‘I don’t want your coronavirus in my country!’

Initiating a debate on anti-Asian racism in the House of Commons in October 2020, the Labour MP for Luton North, Sarah Owen, described a handful of the hundreds of hate crimes which had been reported in the preceding months:

In March, Jonathan Mok, a 23-year-old student from Singapore, was punched and kicked in the face on Oxford Street by a group of men. He heard shouts of ‘Coronavirus!’ and was told, ‘I don’t want your coronavirus in my country!’ British-Chinese filmmaker Lucy Sheen was on her way to rehearsals on a bus, when a white male passenger whispered in her ear – forgive me for the unparliamentary language: ‘Why don’t you f-off back to China and take your filth with you?’ In Hitchin, just down the road from my constituency, a takeaway owner was spat at and repeatedly asked if he had coronavirus.⁷

A conversation between two academics at the University of Edinburgh, Nini Fang and Shan-Jan Sarah Liu, on ‘being Yellow women in the time of COVID-19’, details the pernicious effects of anxiety over (and experiences of) harassment and social shaming. Liu spoke about her terror of unwanted scrutiny and attention, and competing demands for her physical and emotional safety, such as not wanting to wear a mask for fear of standing out and not wanting to leave the house despite the well-known benefit to mental health. Freedom from trepidation over confrontation or abuse, she explained, ‘was a white privilege I didn’t have. Eventually, when I did finally go into my office to collect things, I got spat at’. For Fang, pandemic racism created an uncomfortable reliance on her partner in public spaces; attending an online seminar, she was humiliated and shamed while asking a question of the speaker. ‘Was this social shaming partly stoked by the pandemic’, she speculated, ‘which has been racialized as the disease of the East?’¹⁰

Anti-Asian racism during Covid-19 is a multi-layered and complex phenomenon, tapping into long histories of anti-Chinese sentiment in the UK and elsewhere, particularly relating to infectious disease. In the context of Covid-19, deeper suspicions of global mobility and migration were collapsed into accusations of transmission and contamination. Developing long-established orientalist tropes, this racist scrutiny combined contradictory narratives on the origins of the virus. In one imagining, unclean or unsavoury eating habits had resulted in the transmission of the virus from bats (or sometimes pangolins) to humans; in the other, the Chinese government had released the virus, by mistake or intent, as part of a programme of ongoing efforts to manipulate, destabilize and subjugate the global West.¹¹

Incidents of racist violence during Covid-19 were encouraged and exacerbated by a proliferation of online racism in the form of hate speech, anti-Asian memes, images, videos and cartoons, and conspiracy theories.¹² The overall intention was to blame, shame and degrade individuals and communities, implicating victims (and members of East Asian and Southeast Asian communities in general) as dirty or unhygienic spreaders of contagion. In predominantly white nations and communities, racist language and violence have always been methods of policing white supremacy, of communicating to ethnic minorities that hard-won civil rights and safeties are fragile and easily set aside. They have always been about degradation, humiliation and shame.

Shame is a common response to racism, where the feeling arises not because someone has done something wrong, or necessarily feels flawed or at fault in some way; instead, racism-induced shame is intimately related to social power.¹³ As the philosopher Aness Webster notes, shame arises because an individual experiences a ‘loss of power over when her stigmatised racialised identity is made salient’.¹⁴ A common harm of racism, she argues, is the ‘emotional cost of feeling shame … and an ongoing vulnerability to shame’.¹⁵ In this way, racist violence and verbal abuse frequently result in shame, fear and insecurity, not just for direct victims but for members of the targeted group as a whole. The taunts that Mok and the takeaway owner endured rehearsed well-travelled cultural tropes over migration and contagion, brought out even more forcefully in the whispered invective to Sheen. The reference to ‘filth’ collapsed fears over viral transmission with racist intimations of dirtiness and poor hygiene, keying into widespread speculation and scapegoating over the origins of the virus in a Wuhan wet market.

Indeed, one of the more publicized examples in the early pandemic was the case of ‘Bat Soup Girl’. Russia Today and The Daily Mail found footage of a Chinese woman eating a bat, publicizing it as ‘disturbing’ and ‘revolting’ evidence of eating habits in Wuhan.¹⁶ As the video gained traction, the woman, travel vlogger Wang Mengyun, came forward to apologize for eating the bat. Explaining that the video was filmed as part of a travel segment on Palau, Micronesia, in 2017, she detailed the online abuse she had received, including phrases like ‘You’re abnormal’ and ‘You’re disgusting’. Although Wang was undoubtedly the direct victim of the abuse, commentators like James Palmer have noted how ‘the Palau video has been deployed in the United States and Europe to renew an old narrative about the supposedly disgusting eating habits of foreigners’.¹⁷ Despite working from incompatible theories, narratives on the genesis of Covid-19 in Wuhan wet market or secret government laboratory share a consistent internal logic, drawing a clear conceptual line between a healthy and hygienic West and a polluting and infectious East, with disease ‘coded as a foreign invasion’.¹⁸

There is a serious historical question playing counterpoint to these shaming causative stories. What is historically specific about anti-Chinese racism in the UK, and the way it relates to contagion, conspiracy and shame? As an extensive literature of scholarship attests, real or manufactured anxieties over disease have long been a feature of anti-immigration rhetoric in the global West.¹⁹ With both the UK government and the Opposition attempting to outdo one another on border policing as a technique of virus management, imagined dichotomies between a healthy polity and a diseased and dangerous other are very much here to stay.²⁰

When Sarah Owen spoke in parliament on anti-Asian racism, she criticized the Metropolitan Police’s continued use of the term ‘oriental people’: ‘we do not have enough time in this debate to unpack what is wrong with that term, but it is 2020, not 1920’.²¹ Owen’s reference to 1920 was astute, gesturing to particularly pervasive patterns of anti-Chinese racism around the turn of – and well into – the twentieth century. Anti-Semitic and Sinophobic propaganda framed Jewish and Chinese migrants as ‘carriers of “foreign” diseases’, a characterization rooted in a visceral and shaming language of illness and dirt. The pamphleteer Joseph Banister, for example, intentionally blurred the boundaries between the two, describing Jews as an ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Oriental’ presence whose blood was ‘loaded with scrofula’.²² In his 2020 essay on ‘The Chinese Virus’, Roger Luckhurst explores the Gothic literary traditions that drew from and fed into political anxieties over Eastern contagion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including fictional depictions of exotic plagues ravaging Britain, allegorical writing on vampirism (with identical tropes of infection and pollution) and literatures preoccupied with Chinese and Japanese expansionism.²³ Other contemporaries tapped into an overlapping characterization of Chinese migrants and nationals as insidious conspirators and ‘puppet masters’, degrading and debauching Western society from within. The General Secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, for example, warned in 1906 that the Chinese labourer ‘comes here like an international octopus spreading its tentacles everywhere’.²⁴ Although carrying no obvious connotations of dirt and disease, the imagery of the octopus is relatively easy to parse: fluid, alien, manipulative, strangling and impossible to pin down.²⁵

After 1913, Sax Rohmer’s famous supervillain, Dr Fu Manchu, simultaneously drew on and sustained the racialized image of shadowy and malevolent criminal networks, and evil masterminds bent on world domination.²⁶ As Luckhurst puts it, Manchu is tentacular, ‘always slithering his arms around Western interests’.²⁷ In the first of Rohmer’s prolific canon, The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (published in the United States as The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu), the antagonist reveals himself as an expert in the deadly application of animal and biological agents:

‘One of my pets, Mr. Smith,’ he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. ‘I have others, equally useful. My scorpions – have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No?’²⁸

Drawing an uncomplicated line from Rohmer to conspiracy theories over a Wuhan lab leak in 2019 would be a mistake, but they both drink deep from the same well. Despite the cosmetic point that official languages around race are supposed to have shifted, it is difficult to interpret the Metropolitan police’s designation of victims of racist violence as ‘oriental’ as somehow discordant or out of step with the events of 2020. When Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, he described a long tradition of looking at the global east from the global west, with an exoticizing, shaming, imperialistic gaze.³¹ During Covid-19, this gaze resulted in significant violence and harm. As the pandemic wore on, however, it was by no means the only way that racialized bodies were subjected to damaging scrutiny and shame.

The lepers of Leicester

When Manchu taunted the protagonist of The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, Dr Petrie, with his knowledge of the leper colony on Moloka‘i, the implication – that he could, himself, effectively induce leprosy – promised both bodily sickness and social death. On 2 July 2020, the UK government announced the trial of a new public health approach to local and regional restrictions, based on numbers of cases and rates of infection. The announcement of the first ‘local lockdown’ in the city of Leicester followed from the new policy of identifying and policing specific viral ‘hotspots’. As the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours – a sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – later reflected, this strategy of identification and isolation allowed shame to accrue around distinct and identifiable cities, towns, neighbourhoods and postcodes.³² Shame here was the by-product of public health policies which drew national attention to specific places, spotlighting the people who lived there as vectors for disease and raising questions over differences in behaviour as causes for higher rates of transmission.

Like Leicester, these ‘hotspots’ were frequently places with histories of spatial stigma, or concentrations of communities with long experiences of shaming and racialization.³³ In journalistic and social media discourses, particularly around the city of Leicester, leprosy surfaced as a metaphor for the pariah status that residents were made to endure. National news outlets, for example, reported the experience of a woman from West Knighton, Tracy Jebbett, who felt that she had been branded a ‘Leicester leper’ after a holiday park in Cornwall closed its gates to holidaymakers from the city and some of its surrounding areas.³⁴ Inhabitants of the city felt simultaneously abandoned and hyper-visible, a combination with a heightened potential for shame. Ashamed that they were unable to relax restrictions alongside most of the rest of the country on 4 July 2020, they also believed they were being singled out and punished unfairly.³⁵ In their dissection of the shaming effect of ‘local lockdowns’, the SAGE sub-group speculated on the long-term effects of designating areas as Covid-19 ‘hotspots’; referring specifically to areas in Leicester, they suggested that they could potentially ‘become known as a place to avoid for fear of contracting COVID-19’, setting patterns of avoidance and disinvestment in process which, if economic decline results, can become self-perpetuating: ‘an area that people do not want to visit will become an area in which people do not want to live’.³⁶

The local lockdown in Leicester drew together a series of pressure points on shame, racialization and pandemic behaviour. Two studies from the COVID and Care Research Group (CCRG) at the London School of Economics engage extensively with stigma, race and place, taking Leicester as a specific case study and analysing testimony from residents.³⁷ In their nuanced and detailed work, the CCRG identify overlapping layers of potentially shaming discourses on ethnic minorities and Covid-19. Shame, they argue, is coded into public health vocabularies which attempt to present as innocuous or value-neutral:

Moral languages of pollution, hygiene and recklessness have been used to apportion blame to certain groups. Avoidance of stigmatised populations is often articulated through the oblique language of safety and protection, rather than illness or infection. Conversations about safety are used as a proxy for conversations about transmission and epidemiology; where the language of protection takes the place of the language of illness and infection.³⁸

While Whittaker was condemned for his comments (although not by Boris Johnson), he was only saying the quiet part loud; by announcing a last-minute escalation of quarantine measures on the eve of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim religious festival, Matt Hancock was widely interpreted as implying that Muslim communities in particular were not abiding by social distancing guidelines.⁴³ Examining anti-Muslim racism in the pandemic, Elizabeth Poole and Milly Williamson situate heightened anxieties around Muslim behaviour and religious observance as an example of how racism ‘adapts and stretches over new situations’, with old tropes of social threat and lack of integration repackaged for the Covid-19 context.⁴⁴

Race and Covid-19 health inequalities

As early as spring 2020, evidence pointed to the uneven number of Covid-19 infections among ethnic minorities in the UK; in addition, members of racialized communities who contracted the virus were consistently found to be at greater risk of serious symptoms, hospitalization and death than white people of similar age and gender.⁴⁵ During the early months of the pandemic, shocking racial disparities in the deaths of doctors and other healthcare workers in the UK gave the first indication that mortality rates might also be skewed at a national level. In March and April 2020, 64 per cent of all nurses and 95 per cent of all doctors who died of Covid-19 were ethnic minorities.⁴⁶ The reasons behind these findings are multi-layered, intersecting with other complicated causal relationships between health and structural racism. In terms of infection rates, a number of factors can help to explain the evidence. A disproportionately high presence in the healthcare professions among particular groups – such as Black women from African backgrounds or men from Indian backgrounds – probably results in increased rates of occupational exposure.⁴⁷ In the case of healthcare workers, individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds reported higher rates of bullying and harassment during the pandemic, and felt less confident and safe in reporting PPE shortages, with the result that they were more likely than white coworkers to be exposed to the virus.⁴⁸ Indeed, some nurses and healthcare assistants from ethnic minority backgrounds felt they were being ‘targeted’ to work on Covid-19 wards.⁴⁹

In the broader community, minoritised groups generally have higher levels of risk as a result of ‘inequalities in exposure to the social determinants of health’ where the environments and conditions within which individuals live, work, grow and age – such as their place of employment, housing, their access to goods and services, access to healthcare, and food scarcity or security – cause inequalities in chronic conditions. These in turn increase the severity of Covid-19 infection.⁵⁰ Within the UK, ethnic minorities are more likely to live in urban areas, where infection has been higher and social distancing more difficult to achieve. They have been less likely to be able to stop working or work from home, disproportionately making up the workforce in service and frontline positions, directly placing them at higher risk, sometimes even in comparison with white co-workers in the same job. Public health edicts around staying at home, moreover, work from a white middle-class imagining of domestic space which ethnic minorities are frequently excluded from.⁵¹ Even non-compliance with public health guidance, where it actually occurs, has to be understood in the context of historic and understandable mistrust of medical and state authority, and the less than proactive approach taken by the UK government to communicate information in diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.⁵²

This phenomenon, in which shame was adroitly shifted away from structural factors and placed squarely with racialized communities, was reproduced even more insidiously in the lack of a sincere public reckoning with the relationship between racism and reduced health outcomes. Literatures on minority stress, the psychological and physical burden of racism, and significant and pervasive health inequalities among racialized groups are well evidenced and well established.⁵³ While heightened hospitalization and mortality rates among ethnic minorities with Covid-19 had genuine public visibility and cut-through, politicians, media outlets and prominent health advisors largely abdicated responsibility for explaining where and how these disparities originated. Despite good, early evidence on why infection, morbidity and mortality rates might be higher among particular communities, there was a comprehensive political failure to engage publicly with structural racism as a causative factor for health inequalities in Covid-19. The publication of the Sewell Report (the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities) in March 2021, a document which has been described by the Runnymede Trust as ‘frankly disturbing’ in its suggestion that ‘institutional racism does not exist’, represented the culmination of a long refusal on the part of conservative politicians to acknowledge that racism in the UK exceeds the isolated behaviour of individual bad actors.⁵⁴ In the deliberate fixation on individual responsibility and behaviour in public health, media and political rhetoric (see Chapters 1 and 5 of this volume), racist anxieties about disease transmission, culturally contingent living arrangements and the misuse of public and private space were allowed to fill a discursive gap between undeniable facts and figures (in the form of publicly visible epidemiological data on inequalities in Covid outcomes) and the uncomfortable and jarring context required to make them explicable. As Vanessa Apea and Yize Wan point out in their response to the Sewell Report, the Covid-19 pandemic has in fact been a peerless illustration of the existence of structural racism, with the accompanying denial acting as an important component of its perpetuation.⁵⁵

Although sometimes complicated, structural narratives on Covid-19, systemic racism and health inequality are by no means impossible to publicly communicate. In terms of public health evidence, homogenizing categories such as BAME have limited explanatory value. Granular, intersectional work on how members of particular groups are subject to structural racism in specific places and contexts is necessary to fully illuminate the myriad pathways to poorer health outcomes, both in Covid-19 and in general. Data on outcome disparities within these loose categories, however, could have been accompanied by a broad-strokes, unequivocal analysis of the entrenched structures of exclusion and oppression which frame the health and illness experiences of racialized people in the UK.

In simplistic and general terms, racism impacts health in three ways. It directly erodes physical and mental health through long processes of attrition, particularly through the stress and shame of racialization, discrimination and overt prejudice.⁵⁶ This includes the fear or experience of racist violence, over-policing, public scrutiny and stigmatizing medical and public health interventions. Structural racism also frequently results in poor living and working conditions, material poverty and deprivation, and reduced educational opportunities. These social and economic determinants of health impose an additional physical, psychological and relational burden, deepening and complicating other experiences of ill-health.⁵⁷ In both instances, a cyclical relationship between physical and mental comorbidities, and between health and environment, can decrease health-seeking behaviour; it can also contribute to premature ageing, or ‘weathering’, through the sustained application of psychosocial, physical and chemical stressors.⁵⁸ Structural racism further affects how and whether racialized people engage with healthcare services and public health messaging, how they are treated in clinical encounters, and which kinds of health conditions are prioritized within NHS planning and resource allocation.⁵⁹

Particularly in the context of a government committed to denying the structural nature of racism, its indisputable inscription on the minds and bodies of British citizens is a profoundly shaming and exposing legacy. As with inequalities in infection rates, this deliberate omission deflected shame from institutions, ideologies and structures, allowing it to attach to individual factors and decisions. This can be read as a cynical and complicit exercise in saving face. Presented with decontextualized data on disparities in morbidity and mortality, different communities were left to speculate on what might explain them. Some placed in the ‘BAME’ category attributed their ‘clinical vulnerability’ to genetic predispositions, or to long-standing chronic diseases caused by ‘lifestyle and diet’.⁶⁰ This internalization of deflected shame over Covid-19 entrenches and deepens the cyclical burden of structural racism and health inequality, afflicting populations which have already been rendered shame-prone by long experiences of social shaming.

Coughing while Asian

‘Coughing while Asian’ brought acute bodily shame over the potential transmission of disease into close proximity with deeper structures of racialized shaming. Tow and Arboleda’s film actively set out to satirize and subvert these shame dynamics; T-shirts bearing the legend ‘Lestah Lepers’, featuring the city’s fox mascot in a gas mask, can be found for sale online. These attempts at levity, however, were tangled up with real suffering and stress. The Mass Observation respondent who wrote that she felt ‘very Asian in public’ recounted that she began online therapy after these experiences, joining a growing population of service users across the global West seeking urgent psychological support for race-based trauma during the pandemic.⁶¹ Direct experiences of overt racism and violence are significant life events, with serious consequences for emotional, physiological and relational health. They cast a long shadow, introducing damaging patterns of fear and shame which can be difficult to break out of. For members of racialized groups routinely (or acutely) subject to violence and abuse, anticipated experiences and the experiences of others can be a persistent source of anxiety and collective pain.⁶² Far from trivial, social slights, microaggressions, hypervisibility and exaggerated physical avoidance also take a cumulative toll. The ‘new’ body language of social distancing reproduces and reformulates the ‘old’ body language of stigma and suspicion, with different consequences for communities with long experiences of being avoided or snubbed by white people.⁶³ Although there are rapidly emerging literatures on anti-Asian racism, health inequalities and Covid-19, our analysis suggests an ongoing need to engage with literatures on shame. Shame is an under-recognized and under-explored component of acute and structural racism, and chronic shame is an important theoretical device in understanding how processes of exclusion and stigmatization actively translate into poor health.⁶⁴

Attempts to shame people of East and Southeast Asian backgrounds with culpability for the transmission and origins of Covid-19 tapped into older and deeper structures of racialized shaming, following cultural scripts which have been well-established for over a century. Likewise, with a political, media and scientific establishment largely unprepared to acknowledge structural racism and its effects on health, shaming narratives on individual responsibility, behaviour and choice were allowed to fill the information gap accompanying ‘BAME’ mortality and morbidity data. The most comprehensive failure, a recent study of ethnic disparities in Covid-19 suggests, is our systemic cultural and political refusal to confront shameful histories: ‘Many high income countries with legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism have a moral duty to reckon with the past. We know the problems, and the solutions are mostly in front of us.’⁶⁵ Predictably, attempts to do precisely that, in the form of the Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 – as well as the police taking no further action in the case of Belly Mujinga, a transport worker who died in April after alleging that a man who claimed to have Covid had spat on her in her place of work – were subject to extensive criticism and censure for spreading the virus, including by Matt Hancock. Critics of Black Lives Matter deliberately sidestepped the question of precisely what kinds of survival were at stake in the ‘twin pandemics’ of Covid-19 and racism.⁶⁶

In disowning that moral duty, the UK government knowingly increased the burden of shame on ethnic minorities, rendering them publicly culpable both for their own bodies and behaviour, and for a civic imagining of collective health which had always excluded and neglected them. As the following chapter explores, racialized bodies were not alone in subjection to alienating and intrusive systems of policing, surveillance and shame, with neoliberal languages of individual responsibility and choice eliding and obscuring important social, economic and relational determinants of health. Nor were they the only context in which significant evidence on shame in public health was comprehensively ignored, or where long histories of medical and cultural humiliation and disgust culminated in poorer outcomes for chronically shamed populations.

Notes

1

Tow-Arboleda Films, ‘Coughing while Asian Corona Virus’, 3 February 2021. Video and accompanying text. https://www​.youtube.com​/watch?v=HZq7fwUywR4.

2

Lauren Aratini, ‘“Coughing while Asian”: Living in Fear as Racism Feeds off Coronavirus Panic’, The Guardian, 24 March 2020, 22.00 GMT. https://www​.theguardian​.com/world/2020/mar​/24/coronavirus-us-asian-americans-racism.

3

David A. Harris, ‘Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s Motorways’, American Civil Liberties Union Special Report, June 1999. https://www​.aclu.org​/report/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways; Leonore F. Carpenter and R. Barrett Marshall, ‘Walking while Trans: Profiling of Transgender Women by Law Enforcement, and the Problem of Proof’, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law vol. 24:1 (2017), 5–38.

4

Aratini, ‘Coughing while Asian’.

5

Karen Dunn, ‘Conservative Leader’s “bat soup” Comments Not a Code of Conduct Breach’, Sussex Express, 25 January 2021. https://www​.sussexexpress​.co.uk/news/politics​/conservative-leaders-bat-soup-comments-not-a-code-of-conduct-breach-3111501.

6

Matthew Sparke and Owain David Williams, ‘Neoliberal Disease: COVID-19, Co-Pathogenesis and Global Health Insecurities’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space vol. 54:1 (February 2022), 15–32, 16. 10.1177/0308518X211048905. [CrossRef]

7

Hansard HC Deb 13 October 2020, vol. 682, col. 114. https://hansard​.parliament​.uk/commons/2020-10-13​/debates/858E78B5-1049-4480-A1A7-5362FC12F47E​/ChineseAndEastAsianCommunitiesRacismDuringCovid-19.

8

Mass Observation Archive (University of Sussex): Replies to Spring 2020 Directive [R7180].

9

Hansard HC Deb 13 October 2020, vol 682, col 114.

10

Nini Fang and Shan-Jan Sarah Liu, ‘Critical Conversations: Being Yellow Women in the Time of COVID-19’, International Feminist Journal of Politics vol. 23:2 (2021), 333–40. 10.1080/14616742.2021.1894969. [CrossRef]

11

Hannah Farrimond, ‘Stigma Mutation: Tracking Lineage, Variation and Strength in Emerging COVID-19 Stigma’, Sociological Research Online (August 2021), 1–18. 10.1177/13607804211031580. [PMC free article: PMC10008726] [PubMed: 36941953] [CrossRef]

12

Ditch the Label, ‘Uncovered: Online Hate Speech in the Covid Era’, November 2021. https://www​.ditchthelabel​.org/research-papers​/hate-speech-report-2021/.

13

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011).

14

Aness Kim Webster, ‘Making Sense of Shame in Response to Racism’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 51:7 (2021), 535–50, 543.

15

Webster, ‘Making Sense of Shame in Response to Racism’, 547.

16

Billie Thomson, ‘Chinese Woman Eats Bat in Restaurant Despite Coronavirus Link’, MailOnline, 23 January 2020. https://www​.dailymail​.co.uk/news/article-7920573​/Revolting-footage-shows-Chinese-woman-eating-bat-scientists-link-coronavirus-animal.html.

17

James Palmer, ‘Don’t Blame Bat Soup for the Coronavirus’, Foreign Policy, 27 January 2020. https:​//foreignpolicy​.com/2020/01/27/coronavirus-covid19-dont-blame-bat-soup-for-the-virus/.

18

Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Chinese Virus’, Critical Quarterly vol. 62:4 (December 2020), 54–62, 55. 10.1111/criq.12582. [CrossRef]

19

Stephen L. Muzzatti, ‘Bits of Falling Sky and Global Pandemics: Moral Panic and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)’, Illness, Crisis & Loss vol. 13:2 (April 2005), 117–28. 10.1177/105413730501300203 [CrossRef]; Katherine A. Mason, ‘H1N1 Is Not a Chinese Virus: The Racialization of People and Viruses in Post-SARS China’, Studies in Comparative International Development vol. 50:4 (2015), 500–18. 10.1007/s12116-015-9198-y [PMC free article: PMC7090737] [PubMed: 32218614] [CrossRef].

20

Des Fitzgerald, ‘Normal Island: COVID-19, Border Control, and Viral Nationalism in UK Public Health Discourse’, Sociological Research Online (November 2021). 10.1177/13607804211049464. [PMC free article: PMC10265261] [PubMed: 37337516] [CrossRef]

21

Hansard HC Deb 13 October 2020, vol 682, col 113.

22

Daniel Renshaw, ‘Prejudice and Paranoia: A Comparative Study of Antisemitism and Sinophobia in Turn-of-the-century Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice vol. 50:1 (2016), 38–60, 17, 21. 10.1080/0031322X.2015.1127646. [CrossRef]

23

Luckhurst, ‘The Chinese Virus’.

24

Anne Witchard, England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (London: Penguin, 2014), 28–9.

25

Jacques Schnier, ‘Morphology of a Symbol: The Octopus’, American Imago vol. 13:1 (1956), 3–31.

26

Renshaw, ‘Prejudice and Paranoia’, 23.

27

Luckhurst, ‘The Chinese Virus’, 60.

28

Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913), https://www​.gutenberg​.org/files/173/173-h/173-h.htm, Chapter XIII.

29

R. D. K. Herman, ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Power: Leprosy, Race, and Colonization in Hawai’i’, Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being vol. 6 (2010), 265–96, 275; Renisa Mawani, ‘“The Island of the Unclean”: Race, Colonialism and “Chinese Leprosy” in British Columbia, 1891–1924’, Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal vol. 1 (2003). https://warwick​.ac.uk​/fac/soc/law/elj/lgd/2003_1/mawani/.

30

Luckhurst, ‘The Chinese Virus’, 61.

31

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

32

Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, ‘SPI-B: Health status Certification in Relation to COVID-19, Behavioural and Social Considerations’, 9 December 2020, 13. https://www​.gov.uk/government​/publications​/spi-b-health-status-certification-in-relation-to-covid-19-behavioural-and-social-considerations-9-december-2020.

33

Emma Halliday et al., ‘The Elephant in The Room? Why Spatial Stigma Does Not Receive the Public Health Attention It Deserves’, Journal of Public Health vol. 42:1 (2020), 38–43. 10.1093/pubmed/fdy214. [PubMed: 30576532] [CrossRef]

34

Coronavirus: ‘I Felt Like I Was being Penalised’, BBC News, 30 June 2020. https://www​.bbc.co.uk​/news/uk-england-cornwall-53237240.

35

Laura Bear et al., ‘A Right to Care: The Social Foundations of Recovery from Covid-19’, Covid and Care Research Group, 22 October 2020, 94. https://www​.lse.ac.uk​/anthropology/assets​/documents/research​/Covid-and-Care/ARighttoCare-CovidandCare-Final-2310.pdf.

36

Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, ‘SPI-B’, 6.

37

Bear et al., ‘A Right to Care’; Laura Bear et al., ‘Social Infrastructures for the post-Covid recovery in the UK’, Covid and Care Research Group, 12 July 2021. http://eprints​.lse.ac​.uk/111011/4/SocialInfrastructures​_ReportFinal_180122.pdf.

38

Bear et al., ‘A Right to Care’, 85.

39

Bear et al., ‘A Right to Care’, 89, 95.

40

Bear et al., ‘Social Infrastructures for the post-Covid recovery in the UK’, 58.

41

Bear et al., ‘Social Infrastructures for the Post-Covid recovery in the UK’, 54.

42

Adrian Sherling, ‘Muslim and BAME Communities Not Taking Coronavirus Pandemic Seriously’, Tory MP says’, LBC, 31 July 2020, 08:33. https://www​.lbc.co.uk​/radio/presenters/ian-payne​/muslim-bame-communities-coronavirus-pandemic/.

43

Josh Halliday and Guy Kilty, ‘Hancock Added to Anti-Muslim Hate with Distancing Claims, Says Government Adviser’, The Guardian, 26 October 2020, 11.18 GMT. https://www​.theguardian​.com/uk-news/2020​/oct/26/hancock-added-to-anti-muslim-hate-with-distancing-claims-says-government-adviser.

44

Elizabeth Poole and Milly Williamson, ‘How Racist Narratives about Muslims in the British Press Were Reconfigured during the Initial Peak of COVID-19’, LSE British Politics and Policy, 7 September 2021. https://blogs​.lse.ac​.uk/politicsandpolicy​/press-reporting-muslims-covid19/.

45

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