Blog
Foreword
In this section, you can find topic-based clusters of information and analysis. Based on the collected data, we offer succinct reviews and brief summaries of the phenomena related to Sinophobia and epidemic.
We also welcome submission of reviews and analytical essays. If you want to contribute to this section, please send an email to sinophobia.tracker@gmail.com.
Doctor Li and the Crown-wearing Virus explains what the virus is, its harm, and how to avoid its harm. It also introduces the heroes behind the story of COVID-19--Doctor Li Wenliang and Doctor Ai Fen from Wuhan, China. When they first realized the danger of coronavirus, they tried to warn people of its danger.
Jing Wang
In this review, we mainly offer a brief timeline on the myth of bat soup. Racist tropes often use animals and their associations with diseases to dehumanize a certain group of people. Institutional settings, such as media, may further complicate such transcultural perceptions.
Li Li
Since the beginning of the 2019 novel Coronavirus (henceforth 2019-nCoV) outbreak, seeking for the origin of 2019-nCoV has been a hotly discussed topic on the Internet. People tend to be keen on finding the “culprit” to blame for what happened. Here we offer a brief review of several scientific articles regarding 2019-nCoV and its bat origin.
My resourceful American friends, it is now the time to use your political and social influence to save US. We are at a critical juncture in our fight against the COVID-19 and will lose badly if we don’t act now. Simply put, we are at a situation similar to China in early January or Italy two weeks ago. While I was hesitant to write this post because I am not an epidemiologist, it is my responsibility to offer you information and assessment that I have gained in the past month to call to your attention the immediacy of this issue. I will try to make my six points straightforward and clear, with six illustrative figures.
Interviewees Li Li and Jing Wang
Interviewed by Amy Decillis, Jingzhi Xu, Jiannan Shi
A face mask is not just a medical product. It is also a cultural artifact.
—Wang Jing
“Fear and discrimination will not take us far.” These words are shown on the homepage of “Sinophobia Tracker,” a website that archives and documents the information on sinophobia, its spill-over effects, as well as the counter efforts worldwide during the COVID-19 outbreak. Here, sinophobia is defined as racist or xenophobic sentiment against China, Chinese culture, or people of Chinese heritage. During the COVID-19 outbreak, sinophobia is particularly manifested in anti-Asian racism as in some countries people of East Asian features are often regarded as Chinese.
Also seen on the homepage is the shape of a thumbnail symbolizing the admonishing, policing and silencing of Doctor Li Wenliang. To Wang Jing and Li Li who created the “Sinophobia Tracker” project and built the website, the death of Doctor Li was a “wakeup” call, prompting them to do something to “record, remember and carry on.” Wang Jing is a postdoctoral fellow at Shanghai New York University (NYU Shanghai) whose work mainly focuses on globalization and Muslims in China. Li Li is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen. While COVID-19 is already an unforgettable epidemic, Wang and Li want to ensure that no one will forget the racism and sinophobia revealed by it.
The interview took place on February 26, 2020, conducted by three NYU Shanghai students — Amy DeCillis, Jingzhi Xu, and Jiannan Shi. Since the interview, the outbreak continues to spread rapidly around the globe, and has been declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11. The development of the outbreak in different countries as well as governments’ response to it informs our discussion on the outbreak in the political context. This is particularly true when it comes to questions of certain policies and measures taken at cross-national or local level with an aim of containment. Some of those questions are discussed in the interview and our readers may agree with the views presented here, or have their own. We encourage you to tell us your views via different platforms including Wechat, facebook, instagram or email.
I Used to Say: “Sacrifice Is Unavoidable”
Each and every generation navigates its own path to self-salvation, and hope arises from nowhere except humans ourselves.
Luo Xin (罗新) is a professor at Peking University whose work mainly focuses on how dynasties founded by ethnic minorities have shaped Chinese history. Born in Hubei province, Luo and his family were impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. “剩余价值Surplus Value” is a culture podcast program created by three female media practitioners. In February, Surplus Value invited Luo for a conversation. They spoke about what was happening then in Hubei, as well as plagues in history, militarized language, nationalism and internationalism. “Humanity” is the point where all these ponderings eventually led them. As was written in the original Surplus Value post:
We are talking about humans as bearers of rights, not units of profit . . . We are talking about humans as alive in the real world rather than exploited by institutions . . . We are talking about humans as those ordinary people who deserve our respect despite having few commendable achievements. They are not abstract symbols, but concrete existences, divided by no border . . . We talk about humans because we believe that they are fundamental to modern civilization. Each and every generation navigates its own path to self-salvation, and hope arises from nowhere except humans ourselves.
Structural racism after 9/11 and during COVID-19
By Jing Wang
“It feels like 9/11.” A Chinese friend in the United States commented to me through Zoom, a most popular digital conferencing platform in the time of the current pandemic, “I mean, after 9/11, Muslims are afraid of going out in the streets. So are we now.”
Nowadays, it is not uncommon to hear friends commenting on the societal impact of COVID-19 and likening it to 9/11 in terms of the negative impacts on the Muslim communities around the world. My research focuses on Muslim minorities in China and Islamophobia from comparative perspectives. Having closely tracked the surge of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia for over three months by far, I come to see how sudden global events like a terrorist attack or pandemic could stir up racism in structurally similar ways.
Almost two decades ago, the falling of the twin towers at the center of Manhattan shocked the world. Images of planes crashing into the buildings in New York and Washington D.C. sent a chill down the spine of many Americans as well as its Muslim communities. Many Muslims—no matter practicing or non-practicing, citizens or immigrants— suddenly felt unsafe because of race, religion, or cultural practices. They were worried that their seemingly “Middle East” physical features, brown skin colors, donning of veils, languages, or even just the simple act of carrying a backpack in the subway would invite looks of suspicion and panic.
Yasmin is an international student residing in a southern US city. A queer activist back in China, she participates in the graduate union campaign in her university and is also a community organiser. She is among a group in the Chinese diaspora who are involved in country-of-residence social movements, a reality that tends to be overlooked in the landscape of contemporary social movements.
Diaspora activism occupies a strange position in today’s social movements. It is at least a century-old phenomenon, with radical anarchists and communists transgressing national boundaries to breed revolutions during the early twentieth century being the most notable example (Anderson 2013). The history of Chinese diaspora activism could also date back to the late Qing dynasty, when the diaspora established multiple revolutionary groups overseas (Lai 2010). However, both narratives and practices of diaspora activism underwent a gradual conservative turn with the strengthening of national borders, the end of the Cold War, and the formalisation of social movement theories during the last century that are often strictly confined to national contexts.
Nowadays, stemming from Hirschman’s (1978) famous ‘exit and voice’ framework, public memories of diaspora activism are conspicuously reduced to activists’ involvement in topics directly corresponding to their homelands, usually non-democracies with a repressive system (Quinsaat 2013). However, based on my study of Chinese diaspora activism, I argue that such essentialist tendencies frames social movements in non-democracies as antithetical to those in democracies, trivialising the potential interaction and mutual learning between the two fields. Not only does it risk snatching away the agency of diaspora populations, but it also curbs our ability to imagine the breadth and depth of transnational activism that is taking place in today’s multi-layered political sphere.
1) When you see people mix up the names of Asian/Asian Canadian colleagues, calling them by a wrong name without realizing it, bring this to their attention so that it’s not repeated in the future. Don’t ask your colleagues for a “nick name” when it’s unfamiliar to you, or ask what their “real name” is, if you are given a name that seems familiar to you.
2) When you see the names of your Asian/Asian Canadian colleagues misspelled in an email or a document, let the writer/sender know, so that it is corrected if possible, or at least not repeated. It is one thing that Asian names are mispronounced (although it will be nice if people make a bit more effort, but no one expects perfection and the bar is very low for many), but it is another that a name clearly in English alphabet (not in a different language) is written incorrectly. If this is a challenge, just copy and paste how the person signs off.
With the rise of anti-Asian racism, science communication can play a vital role in fighting against racism. However, it can also fuel racial hatred and oriental imagination, if done improperly.
In the aftermath of the killings in Georgia, New York Times published a news piece titled “China has approved its fifth COVID-19 vaccine, and it’s made from the ovary cells of hamsters.” The original title can be found in this Twitter thread.
One Saturday morning in 2018 I set out to get some coffee after dropping my daughter for pregame warm-ups. Picture it: the beginning of high school soccer season, a sunny moment filled with promise and jitters. At the CC’s — itself crowded with people there for a vintage car show — I stood in line, daydreaming and people-watching when I heard behind me: “Ching a chonk a chong chink chink.”
I’ve known noises like these since my childhood in Kentucky. And as was the case that morning, it was a group of kids who stood looking at me as I turned around. Who repeated themselves when I said, “Hey guys, that’s really not nice.” And when I raised my voice to say that their remarks were racist, a woman swooped in, fierce with anger and self-righteousness, asked me how I dared to speak in such a way, and told me that I needed “to get the fuck out of here.”
In early February 2020, COVID-19 sparked increasing racist violence against Chinese communities in the United Kingdom. In response to this, we as Chinese feminists who study in the country initiated a campaign called ChineseAgainstRacistVirus. Along with coordinating posts on social media, we organised a public protest in London’s Trafalgar Square. Four months later, the death of George Floyd in the United States reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement around the world. In response to BLM, we coordinated another campaign, called ‘Chinese4blacklives’. Through these actions, we constantly experienced marginalities and vulnerabilities from our multilayered identities and the entangled global political environment in which we are living.