The Chinese Virus: A Dangerous Game of Blame

Language is a complex beast. Perhaps in an ideal world we would be able to use language in such a way that concepts and ideas could be shared from universal perspectives that are untinged by unfortunate contexts, but the systems we utilize for discourse don’t easily allow for this. Racial slurs are culturally harmful because, even if one says it for educational purposes or otherwise in the present, it is virtually impossible to divorce the term from its history of usage. Similarly, one cannot use terms like “socialism” or “communism” to talk about conceptualized forms of government without drawing a link to oppressive failed states that carve out their own places in international history. The swastika, once a symbol of peace and divinity in faiths like hinduism and buddhism, can likely never be discussed in that context again without acknowledging the massive genocidal elephant in the room. 

Language is coded, and what you think you are saying frequently cannot encompass the entirety of what you are actually saying. The advent of “political correctness” isn’t to police tone for the sake of being authoritarian, but rather to raise awareness that how a topic is discussed has an influence over the impact of that topic. And when you’re talking something as severe and universally impactful as the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, it pays to be conscious about how language is being used. 

The pandemic in question needs no explanation or introduction. At the time of writing, there have been more than 2 million infections worldwide with nearly 150 thousand deaths, with some countries hit dramatically harder than others. Entire industries have been shut down, millions of people are out of work, and social distancing has become the new law of the land. Many of those that still find themselves employed, those deemed “essential workers,” risk their health every day they step outside their own front doors. Regardless of who you are or where you’re from, if you are a functional adult in the year 2020, it is virtually impossible for your life not to have been impacted by recent events, almost certainly in the negative. 

And, as is our nature when something impacts our lives in the narrative, we seek out a villain to focus our attention on.

This time around, that villain is China. While the outbreak itself is widely believed to have originated specifically from the city of Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, the Chinese government does indeed deserve much of the blame for the situation in which we find ourselves. Mutations in viruses and other pathogens happen all the time, and it isn’t necessarily the fault of the country of origin when something like this takes place. But if there is one thing that we can definitively hold China accountable for it is its concerted effort to clamp down on efforts from Chinese doctors to warn the rest of the world of the impending threat. Effective data collection and coordinated readiness have undoubtedly been harmed by the Chinese government’s campaign of censorship, and this is a fact that is widely agreed upon by the administrations of many of the most powerful western nations, including the U.S., the U.K., and France. It is a virtual certainty that, if and when a sense of normality returns to the world, the relationship between China and the west will undergo a period of critical re-evaluation. 

And yet, despite understanding and acknowledging the role China has played in our current predicament, I would argue that it is still grossly irresponsible to attach references to China to virus-related terminology. 

Colloquially speaking, the pandemic has no shortage of names. Although this coronavirus is only the most recent entry on an expanding list of coronaviruses, the term “coronavirus” itself provides enough of a context to foster understanding between participants in a discussion. MERS and SARS are both types of coronavirus, and yet there exists a general understanding that talking about “coronavirus” in 2020 isn’t meant to be a reference to MERS or previously-experienced versions of SARS. If one desires to be more specific, one could refer to the scientific name of the disease caused by the coronavirus; Covid-19. 

Certain public voices, not the least of which include that of President Donald Trump, have alternative names for the coronavirus. Trump himself has referred to the virus with terminology such as the foreign virus, Chinese flu, and the Chinese virus. Most media outlets were quick to jump on the racial implications of using names like this, and in typical Trump fashion he, as well as many of his most public supporters, claimed persecution by a rabid media quick to cry “racism” at anything Trump-related. Trump instead insisted upon a focus on accuracy in his reframing of coronavirus; “It comes from China. It’s not racist at all, not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

One of the more particularly egregious defenses of Trump’s rhetoric actually came from Bill Maher, usually a prominent Trump critic on his HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher, in a video posted to Maher’s YouTube channel on April 10. In this video, Maher ridiculed the left’s arguments of racism and pointed out that most recorded viral outbreaks are named for the region from which they originate. More specifically, Maher categorically named the Zika virus (named after the Zika forest), the Ebola virus (named after the Ebola River), Hantavirus, West Nile virus, the Guinea worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and the Spanish Flu. Unfortunately for Maher, a basic Wikipedia search would expose a critical flaw in his logic, and we only need to pull two examples from his list to explore it; Ebola virus and the Spanish Flu. 

If there is one thing to understand about the Spanish Flu, it is that Maher’s inclusion of it in his list of geographically-named diseases destroys absolutely any credibility of his argument. In reality, Spain was simply the only western nation that was widely reporting on it. The outbreak occurred in 1918, in the midst of World War I. At this time, the outbreak had already claimed lives in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but censors in all four countries greatly limited the dissemination of information related to the pandemic in an effort to keep morale up amongst the troops. Understandably, it is hard to fight an enemy on foreign soil, protecting one’s nation and family, while crippled with the knowledge that the very same nation and family is being devastated by disease miles away. However, Spain remained neutral throughout the war and its press was under no obligation to censor reports of the flu’s impact. In fact, so much information came from Spain during this time that the illness of its own ruler, King Alfonso XIII, was public knowledge. Regardless of the true origins of the 1918 influenza outbreak, the rapid troop movement of the war’s belligerents across the entire European continent made widespread transmission almost too easy. Today, current experts can only hypothesize about the actual source, but they tend to suggest origins such as British soldiers stationed in France, a flu outbreak in Kansas, and yes, even China, but not from within Spain itself. 

The fact that, over a hundred years later, Bill Maher can publicly but very erroneously argue that the Spanish Flu is named as such for geographic significance, and compare it to the terminology currently being used to describe Covid-19, is a testament to how damaging these stigmatizations can be and how long they can potentially stick around. 

Now let’s talk about Ebola virus; while Maher is correct in asserting that Ebola virus takes its name from the Ebola River, located in the northern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there is currently no indication that the virus itself has any connection to the river. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the initial outbreak was recorded in 1976 in a small village known as Yambuku, also located within the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yambuku’s lack of running water, electricity, or general standards of hygiene made it a perfect ground zero for the outbreak. However, it should be noted that the Ebola virus was not referred to as “The Yambuku Virus” or even “The Congo Virus,” and it was chosen to share a name with the Ebola River specifically to avoid potential stigmatization of the already-struggling Yambuku. Even in the 1970s, researchers of deadly diseases were acutely aware of the potential implications inherent in attaching geographic references to outbreak terminology. History would ultimately validate their sense of caution; the worst-recorded outbreak of “Ebola virus” in history would occur in 2014 and originate from southeastern Guinea, nearly 4 thousand kilometers away from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite this new outbreak having nothing to do with neither the Ebola River nor the village of Yambuku (and by extension the Democratic Republic of the Congo), social reactions in the United States still resulted in some stigmatization of a virus as a “black disease.” While the 2014 outbreak was disastrous in magnitude, it did not encompass the entirety of the African continent; the only countries on the African continent that the CDC listed as having been impacted by “widespread transmission” were Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In terms of the actual impact on U.S. citizens, only 11 individuals were treated in total. Still, despite having no tangible impact on public health in the United States, constant media coverage of the Ebola outbreak made it an identifiable part of the average American news diet. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014 reported that 98% of respondents identified as having heard “at least a little” about the disease, and scattered testimonials featured during the same year on news sites like the BBC, the Verge, and the Intercept detail anecdotes from African-Americans. These stories center around racialized responses such as the word “Ebola” being transformed into a chant directed at blacks for the purposes of agitation or individuals who took trips to unaffected nations on the African continent, like Zambia, being subjected to intense public scrutiny upon their return. 

Now imagine how African-Americans would have their daily lives negatively impacted if, during the 2014 outbreak, the president of the United States had routinely referred to Ebola as “the African virus.” 

This is what is at stake for Asian-Americans living in the country today. Even before businesses were closed, social distancing became the norm, and lockdowns were put into place, Asian-Americans were already feeling the impact of racialized stigmatization. It’s crazy to consider it now, but in February, just a little over two months ago, the U.S. was only reporting 12 cases of Covid-19. China, on the other hand, was reporting over 40,000 cases and Wuhan had already been placed under strict lockdown as of the end of January. The growing concern in the U.S. over what was inevitably to come probably manifested most tangibly in the immediate economic impact on Chinese-American owned businesses. Sources such as the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that businesses that operated out of New York’s three Chinatowns were reporting anywhere between a 50-70% drop in business. Unfounded and unsourced rumors that employees at these restaurants had been exposed to the coronavirus, despite never leaving the U.S., carried the potential to turn said restaurants into virtual ghost towns for days on end. 

Today, the coronavirus situation has intensified. People across the country are out of work, stuck at home, dealing with significant disruptions to their daily life, and all of this has a tendency to materialize in forms of anger. It is becoming depressingly uncommon to read more reports of Asian-Americans claiming to have been shouted at in public unprovoked, having their lives threatened, and in the most severe cases being physically attacked. In a time that is already incredibly difficult for the majority of the nation, a subset of its citizens now has to deal with constantly fearing for their wellbeing, and Trump (and Maher’s) insistence on using a term that stigmatizes Asian-Americans only continues to negatively impact their situation. And that’s not even considering the fact that the World Health Organization has specifically recommended against using geographic references in the naming of illnesses, especially considering examples like the Spanish Flu and Ebola virus aren’t even helpful in understanding the nature and/or impact of the disease being described. the notion that, at this point, Covid-19 is in any way a “Chinese virus” paints a dangerously misleading picture, even from the perspective of protecting the health of U.S. citizens. The U.S. currently leads the world in reported Covid-19 cases, and this is despite an undersupply in coronavirus testing kits. Directly beneath the U.S., descending in order from most reported cases, are Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and then China. While there is much international concern over the legitimacy of China’s reports, and rightly so, it is still grossly irresponsible for the Trump administration to lend any credence to the idea that avoiding coronavirus in 2020 means avoiding Asian people. 

So why does Trump continue to focus on the origins of the virus despite the tangible harm it does to Asian-American citizens and its unhelpful nature to virtually anyone else who wants to just stay healthy? The intent isn’t very difficult to grasp; Trump’s response to the encroaching pandemic, or rather his lack of one, has been a repeated topic of criticism even as far back as January. As China and Italy were being locked down, and countries like South Korea were rolling out widespread testing initiatives, Trump was making public statements, especially on Twitter, that contained nonsensical statements like the number of cases in the U.S. would go down and not up, that the administration had caught the virus in time, and that everyone should just keep going to work. By creating a bogeyman in China, Trump is laying the foundation to shift blame off of himself and onto a foreign antagonist in the hopes that his lackluster management of the Covid-19 pandemic won’t negatively impact his electability. 

In the hands of a far more shrewd politician this might actually be a winning strategy. After all, another name Trump likes to use for Covid-19 is “the invisible enemy,” and the evocation of ambiguously-defined antagonists has historically proven to be largely beneficial to rally the people around the cause of the president. Millennials and older will recall the nebulously-defined “war on terror” of the Bush administration that justified the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and likely galvanized enough support around Bush himself to win him a second term as president. 

There is, however, a critical difference between Bush and Trump; Bush was primarily concerned with the impact his words and actions had on the unity of the American people whereas Trump is significantly less concerned. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center saw a predictable rise in islamophobia and yet, rather than pay into that sentiment, Bush appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington just days after the attack to say, among other things, “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about.” For whatever reason, be it genuine, insidious, or somewhere in between, it was important to Bush that his message “the war on terror” not be treated as “the war on Islam.” 

Conversely, Trump wants to proclaim complete innocence from the impact of his messaging, and it’s been a recurring problem throughout the entirety of the Trump administration thus far. As a political candidate, Trump’s most noteworthy policy proposal was perhaps the construction of a massive wall along the Mexican border; an act he claimed would curtail illegal immigration. When pushed on this position in interviews, Trump characterized the proposal as a form of support to the idea that America was “a nation of laws” and a strengthening of U.S. immigration policy. However, when coupled with his statements that Mexico was sending over its “criminals” and “rapists,” and that only some were considered “good people,” Trump’s wall quickly became a symbol of anti-immigration rather than an enforcement of “legal” immigration. Similarly, by turning this policy proposal into a simple and repetitive chant, “build that wall,” Trump had either advertently or inadvertently created a motto that bore the implicit subtext of “keep the Mexicans out.” 

Describing coronavirus as a “foreign virus” produces a near identical effect, and it is not a dramatic leap of logic for one of his supporters to treat this rhetoric as a tacit acknowledgement of the dangers of immigration as a whole. For first-generation immigrants, many of whom are Asian-American, this produces an incredibly toxic existence. Whether this is the intention of Trump or not is not relevant here. As I mentioned before, language is an incredibly coded process, and understanding its impact requires a willingness to examine one’s word choices and choose them appropriately. 

Sadly, this is not something that Donald Trump seems willing to consider, and the end result can only ever be an increasing level of collateral damage inflicted upon certain groups within the American public.