Analysts warn against xenophobia and racism in the US as it rolls out US$2 trillion aid package 

Wall Street in New York City is quiet in this picture taken on March 24 local time. Both the city and the United States as a whole are seeing confirmed cases of COVID-19 rising fast. (WANG YING / XINHUA)

US politicians’ stigmatization of China on the novel coronavirus has sparked concerns over racial discrimination and their disrespect for medical science and disregard for the World Health Organization, analysts say.

As the coronavirus continues to spread in the United States, the White House tried labeling the illness a “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus”, terms that experts argued are inaccurate and have led to increased incidents of racist attacks against Asians of different ethnicities. 

Benjamin Neuman, Professor and Chair of Biological Sciences of Texas A&M University-Texarkana in the US, has personal experience with naming coronaviruses, including helping to name this most recent one as a member of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses.

“The virus has a name, SARS-CoV-2, that succinctly conveys that this new virus is a close relative, in genetic terms, of the original SARS coronavirus. 

“The disease also has a name, COVID-19, that tells you that even though the virus is related to the one that caused SARS, this disease is a little different,” Neuman said. 

“Calling it the ‘China virus’ would be inaccurate and would seem to me to be deliberately inflammatory — something out of a schoolyard bully’s playbook, not a science textbook,” he said.

“The point of a name is to give people a way to accurately and specifically refer to a virus, and to tell how it is related to other viruses.”

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the use of the name COVID-19 is to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. He and other WHO leaders have repeatedly warned against stigmatization in the past two months.

“To stigmatize a country or a location by associating the virus with that place is improper,” said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “It is not only anti-science, but is xenophobic.

“(The world needs to) move to shared values of respecting countries and respecting ethnicities and adopting a fully respectful non-discriminatory attitude toward all populations, and not encouraging xenophobia in any way that links any ethnic group in a negative association with any disease.”

Helen Sawczak, national CEO of the Australia China Business Council, considers the sort of commentary by the US politicians as “particularly unnecessary and unhelpful”, and regards COVID-19 as a global humanitarian crisis that will have profound economic impacts.

“WHO officials have emphasized that the virus does not have an ethnicity, does not respect borders and requires a united response,” Sawczak said.

“As China is beginning to contain the virus, and resume normal life, Australia and other countries are beginning to deal with major disruptions to their way of life in response to COVID-19 as it spreads to other parts of the world.”

In her view, Australian companies are keen to ride out this storm, and restore business confidence and get back to normal as quickly as possible. The road to recovery from this pandemic and its economic impact will require much greater international cooperation and a de-escalation of tensions between all parties.

Racist sentiment

Aaron Jed Rabena, a research fellow for Manila-based think tank Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress, said the Trump administration’s emphasizing the “Chineseness” of the virus stigmatizes China as a country. “It can also inflame racist sentiments — and not just against the Chinese,” the researcher said.

He has observed that other Asians, too, are victimized because of their similar appearance to Chinese, pointing to reports of people in Europe and the US attacking Asians and blaming them for the outbreak.

Reddy said: “India also had this problem of a similar kind. So we are no strangers to this nature of propaganda, which is xenophobic. We fully have solidarity with the Chinese position on this, at least the scientists do. And I believe that we shall together counter this.”

Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a community-based civil rights organization in San Francisco, said: “The president of the United States, and other White House officials, using the term ‘Chinese virus’, or ‘Kung-Flu’, or ‘Wuhan virus’, we believe is inciting and provoking this anti-Asian sentiment and is really responsible in the rise of these more violent acts.

“He’s refusing to call it by its correct medical name, which is COVID-19, or the coronavirus. He’s refusing to do that, even after it was called to his attention that this is harming and endangering the lives of Asian Americans,” she added.

In response to the increasingly frequent harassment resulting from the coronavirus, Choi’s organization, along with the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council and the San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department, have launched a reporting center to track cases of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders throughout the country.

The center opened on March 19, and by March 20 it had already received 60 reports of cases from community members on the site, Choi said.

One of the cases involves a 12-year-old Asian American boy in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, who was so badly beaten by middle school classmates that he had to visit the hospital emergency room. On March 14, a man from Myanmar and his young son were two of four people stabbed by a man at a grocery store in Midland, Texas. 

The violence has spiraled so out of hand that David Liu, the owner of Arcadia Firearm & Safety in San Gabriel Valley, an area with a high concentration of Chinese immigrants, said gun sales at his store were 10 times the usual amount in the past three weeks, with many customers buying firearms to protect themselves against possible racial attacks and fear of social disorder caused by the coronavirus.

Zi Yang, Senior Analyst, China Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, said the US administration’s insistence on linking the name of the virus to Wuhan or China contributes to racism against Chinese people or those of Chinese descent. 

“The word ‘Chinese’ has multiple meanings, either referring to something from China or the Chinese language, culture, or people. We have already seen a number of cases where people of Chinese background faced discrimination or even violence. Although not all of those incidents were due to such a statement, it certainly played its part in (stoking) Sinophobic sentiment.” 

Cases of a strange, severe pneumonia were witnessed last November in Italy before the world even became aware of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, said Giuseppe Remuzzi, an Italian physician.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Remuzzi said some family doctors told him that they had seen the pneumonia, particularly in old people, in December and even in November. “It means that the virus was circulating at least in Lombardy before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.”

Meanwhile, a social medial clip filed from the US revealed a servicewoman attended the 7th CISM Military World Games in Wuhan as a cyclist in October. But the officer was reported to have a close relative who worked in a military lab of infectious diseases in Maryland which was shut down before. Another relative of hers was believed to be the first COVID-19 patient in a European nation. 

The WHO on March 24 said that the United States had the potential to become the global epicenter of the pandemic, citing a “very large acceleration” in coronavirus infections.

Peter Gries, the Lee Kai Hung chair and director of the Manchester China Institute, and Professor of Chinese politics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, said blaming foreigners by calling COVID-19 a “Chinese” or “US military” or “Italian” virus is irresponsible, because such language can contribute to prejudice in both China and the West.

“Xenophobia — whether in China, the US, or anywhere — will close borders, inhibiting our ability to cooperate in fighting a disease that knows no national boundaries,” he said.

US$2 trillion aid package

Also on March 25, US senators and Trump administration officials reached an agreement on a massive economic stimulus bill to alleviate the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak, the negotiators said.

The Senate was set to vote on the US$2 trillion package later in the day, with the House of Representatives expected to follow suit soon after.

“This is a wartime level of investment into our nation,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech announcing the pact after days of negotiations between Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other top aides to President Donald Trump.

“We’re going to pass this legislation later today,” McConnell said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called the measure “the largest rescue package in American history,” describing it as a “Marshall Plan” for hospitals and medical needs, in a reference to the US-funded program that helped rebuild Europe after World War II.

“Help is on the way, big help and quick help,” Schumer said.

Contact the writers at kelly@chinadailyapac.com