a

co-director of the Imperial College Institute of Global Health Innovation, told us.

“I’m aware of that, and I don’t propose to make any comment on whether that is

good or bad. It’s just the reality.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write

to [email protected].

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