Groundhog Day: anti-Chinese sentiment and COVID-19
When I heard that China would resume issuing passports during a surge in COVID cases, I braced myself for the inevitable unwelcome. Sure enough, the US and other countries imposed more stringent entry requirements on travelers from China. Even if legitimately motivated by public health, the policy choice and public response reflect a long history of anti-Chinese sentiment that has revived with the onset of the pandemic almost exactly 3 years ago.
The National Immigration Administration of China said it will start taking applications this weekend (beginning January 8) for passports for Chinese people to go abroad. Prior to the pandemic, China was the largest sender of visitors to neighboring Asian countries and a significant source of travelers to Europe and the US. Those countries are now imposing barriers to visitors from China after a multi-year pause in travel due to China’s self-imposed travel restrictions. For example, Japan, South Korea, and India responded by requiring passengers show negative COVID tests for travelers from the country.
U.S. officials did the same. According to a State Department travel advisory, passengers flying to the US must show proof of a negative test taken 48-hours before boarding a plane. The requirement will apply both to passengers flying directly to the US from China, including Hong Kong, as well to passengers flying through gateway cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. At least one cruise line has imposed a similar testing requirement.
To be sure, the US testing requirement is focused on the locus of travel rather than race and nationality. And there is a real health risk that comes from the abrupt reversal of China’s zero COVID protocols and their simultaneous unwillingness to reveal reliable data about rising rates of infection. As the State Department says, the testing requirement is a “public health policy” motivated “by the surge in COVID-19 cases in [China] and the risk of the emergence of a new viral variant given the lack of adequate and transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data being reported from [China].”
But the signals sent by the travel restriction may fan the flames of anti-Chinese sentiment. A USA Today story interviews a Stop AAPIT Hate co-founder who says, “What we’ve seen is that it’s not only policies alone that spur incidents, but the language that elected officials and public figures use.” Stop AAPI Hate, a San Francisco-based consortium of several groups formed in response to rising anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it reports 11,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate since the inception of the pandemic in early 2020. Its co-founder says,
There are many sources of information that drive animosity, but combined, it has the effect of legitimizing the scapegoating of Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans.
That concern extends to displaced discrimination onto persons mistaken for being Chinese. Frank Wu, president of Queens College CUNY (disclosure: he was formerly dean of UC Hastings, before I joined the faculty), noted that the pandemic’s accompanying rise in anti-Asian sentiment not only targeted Asian Americans but even others thought to be. In April 2021, for instance, a 70-year-old Mexican American woman was reportedly brutalized aboard a metro bus in Los Angeles by an attacker who mistook her as Asian. “Many of the people attacked were not of Chinese descent,” Wu said. “But they were blamed for the virus. What the hate crimes showed is that haters do not draw distinctions.”
Moreover, public health experts and European countries have called into question the effectiveness of testing for a virulent virus and declined to impose a requirement on travel from China. An op-ed from Asian American writer Frankie Huang in the New York Times opines,
Why does the administration drag its feet on XBB.1.5 but treat the “China variant” as a dangerous, volatile plague that must be kept from invading America? This echoes the travel ban in early 2020 on passengers from China, a racist policy decision that focused on the spread of the coronavirus from China while ignoring European travelers who brought it to New York. By treating only Covid from China as a real danger and domestic cases as presumably milder, the U.S. government effectively endorses the centuries-old tropes of Asians as the “diseased other” and the notion that the coronavirus is, in fact, the “China virus.”
We have learned that the coronavirus knows no nationalities. Treating it as a uniquely Chinese problem pathologizes Asian people and also fails to protect the American public, whose understanding of how the virus spreads and harms depends on consistent and scientifically rigorous messaging from the government that has been lacking at critical moments. This type of racialization masked in racially-neutral terms easily evades legal sanction and is endemic in US policies that promote “colorblind nationalism,” a term that I use to describe the broader phenomenon in a forthcoming article with Cardozo Law Review.
MHC