The news about the coronavirus epidemic that is currently spreading and causing deaths in Hubei Province is worrisome enough. Henan borders Hubei, and I’ve been watching my wife and in-laws scanning the news with bated breath and hoping that no one they know has been infected or died of the illness. A tragœdy like this one which Wuhan is currently undergoing, shouldn’t be exacerbated by a racial panic that targets Chinese people. But, fallen humanity being what it is, if there’s something human beings shouldn’t do, chances are more than a few of them will find some way to do it.
The anti-Chinese racism that people are expressing out of fear of the coronavirus isn’t limited to the sticks, either. Racism is not exclusively a ‘deplorable’ failing, even though our government has instituted an ill-considered travel ban. Hate messages against Chinese people have been scrawled at liberal Columbia University. UC-Berkeley administration excused xenophobia as a ‘common’ and ‘normal reaction’ to the coronavirus outbreak. Chinese students have faced abuse at Barnard and the University of Manchester in the UK. ‘Pro-democracy’ food-service businesses in Hong Kong have started using the coronavirus as yet another excuse to discriminate against Mandarin speakers. Similar incidents of service discrimination and racist abuse against Chinese people have been reported in South Korea, Japan, France and Italy.
I suspect neither the American government, nor the ‘China watcher’ commentariat, can escape blame for this secondary outbreak of xenophobia. For one thing, the current administration does overreact to everything in intemperate and inappropriate ways, and this has an impact on public perceptions, and condones and creates space for prejudicial abuses. But, of course, this is the well-established modus operandi of the administration. Whether the target is Central American refugees or Muslim immigrants or black men – the administration thrives on associating legitimate fears of terrorism, violent crime and wage depression with a scapegoat. Preferably that scapegoat is of foreign origin or has foreign connexions. Suffice it to say I know exactly how I’m not voting this November.
The liberal, English-language China watchers also have two main attitudes to answer for, with regard to the spread of anti-Chinese xenophobia abroad. These attitudes are subtle and pervasive. The first is the selective conflation of the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of the Chinese people with those of the government. I say and emphasise ‘selective’, because the liberal tribe of China watchers always sets apart and fetishises a particular group of urban, libertarian-leaning students and dissidents on account of their river-elegiac political similarity to the Western mindset. And the second consists in the often undeliberate or half-deliberate framing – whether belittling and denigrating, or posing it as a threat – of Chinese cultural practices, foods, trends and habits as somehow dirty, scary, harmful or weird.
Speaking to the first tendency. It’s a telling tic that blue-check commentators like James Griffiths, James Palmer and Melissa Chan often talk about ‘the Chinese’ in a monolithic and pejorative way when they inexplicably fail to agree with them, against a government that they have a priori designated as evil and meriting destruction. This rhetorical tic has some rather objectionable ramifications when it comes to public health disasters like the coronavirus, ramifications which these authors hasten to deny and disavow for themselves. These China watchers assert both governmental responsibility for, if not the outbreak itself then the paucity of the response. They also have a record of asserting, decrying and deploring the Han majority’s complicity in that government – excepting a handful of West-friendly ‘dissidents’ of their choosing. They stop just shy of the racist conclusion of their own logic: that the Chinese people are to blame for the disease. The China watcher also doth protest too much, methinks.
The second tendency is related, and more subtle. Allow me to give a brief example. Now Palmer decries the blatant and obvious racism of blaming Chinese hygiene and cuisine for the public health crisis. But in 2016 he came very close to blaming the Chinese people themselves for being lazy, cutting corners and subscribing to an ethic of ‘chabuduo 差不多’ – that is, ‘more or less’ – that resulted in just such disasters. (You know Palmer’s full of shit when he starts with his pinyinisms aimed at an English-speaking audience.) This piece comes insidiously close to a self-congratulatory just-so tale about democracy and capitalist work ethic allowing the Anglo-European nations to revitalise their native standards of craftsmanship and safety and quality control in consumer durables and infrastructure (and just what was our infrastructure like in 2016?) – while China was sorrily mired in cut-rate industrial filth by its sheer size and inertia, not to mention an oppressive illiberal government. Stories like these actively feed the kinds of Eurocentric self-congratulation that I’ve had the singular misfortune of getting to see and hear first-hand directed at Chinese patrons in European shops, or at Chinese shopkeepers by European tourists. In the imaginations of certain Germans, French and Italians, China is synonymous with ‘shanzhai’ – with cheap knock-off brands and copyright infringement. And Chinese people themselves are considered to be cheats and losers.
Note that ordinary Chinese people just can’t win this game against the China watcher hermeneutic of suspicion. Chinese people like Sichuan’s Li Ziqi 李子柒 are trying to promote old-fashioned craftsmanship. People in inland second-tier and third-tier cities, even working-class people there, are trying to bring back traditional clothing replete with standards of artistry and quality that would bring tears to William Morris’s eyes. But Li Ziqi gets criticised in China watcher circles as an escapist and a nostalgist, for which the authors add a superfluous pinyinism of xiangchou 乡愁. Why? Reading between the lines: it’s because Miss Li is not overtly a dissident.
And the hanfu movement of course is painted in sinister terms by Anglophone news media as a kind of Han cultural revanchism. Full disclosure: I had one hanfu enthusiasts in my seventh-grade English class in Luoyang. She was about the furthest thing from a Han nationalist you could get; her interest was apolitical and in fact a bit twee, in the same way Victorian enthusiasts and steampunks are here. But, because the hanfu folks are also not overtly dissident and pro-West, they must therefore be culpable and complicit in the worst of their government’s evils. See how this game works?
If I may give some advice which I know won’t be taken, coming as it does from an expat who somewhat ‘went native’: China watchers need to watch themselves. The China watchers spend their careers assiduously summoning psychological fears of the rise of a dark, monstrous and inscrutable Asiatic menace. Then, when laymen without such local expertise suddenly start acting on those fears, they at once trip over themselves trying to decry the self-same racist attitudes they’ve been tutoring.
The worst part of it is, the racial panic over the coronavirus has even got me jumpy. I took my son Albert into the urgent care clinic after he’d been in a minor fender-bender, and the first thing the RN on duty asks me is, ‘has he been to China in the past twenty-one days?’ It took me a bit longer than it should have to register that this was a perfectly routine question and that there was no stereotyping involved. The nurse hadn’t even gotten a good look at Albert’s face yet to tell that he was mixed-race. Even if she had, there’s no reason to assume she was asking out of prejudice. Even so, I’m afraid there was a bit of a passive-aggressively acid tone – Minnesota’s rubbing off on me, sad to say – to the ‘no’ that I answered the poor girl with.
It’s sad and infuriating to me, in the same way I found the closure of the Confucius Institute at UMN last year sad and infuriating. It’s bad enough I have family members watching the news and the conflicting reports on WeChat trying to figure out if their friends and acquaintance are safe and healthy, without the very real danger of a backlash against my family for being Chinese in the middle of a racial panic.
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