Covid-19, Anti-Asian Racial Violence, and The Borders of Chineseness

Diana Yeh

doi:10.51661/bjocs.v10i0.117

Abstract

This position paper argues that Covid-19 related anti-Asian racial violence highlights how contemporary problems facing Chinese communities worldwide – and responses to them – cannot be contained within the borders of Chineseness.

Highlights

Despite China’s alert to the World Health Organization (WHO) in December 2019, and research warning of the likelihood of a global pandemic in January 2020 (Wu et al, 2020), the UK government continually downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19 as it began to devastate parts of China and spread to Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and other parts of Asia
Despite appeals by the WHO, the United Nations, and Human Rights Watch to governments worldwide to address Covid-19-related hate, the UK has still to fully acknowledge or act upon the violence wrought by the racialisation of the disease
While Chinese studies can no longer be caricatured in this way, in line with other academic disciplines, its privileging of “Chineseness” as ethnicity, opposed to, potentially, a racialised category – might blinker its view on the way in which the racial violence – its impact and the resistance towards it – cannot be contained within the borders of Chineseness

Summary

Introduction

Despite China’s alert to the World Health Organization (WHO) in December 2019, and research warning of the likelihood of a global pandemic in January 2020 (Wu et al, 2020), the UK government continually downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19 as it began to devastate parts of China and spread to Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and other parts of Asia. Covid-19, Anti-Asian Racial Violence, and The Borders of Chineseness.

Results

Conclusion