Sinophobia during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Identity, Belonging, and International Politics

In many countries, Sinophobia or discrimination against Chinese has taken place amid the Covid-19 pandemic. While this wave of Sinophobia is popularly understood to be based on a stereotypical association of Chinese with coronavirus, I argue that at a time of international tensions surrounding China, political antipathy toward China and Chinese matters as well. Thus, there is a phenomenon of “triple conflation” in which the health, racial, and political/national statuses of Chinese people become intermingled. In this study, I examine this triple conflation based on dozens of select cases covering Sinophobic actions of governments, politicians, media, businesses and lay persons in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe. My study consists of three parts using three respective interdisciplinary approaches. First, using a sociological approach, I argue that the racial and national statuses of Chinese are both, and sometimes interchangeably, used as identity markers for implementing containment, a public health measure that easily leads to stigmatization. Second, using a discursive approach, I examine how political claims unfavorable to China/Chinese are constructed in discussions of the pandemic. Third, using an interpretive approach, I analyze how Covid bio-political metaphors present certain imaginaries depicting Chinese as suspicious bio-political subjects. These three parts are unified in my analysis of the geopolitics of belonging, in which Chinese people’s rights to certain social and physical spaces are contested sometimes thorough administrative means (such as travel restriction) and sometimes through mental representations (such as the imagination of Chinese as alien).