The Revival of the Yellow Peril: Culture and Scapegoating During COVID-19
By Gwen D’Arcangelis
This piece is part of our Spark series: Unmasked — Anti-Asian Violence amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
In his March 19, 2020 daily press briefing, U.S. President Trump called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” and in the days that followed adamantly defended this epithet by stating that “it comes from China.” Such rhetoric from the nation’s highest government official was one among many instances of the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic, and directly counteracted the World Health Organization’s guideline that geographic location not be included in devising names for new human infectious diseases so as to avoid the stigma that naming practices can foment. The uptick of violence against Chinese in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the dire consequences of such stigma. Advocacy organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice has documented a dramatic rise in anti-Asian hate, from verbal to physical assaults.
Model Minority or Yellow Peril?
Both Trump’s rhetoric and the rise in violence against Chinese and other Asians in the United States reflect persistent ideas of the “Yellow Peril,” a negative image of Asians following their immigration in large numbers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Chinese had been courted for their labor during the Gold Rush, working in mining and, later, industries like railroads, agriculture, manufacturing, and laundries. Whites soon turned from welcoming Chinese — albeit as temporary sojourners from what they thought of as a mysterious “Orient” — to viewing them as labor competition and a threat to Euro-Christian cultural norms and whites’ social power. They maligned Chinese as immoral, dirty, and diseased, and white violence erupted in towns all over the Pacific Northwest in an attempt to drive Chinese out of them. White hostility culminated in a series of discriminatory acts to curtail Chinese immigration, the most notable being the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barring Chinese laborers. These race- and class-based immigration restrictions were the first of their kind, and would be followed by immigration laws excluding other Asians and other ethnic groups unwanted by white society.
Attitudes towards Chinese changed in World War II when the United States sought China as an ally, and the post-war period saw the birth of the model minority myth. The image of Chinese- and other Asian-Americans as good, assimilable minorities served to counter the aims of civil rights movements and black power dissent — whites propped up Asian-Americans as proof that racial inequality had been overcome. But the Yellow Peril image never disappeared — at times lying dormant, at times joining together with the model minority myth (I can remember myself as a teenager in the late 80s subject to my peers’ racial taunts about my dirtiness, at the same time teachers blithely treated me as naturally hardworking and without need of support).
What Vijay Prashad calls “Western fantasies of Chinese domination” began in the 1980s, and U.S. fears only increased with China’s continued rise in economic and military power. When a novel pathogen — SARS-CoV — was identified in Guangdong province, China, in November 2002, later appearing in the United States in March 2003, U.S. discourse focused on China as a disease threat. The resulting resurgence of racialized disease tropes mirror what we see in today’s COVID-19 pandemic context, ever since its identification in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China. From U.S. government officials’ rhetoric to mass media, Chinese are depicted as disease vectors, and Chinese culture as consisting of “exotic” cuisine and unhygienic markets.
Offering current knowledge of how infectious diseases arise and spread can help counter these uninformed ideas about China and Chinese culture in relation to disease.
Dispelling Myths about China and Disease
Animals are not to blame: Human patterns of agriculture, food consumption, and land use drive disease emergence. Research suggests that zoonotic species (viruses and other pathogens that spread between humans and non-human animals) are the source of about 60% of pathogens infecting humans — and about 75% of emerging (i.e. new, re-emerged, or newly spread) infections. The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 shares a genetic profile similar to one of the many coronaviruses found in bats, hardy hosts who tend to not get sick from these viruses (similar to how humans largely coexist with seasonal influenza while maintaining general health). But when zoonotic pathogens infect new hosts, these new hosts typically cannot handle them with the same ease. Such is the case with the 2020 novel coronavirus and its infection of humans.
Whether SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through direct contact with bats or through an intermediate host is still unknown (and may never be definitively known). But disease ecologists have demonstrated that it is the interactions between species that are the main factor in new disease emergence. Moreover, the factors driving zoonotic outbreaks in humans are largely human-made. The 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the United States arose when a Texas distributor imported small mammals (which turned out to be suffering from monkeypox) from Ghana to an Illinois facility housing prairie dogs for sale as pets — infecting the latter and their human handlers. Human encroachment into wildlife habitats via agriculture expansion, deforestation, and other forms of land development account for much of the conditions that put multiple species into new and intensified relationship. The 1998–99 Nipah outbreak in Malaysia resulted from a combination of deforestation and the migration of fruit-eating bats carrying Nipah virus to cultivated orchards and pig farms — and eventually their human handlers.
Industrialized factory farms and urban expansion produce large, susceptible populations of human and non-human animals. The first known COVID-19 outbreak was in a live market in Wuhan. But the first known case occurred weeks earlier, totally outside of the market — suggesting that the market was simply a place where one infected human came into contact with other humans. Live markets, as well as small backyard farms, have been met with international scrutiny as a source of zoonotic disease outbreaks. However, studies show that it is factory farms that are primarily responsible for the large-scale spread of these diseases. Our most recent preceding pandemic, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic first identified in the southwestern United States and in Mexico, stemmed from the increased contact between wild birds (hardy hosts who are asymptomatic carriers) with highly susceptible populations of poultry and pigs on industrialized (i.e. densely packed, low genetic diversity) farms. The proximity of the farms to densely populated human centers was the final condition for the disease to jump into and spread widely among humans.
Thus, it is not China’s cuisine (or any culture’s food preferences), its small markets, or its small farms that produce significant disease outbreaks among domesticated livestock; it is the enormous swaths of domesticated livestock in factory farms. Indeed, it is China’s role as a major producer of the world’s meat that makes it a hot spot for livestock industry outbreaks; as are the United States and Mexico per the H1N1 flu pandemic. But it is too easy to blame these locales — and there are many more — when they are merely sites in a global chain of industrialized meat production. The world’s consumers of meat also bear responsibility — their dependence on this industry drives this enormous scale of production.
No one nation is solely responsible for a pandemic’s spread; but some can serve as a model. The initial outbreak(s) of a pandemic is an important site of intervention. However, if an emerging pathogen is contagious enough, as SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be, it is extremely challenging to contain its spread. What will matter more is the combined containment efforts of governments around the world.
Many of the containment efforts directed at COVID-19 derive from studies of what worked during the 1918 flu that ravaged millions around the world. Yet no epidemiologist would deny the uncertainty entailed in striking the right balance of public health measures and the timing of their implementation — particularly for an unknown disease such as COVID-19. But we can look to some relatively successful containment efforts thus far. China, site of the first known outbreak, put into effect a variety of measures, from intensive contact tracing and quarantine to social distancing and personal protection and prevention. China’s response, along with those of South Korea and Vietnam among others, can serve as a model for countries like the U.S. that continue to struggle to contain the pandemic.
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world but the health status of its populations is distributed unevenly: for instance, black and native folks have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Marginalized groups not only have more existing health conditions, but are more concentrated among job types with greater risks of exposure, reflecting a long history of systemic inequality and inadequate health care access. A nation — and the globe — is only as healthy as its most vulnerable.
We Should Rely on Epidemiology and Disease Ecology Sciences, Not Racist Stereotypes
The current anti-Chinese/anti-Asian sentiment in the United States reflects an attempt — from the nation’s president on down to the individual — to deflect from U.S. participation in global patterns of consumption and land use on the one hand, and U.S. government’s efficacy (or lack thereof) in containment and provision of health resources. As we continue to meet the challenges of COVID-19, we must contest the distracting ruse of the Yellow Peril and instead keep sight of current knowledge of how and why disease spreads — what disease ecologists and epidemiologists tell us about the factors driving infectious disease emergence and spread, as well as the social conditions that promote health care and well-being equitably.
Gwen D’Arcangelis is associate professor in Gender Studies at Skidmore College. Her areas of teaching and research include gender, race, and science; feminist science fiction; disease and empire; and feminist and anti-imperial praxis. She has published on the construction of white scientific masculinity in U.S. national security discourse, gendered Orientalism in the U.S. news media during the 2003 SARS disease scare, and nurse activism during the War on Terror. She has a forthcoming book, titled Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility.
