Yellow Peril to COVID-19: Anti-Asian Racism and Public Health Crisis
A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Gidra Zine.
President Trump first referred to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” in a Twitter post on March 16, 2020. In the months that followed, anti-Asian hate crimes spiked dramatically from pre-pandemic levels. In the second half of March alone, 1,100 incidents were documented by the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center. These incidents range from verbal assault to violent attacks, such as the March 14 stabbing of a Hmong American family in Texas and an April 5 acid attack on a Chinese American woman in Brooklyn. In San Francisco, an Asian American bus driver was hospitalized on July 24 after being beaten with a baseball bat for asking three passengers to wear mandatory facemasks.
Amidst mounting criticism related to the administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic, Trump has doubled down on his criticism of China. During an Oval Office press interview on May 7, Trump told reporters, "We went through the worst attack we've ever had on our country... This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never been an attack like this. And it should have never happened. Could've been stopped at the source. Could've been stopped in China.” Trump’s campaign rallies in Oklahoma and Arizona both featured anti-Chinese remarks, referring to COVID-19 as the “Kung Flu.” Trump is actively spreading misinformation about the virus to deflect blame from his own failure to lead the American public through this crisis.
Trump has often demonstrated his ability to utilize media narrative to scapegoat immigrant communities. What is perhaps unique to the current situation is how his rhetoric has transcended discourse and led to the creation of physical propaganda. A cursory search of Ebay reveals dozens of online retailers selling “China virus” merchandise such as t-shirts, bumper stickers, and window decals. A few choice examples of the slogans being used are:
“China lied, people died.”
“COVID-19 Made in China.”
“Coronavirus China’s #1 Export.”
“Even the End of the World Was Made in China.”
We are witnessing the beginning of a dangerous new phase of the “trade war” with China that will jeopardize Asian American communities in the same ways the US-Japan trade disputes once did. One wonders if perhaps future historians will view this period as the start of a new yellow peril.
Like many of this administration’s other tactics, scapegoating immigrants as carriers of disease is nothing new. It is far from the first time that Chinese Americans have been targeted as such. Although much of the anti-Chinese rhetoric in the 1870s-1880s focused on the ruin of white labor, the impact of disease fears in the public imagination carried forward. The pseudo-scientific studies of the late 19th century imbued medicine, and particularly pathology, with an inherent white supremacist attitude.
In her article, “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905,” Joan B. Trauner wrote:
“Chinatown, with its "foul and disgusting vapors," was regarded as the primary source of atmospheric pollution within the city. Numerous citations were issued by the health authorities for such sanitary offenses as "generating unwholesome odors," improper disposal of garbage, faulty construction of privy vaults and drains, and failure to clean market stalls.”
While the overcrowding and substandard living conditions may have increased the likelihood of disease transmission in Chinatown, the notion that Chinese were somehow more prone to illness is flawed racialized logic. Nevertheless, during the 1875-76 smallpox epidemic the SF city health officer J. L. Meares ordered every house in Chinatown to be thoroughly fumigated. When the disease continued to ravage the broader public, Meares offered the following explanation:
“I unhesitatingly declare my belief that the cause is the presence in our midst of 30,000 (as a class) of unscrupulous, lying and treacherous Chinamen, who have disregarded our sanitary laws, concealed and are concealing their cases of smallpox. The Chinese cancer must be cut out of the heart of our city, root and branch, if we have any regard for its future sanitary welfare.”
Despite advances in medicine by the turn of the century when germ theory became widely accepted, Chinese continued to be subjected to discriminatory public health policy. During the Hawaiian bubonic plague scare of December 1899, the entire Honolulu Chinatown community was forcibly evicted and their properties burnt to the ground. Facing a similar scare in California during May 1900, President McKinley authorized the Surgeon General to “forbid the sale or donation of transportation to Asiatics or other races particularly liable to the disease.” Chinese and Japanese were refused the right to leave the state without certificates of vaccination.
Along with the economic, cultural, and assimilationist arguments for Chinese Exclusion and the broader Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917, disease played a significant role in the racially restrictive immigration policy of the 20th century. The sad irony is that while public health officials were busy discriminating against the Asian American community, the US government was actively perpetuating communicable disease among Asian immigrants held in detention at Angel Island Immigration Station.
In October 1920 a three-month meningitis epidemic broke out at the overcrowded Angel Island immigrant detention center, which had poor sanitation, limited access to clean water, and few medical services. A 1921 article written in Public Health Reports by Joseph Bolten of the US Public Health Service notes that overcrowding and inclement weather, which forced Chinese immigrants to spend more time indoors, was the probable cause for this epidemic. However, Bolten concluded that it was the Chinese immigrants who brought the disease in the first place and therefore Angel Island was not at fault. Of the fifteen cases (all of whom were Chinese males) there was a mortality rate of more than 50 percent, for which Bolten blamed, “the patients did not report themselves sick until they were almost in a state of collapse.”
Japanese Americans would face similar concerns during their wartime incarceration in US concentration camps, which had the potential for great epidemic disease. Of particular risk were the temporary assembly centers that were hastily built in race tracks and fairgrounds, which often placed families in horse stables that still stank of manure. Japanese American physicians were tasked with tending to their own community with limited resources, often paying for vaccines out of pocket to provide inoculations for whooping cough, smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases. The Japanese American physicians were paid less than $25 a month to care for their fellow inmates, while forced to live in these unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.
In a March 25 virtual discussion titled “Contagion in the Camps” held by Tsuru for Solidarity, Satsuki Ina recalled her firsthand experience with epidemics in the Tule Lake concentration camp.
“We lived in very confined circumstances in military barracks, and the overcrowding led to repeated incidences of epidemic and contagious diseases. We had to share public latrines and mess halls, and very inadequate medical services. My brother and I got chicken pox and we were quarantined for close to three months, unable to go outside with very limited medical care.”
Another example of government culpability in the spread of disease among the Asian American community came in the wake of US military aggression in Southeast Asia. As Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees began to be resettled into the United States, epidemics of measles and other viral diseases swept through Camp Pendleton and other refugee camps where individuals were being held in temporary shelters.
Dr. William H. Foege, the epidemiologist who led the US Public Health Service's refugee program, offered the following quote in a 1975 New York Times article on the subject:
“We've shown that this group of people is coming in with no more than the amount of disease you would expect from other aliens. But when you put people for extended periods under tent conditions, you are asking for more disease problems… that could be prevented if you could keep people moving, out of the camps.”
Despite this widespread acceptance within the public health service that overcrowding and substandard living conditions are principal perpetrators of disease, the US government seems to have either experienced collective amnesia or are willfully neglecting vulnerable populations today. Like the historical cases mentioned earlier, the government is putting lives at risk by keeping immigrants detained in close quarters without adequate safety measures amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently operates three prisons where immigrant children are detained with their families; Karnes and Dilley in Texas, and Berks County Family Detention Center near Reading, Pennsylvania. There are dozens of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the facilities at Karnes and Dilley, and likely just a matter of time before Berks also succumbs to the virus. Since the pandemic began, at least ten immigrants have died in ICE custody.
Meanwhile, Asian American communities will continue to suffer for the irresponsible and intentional scapegoating by an administration whose white nationalist and isolationist ambitions have been made painfully clear.