In the time of accelerated capitalist globalisation and rising ideology-driven nationalism, the pandemic of Novel Coronavirus that causes lock-downs around the globe also triggers deep-rooted issues to (re)surface, to loom large, like a mirror, or a magnifying glass. For me, as a person from Guangzhou living in the Netherlands, it has been particularly interesting to observe the contradictions the pandemic has thrown up in the West’s image of itself versus Asia.
Before and since COVID-19 spread to Europe and the US, videos and posts about Asian people being verbally or even physically attacked by people on the street or on public transport have gone viral. The toxic narrative of the 'yellow peril' has raised its head again, in a globalisation framework that is rather different from that of 1890s, when this term first emerged. Europe and North America perceived the military and economic development of Japan and China as a threat to the empires of the West, and this sparked fear of the importation of cheap labour from China as the Chinese were stereotyped as “inferior and unhygienic”. In his book Margins and Mainstreams, Gary Okihiro argues: “the fear, whether real or imagined, arose from the fact of the rise of nonwhite peoples and their defiance of white supremacy. And while serving to contain the Other, the idea of the yellow peril also helped to define the white identity, within both a nationalist and an internationalist frame.
Asians might be a 'peril' but they are also constructed as a 'model minority' (even though Asians are not a monolithic group of people), a concept which might help us understand why some of those carrying out attacks on Asians, including those in the videos linked to above, are other people of colour – something that I found puzzling and hurtful at first. Matthew Lee, an Asian American health policy researcher, writes: "the myth of Asian as 'model minority' is rooted in anti-Blackness, and was leveraged by a conservative white majority in the 1960s to oppose the activism of the US civil rights movement". Though the European and US contexts differ, in both cases we can think of pyramid-like socio-economic-political structures in which the white majority are on top, and which defines the White and the Other. The other groups are subject to stereotypes and discriminations, and minorities might to some extent adopt these biases and cast them onto each other, which can be magnified in special times such as now in a pandemic.
