Sinophobia, Pt. 1: The Unspoken Virus
The first in a four-part series, multidisciplinary playwright, actor, spoken-word poet and Mandarin translator, Enxi Chang 常恩悉 , explores the increased prevalence of Sinophobia, and Western society’s reluctance to admit it.
@miss_enxi
The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan triggered a wave of discrimination, abuse and violence towards ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) communities in the West, with thousands of hate crimes being reported a week: from old ladies in New York being set on fire, to a Singaporean man being viciously assaulted in broad daylight on Oxford Street. Popular Asian-American media outlet NextShark has practically become a rolling newsreel for attacks like this, and there is no doubt that our communities are currently violently under attack. This has only been exacerbated by former US President Donald Trump's continued insistence on referring to COVID-19 as 'The Chinese Virus', or even 'Kung-Flu', emboldening racists across the world to enact public hatred towards people of ESEA descent.
This is, of course, nothing new. Racism against ESEAs has long been considered a joke or non-existent, which has led to the widespread normalization of racism towards our communities. From personal experience, growing up I was casually called a chink, subject to jokes about penis size, eating dogs, being a Communist (in the case of the more geopolitically aware white kids), being good at maths, not being good at maths... you know, the usual. I'm sure most ESEAs who grew up in the UK or US can relate to these experiences.
However, this insidious level of normalized racism is precisely why racists have felt emboldened enough to attack us in broad daylight: they know they will face little in the way of repercussions, since ESEA communities have historically been considered meek, subservient and compliant, a stereotype we often live up to, leading to a lack of activism and advocacy within our own communities, let alone society at large.
Since COVID, ESEA communities across the diaspora have begun speaking up en masse, and progress has been made. In the UK, BESEA individuals like Viv Yau, Daniel York Loh and MP Sarah Owen, as well as organisations like besea.n (who I believe coined the term 'ESEA', a term I hope goes down in history as the UK's first major contribution to global Asian diaspora discourse) and End The Virus of Racism, have made enormous strides in combating racism against our community, with the very first parliamentary debate on systemic anti-ESEA racism, discussing news articles relating to COVID-19 disproportionately featuring people of ESEA descent, being held thanks to their efforts.
However, there is one peculiar blind spot in anti-ESEA racism discourse, especially given the COVID-related nature of the racism currently facing our community: the glaring avoidance of the word Sinophobia.
Sinophobia, or Anti-Chinese sentiment, is defined as hatred or fear against China, its people, its diaspora, and culture. The fact that I even have to define this word is symptomatic of why it's become such an insidious problem in the first place.
Sinophobia is everywhere. It is undeniable that the actions of the CCP have earned it a few friends on the global stage, and people are understandably worried about its encroaching authoritarianism and apparent lack of concern for human rights.
It is also undeniable that the CCP and China are demonised by Western media to an absurd degree, with editorials, news articles, videos and more, fixating on almost every single thing China does, being churned out by the hour. To use just one example - British puppet show Spitting Image recently made an excruciatingly cringe-worthy sketch parodying Chinese premier Xi Jinping. The sketch features Xi performing an asinine hip-hop parody called 'the Jinping shuffle' on his TikTok account, lampooning mainstream discourse over TikTok datamining, which I presume the writers felt was the absolute height of cutting-edge social commentary. To call this shitty little ditty ‘satire’ would be an overstatement; not only does it manage to be as painfully, offensively unfunny as the majority of Spitting Image non sequitur-based 'humour', but its depiction of Xi - complete with a mock Chinese accent and a pangolin puppet running around - is troublingly racist.
Of course, the show's target audience clearly doesn’t feel this way. The comment section is almost entirely populated with people calling them brave for daring to make fun of the Chinese premier:
'Forget satirising Trump or Biden - THIS takes balls.'
'Well, you can't say Spitting Image doesn't have any balls. It was nice knowing you guys.'
One person in the comments even went as far as to say this video made them feel 'proud to be [British]'. Ironic, given that it made me want to revoke my citizenship.
Either way, the comments on that video are telling. It takes an impressive amount of mass cognitive dissonance, social engineering, propaganda and media brainwashing to convince millions of people across the West that you cannot say or do anything that criticises the Chinese government... by constantly pumping out media that criticises the Chinese government. In the grand scheme of things, something tells me that between governing a nation of 1.4 billion people and navigating increasingly fraught international relations, the CCP may have bigger fish to fry than an obscure British puppet show with about as much satirical edge as Balamory.
Whether or not the Chinese government deserves this criticism is another question entirely, but I cannot think of another nation in recent history that receives such aggressively frequent, biased and one-sided coverage as China. Many will respond to the above with 'I don't hate the Chinese people, just the government!', a platitude containing about as much self-awareness as classics like 'I'm not racist, I have Black friends', or perhaps more fittingly, 'I'm not racist, I have an Asian wife!'
When anti-China reporting and discourse is mired in racist language deliberately manufactured to conjure up Orientalist Yellow Peril tropes ('How sickening that the dragon is roaring back' in the Daily Mail and 'China is the real sick man of Asia' in the Wall Street Journal, to name just two examples), or conflated with nebulous reports of 'Chinese netizens' (i.e. a few cherry-picked comments on Weibo) voicing reactionary beliefs, it becomes far more difficult to believe that the media is just concerned with criticising China's government.
This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of English-language information about China doesn't even come from Chinese people. White men hold a terrifying monopoly over both mainstream English-language China journalism and academic discourse (just look at who wrote the last two articles I linked) with prominent, influential figures like Foreign Policy Deputy Editor James Palmer free to peddle thinly veiled xenophobia and open disdain for China and its culture under the guise of academic language and cultural expertise.
When mediocre white men visit China for a month or two and are subsequently granted the clout and legitimacy to publish books that look like this and read like this, it becomes clear that there might just be a teensy-weensy bit of a racism problem when it comes to English-language China discourse. It becomes particularly ugly on the rare occasion when public figures are called out for Sinophobia, as these 'China Watchers' bend over backwards to defend each other. Recently, US Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted that 'China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing. Some things will never change...' in a tweet that anyone would consider horrifying, especially coming from a well-known politician. China Daily commentator Chen Weihua shot back, simply calling her a 'bitch', later clarifying his position that she is, in fact, a 'lifetime bitch', which drew the predictably hand-wringing ire of white liberals everywhere, far more concerned with Chen's usage of profanity than Blackburn insulting the culture, history and diaspora of billions across the world.
Like clockwork, figures such as self-professed 'China Historian' James Millward came out of the woodwork to defend her, making the wildly delusional claim that rather than just being racist, Blackburn's tweet was in fact 'adopting the 5000 years of history trope to criticize the PRC', with Millward proceeding to snidely weaponize stereotypes about Chinese people with his remark that 'Chen Weihua's Twitter Team is not English-savvy enough to know what is too much even on Twitter'.
Millward is undeniably giving Blackburn too much credit, and this tweet is enough of a reach that I wonder whether Millward would be better suited as a yoga instructor, but this exchange is nonetheless highly representative of how China is talked about in the English language. When the Anglophone narrative around China is almost entirely dominated by a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of white men who are given free rein to say almost anything they want with impunity, and only held accountable for their brazen prejudice by people with comparatively tiny platforms (like me!! hi x), it's little wonder that open Sinophobia has become such a virulent issue.
The woke consensus on China hasn't been established yet, which means that most white liberal 'progressives' will fall back into old habits when talking about China, those habits of course being Orientalism, xenophobia and racism.
The fact that we have seen such a huge rise in hate crimes towards ESEA people as a result of COVID is only proof that the media's extensive Sinophobia campaign is working - after all, if people really only 'hate the Chinese government, not the people', this would not be happening at all. When discussing the recent hate crimes, Minister for Safeguarding Victoria Atkins literally used the exact words 'racist abuse on the basis of perceived Chinese ethnicity'. Japanese musician Tadataka Unno was recently attacked by a gang of youths in New York who thought he was Chinese. Trump has been widely criticised for his repeated usage of the phrase 'China Virus' feeding into anti-Asian racism. Chinese people have been referred to as 'evil bastards' by the very people running our country in House of Commons debates.
Do I need to go on?
In his excellent article 'The Politics of Being Chinese' for besea.n, Vy-liam Ng has become one of the few BESEA writers to directly engage with Sinophobia itself, listing many examples of how China and Chinese identity are viewed as 2020's biggest 'political bogeyman'. He lists many of the ways China has been demonised by the media in just this year alone, and it's clear that this coverage encompasses far more than just the CCP's actions - these are direct, brazen attacks on Chinese people being pumped out by the institutions most people rely on as sources of information. As he eloquently puts it, 'there’s no pause button as the world creates these narratives with or without us'. At this point it isn't just people of Chinese descent who are being affected: the constant, violent and indiscriminate propagandisation of Chinese identity affects East and Southeast Asians everywhere.
Sinophobia is rampant, systemic, insidious, constant and all-encompassing, and it is abundantly clear that the recent wave of Coronaracism towards East and Southeast Asian communities stems largely from Sinophobia - so why do we keep skirting around using the word? Why are we so afraid of calling a spade a spade? Where does this habitual aversion stem from?
Part 2 of this series will explore the reasons behind this, as well as how we as a community can work to identify, engage with and dismantle Sinophobia in all its forms.
Enxi Chang 常恩悉 is a multidisciplinary playwright, actor, spoken-word poet and Mandarin translator working in theatre, film and music. Her work seeks to bridge the gap between China and the West, whilst exploring the intersections of mixed diaspora identity, growing up in London, and navigating the world as a trans woman. She is also a member of queer mixed-Asian music collective East Wave (@eastwavecollective). Previous credits include Invisible Harmony and WeRNotVirus. Her poetry was recently featured on Benjamin Zephaniah's spoken word show Life and Rhymes. To find out more follow @miss_enxi on Instagram and Twitter.