An article by Melanie Vestergaard
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mr Dashan Xu, a PhD student of Philosophy at KU Leuven, to get his take on the current global crisis and what it means to be Chinese in Europe during a pandemic which has by some been dubbed the ‘Chinese Virus’.
In Stuart Hall’s work on “The Other” he deploys Alfred Shutz’ concept of ‘typification’ in relation to stereotyping, as this provides almost an epistemological function by the way we humans “understand ‘the particular’ in terms of its ‘type” (1997: 257). As thus, we come to know and understand people in relation to particular characteristics, types (and soon stereotypes), which allow us to group together peoples in correspondence to their class, nationality, ethnicity and/or race.
Thus, when Dashan had an encounter with a woman during which she referred to him and his friends as “those people” and blaming the current situation on ‘them’, she could be seen as taking part in the unfortunately common practices of ‘othering’, ‘stereotyping’ and ‘scapegoating’, however, on which basis she did so remains unclear as this could have been on the basis of many typifications incl. their age, their position as students or “rule-breakers” (despite these rules only being applied the day before), or their race as Asian – as three out of the four were.
“A pandemic is plotless [and therefore we assign a villain] to give it agency, in order to form a narrative which we can understand. That is how we understand stories, something happened because somebody’s done it.”
So as Dashan points out, and as seems human nature if exploring the concept of typification, we like to have a reason and we quickly come to view certain groups in relation to certain characteristics assigned them by association or popular portrayal. With a combination of these two it seems inevitable that we would come to stick our noses up in derision as we roll our eyes in contempt of “those people”.
As explored in my article on the inequalities of disease control (LINK HERE), the vilification of the victim, especially the former colonised and those of Asian descent, is nothing new and is deeply rooted in Eurocentric and xenophobic narratives surrounding disease, cleanliness and travel. Feeding off existing stereotypes of Asian cuisine as exotic and at times odd (like eating snakes or insects) or even considered morally wrong to Westerners (such as eating dogs), believing this disease to stem from a Chinese person eating a bat does not seem so farfetched to a Westerner (as also evidenced by the racist stereotyping meme-culture emerging in response to the pandemic, as discussed by Thu Dinh, 2020 LINK). These kinds of stereotypes based on beliefs and limited knowledge are much akin to those described by Flint and Hewitt (2015) in relation to the harmful and racial (perhaps racist?) stereotypes of Africans’ sexual appetite and carelessness and their relations to the spread of HIV/AIDS across the continent. However, beyond control measures, history and policy, what seems to play a part in keeping these stereotypes alive and well are the media;
“The way [the media] portrays the story affects how people see the story. I noticed in the Chinese news for example when the infection of the global first overtook China they kind of narrated it as great news, like we’re not the only one with this number of people [infected] anymore”
When Dashan made the above comment I sadly was not surprised in the slightest. Over the past months we have experienced a flood of infographics depicting nations taking over each other on counts of infected or deceased in a morbid race no one wants to win. Human lives have been reduced to numbers and numbers have come to signify the greatness of nations and competence of governments.
So where governments and media strive to be number one in disease control, the racialisation and blame-game commences, as after all; all’s fair in the name of health (and winning), right?
“It reminds me of a sentence someone used to say, I think it’s from Stalin even, he says; when one person dies it’s tragic, but when a thousand persons die it’s just a statistic”*
*Quote first attributed to Stalin in the form ‘If only one man dies of hunger that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics’ in Washington Post , 20 January 1947 (Source: OxordReference.com)
Yet, despite the media’s practice of dehumanising deaths via statistics, this doesn’t take away the competitive aspect which quickly arose as comparison graphics became more prevalent.
It seems any means are allowed if you want to come out “on top”, and aided by a Euro- and US-centric bias, both from within politics and historic control-systems, it looks as though Euro-America is “winning”, if nothing else they can always cry fake news/unreported numbers, or just blame China for getting the world in this mess in the first place.
If you wish to listen to our conversation with Dashan Xu in full you can click the link below:
References:
Brewis, Alexandra ; Wutich, Amber ; Mahdavi, Pardis (2020) Stigma, pandemics, and human biology: Looking back, looking forward, American journal of human biology, Vol.32 (5), p.e23480-n/a
Cachero, Paulina, China demands an apology from a newspaper for a satirical cartoon of a Chinese flag with coronavirus particles, Business Insider, 28 January 2020, URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-outraged-jyllands-posten-satirical-cartoon-chinese-flag-coronavirus-particles-2020-1?r=US&IR=T
Flint, A. & Hewitt, V. (2015) “Colonial Tropes and HIV/AIDS in Africa: sex, disease and race” in Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 53: 3, pp. 293-314
Hall, Stuart (1997) “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and and signifying practices. (Vol. 2). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Thu Dinh, Thi Anh (2020) Media of the Pandemic and Racism, https://raceandthepandemic.wixsite.com/home/post/media-of-the-pandemic-and-racism
Van Fleet, John D (17th April 2020) “A Covid-19 letter home: Pointless finger pointing” on CGTN
URL:https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-14/COVID-19-no-finger-pointing-allowed--PGacVekJ5S/index.html (Last accessed 23rd December 2020)
Vestergaard, Melanie (2020) Who gets sick matters – the inequalities of infection and disease control, https://raceandthepandemic.wixsite.com/home/post/who-gets-sick-matters-the-inequalities-of-infection-and-disease-control
Xu, Dashan – interview conducted on the 26th November 2020