“Chinese Virus,” World Market | Online Only | n+1

“Chinese Virus,” World Market | Online Only | n+1

1. “Wuhan Virus”?

THE CITY OF WUHAN, CHINA is rich with historical significance, but for much of the world before this year it was hardly a household name. A portmanteau of three historical cities at the mouth of the Yangzi and Han Rivers—Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang—Wuhan served as the site of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which ended the last Chinese Dynasty, and in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government temporarily made the city its national capital, as the military fled from Japanese forces along the eastern coast. In recent years, passengers boarding one of the hundreds of ferries that glide through the city center every day would have seen soaring glass and concrete skyscrapers adorned with the names of hotel chains and national banks—an intimidating skyline, but one increasingly common across Asia. Beyond this photogenic core is the familiar combination of new architectural projects, historical landmarks, residential university neighborhoods, and designated free-trade zones for industrial export processing. It is a massive and sprawling metropolis of over eleven million people, more populous than New York City, but by the high standards of contemporary China, and in the unsentimental parlance of the Chinese media, it is a solid “second-tier city.”

But these days, of course, Wuhan is at once more internationally infamous than ever and associated only with one thing: the global spread of the disease now known as Covid-19. During the first weeks of December, several individuals began to report to hospitals in the Wuhan area with severe flu-like symptoms, including fever, dry coughing, fatigue, body aches, and pneumonia-like symptoms. Only later did doctors recognize that many patients either worked at, or were connected to, the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in the city center. The symptoms soon worsened, paralyzing older patients and killing many. On December 30, lab results finally confirmed that the source was a novel coronavirus strain that shared traits with the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak that claimed over eight hundred people worldwide and the MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) virus that emerged in 2012 and has killed nearly a thousand since. The virus has now ballooned into a pandemic with cases in 183 countries. As of this writing, 11,147 people have died from 265,495 cases. In China alone, 3,248 of 80,967 cases have died, almost all based in Wuhan.

For weeks, American news services referred to the disease as the “Wuhan virus.” Last month, the World Health Organization renamed the virus “Covid-19” (Coronavirus disease of 2019) with the explicit goal of minimizing the social stigma of a name that referred to a specific place—and, by extension, a specific people. Not ones to pay heed to international norms, conservative politicians in the US have continued to insist on the phrase “Wuhan virus,” or “Chinese coronavirus,” in a transparent effort to scapegoat and distract from their own catastrophic mismanagement of the worst public health crisis in recent American history. On Monday, a White House official reportedly described the virus as the “Kung Flu.” The following day Donald Trump defended using the term “Chinese virus,” explaining, “’cause it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.” Less equivocal, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton paired a tweet last week about the “Wuhan coronavirus” with a suggestion that China would have to “pay” for what it had done to America.

There is no question that such terminology is racist and xenophobic. Yet the fact that this global pandemic started in Wuhan, and not elsewhere in China, should not be simply overlooked, either. In recent decades, Wuhan has been caught up in the latest stage of globalization, in which international capital continues to extend further inland in pursuit of cheaper land and labor markets, spawning international links for goods such as steel and automobile parts, which remain hidden to the average consumer. It is a major Chinese city, yet outside the core of glittering metropolises along the nation’s coast. It is precisely the unexceptional status of Wuhan as a second-tier Chinese city that is notable. What the global spread of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan suggests is that the culprit here is not the unique circumstances of a particular place, but rather the now-extensive commercial connections that bring ever more of these kinds of places closer and closer together, into a larger and larger whole. In recounting the story of the novel coronavirus, it becomes increasingly clear that its movements have thus far mimicked the pathways of the 21st-century global market.

THE SPECIFIC ORIGINS of the coronavirus within Wuhan remain unclear.