key: cord-0068268-jlu5ygfw
authors: Sautman, Barry
title: Big Thunder, Little Rain: The Yellow Peril Framing of the Pandemic Campaign Against China
date: 2021-10-02
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1093/chinesejil/jmab023
sha: 6fb3d61e9259be0b33395679d52282ff6d14f449
doc_id: 68268
cord_uid: jlu5ygfw

Yellow Peril ideology has long cast Chinese as cruel, deceitful, incompetent disease vectors. Many US elites now tie such notions to China’s response to Covid-19. Their racialized framing of the drive to condemn and sue China however exemplifies a Chinese idiom—“big thunder, little rain” (雷声大, 雨点小)—which means noisy, yet ineffective. There are empirical obstacles to convincing the world of Chinese responsibility for the pandemic, such as that the virus spread much more from Europe and the US than from China, many Western states failed against the virus, and pandemic-related agitation against China has resulted in many anti-Asian actions. The ongoing claims are thus unlikely to be convincing beyond the Anglosphere, but still spread racism and advance a US-led anti-China mobilization.

again pervade Western elite discussions of China and Chinese, above all in the US. Central to these discourses are claims that Chinese incompetence and malign political and cultural practices spread Covid-19 globally. For example, when a journalist quizzed Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) "about the cost of demonizing Asians in a land that has been historically intolerant of them, especially during pandemics," he responded: I think China is to blame because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that, these viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people and that's why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS [Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome], the swine flu, and now the coronavirus. So, I think they have a fundamental problem, and I don't object to geographically identifying where it's coming from.

reinforced anti-Chinese racism, unless the Yellow Peril tropes are shown to underlie the mobilization and to be empirically unsound.

5. In what follows, we first show that Western political and media figures invoke longstanding Yellow Peril tropes in promoting Covid-19 lawfare against China. We then discuss the lack of an empirical basis for attributing pandemic injuries abroad to China. We conclude that because the difficulties these actions present are obvious and likely insurmountable, they are advanced not to redress injuries, but to mobilize against the US's "most serious competitor," China. 12 Their Yellow Peril underpinnings guarantee that Chinese in general will be adversely affected.

II. The trope of "the cruel Chinese" 6. Orientalist and non-Orientalist views of China and Chinese have existed in the West, 13 but Yellow Peril agitation created a powerful negative narrative through tropes that were revived with Covid-19. 14 "Chinese cruelty" is framed as disregard for human life, 15 an idea present since the first burst of Yellow Peril ideology in the 1870s. 16 An Australian newspaper asserted in 1892 that the "the Chinese are cruel conquerors" with a "love for torture." 17 A British professor wrote in 1897 "that the Chinese are cruel is one of those axioms that need no proof." 18 in 1911-1912 averred that, "We all know that the Chinese are cruel, that they have no sympathies in the usual Western sense; we know that they delight in the torture of all things that have life." 19 The UK/US novel and film character Fu Manchu embodied the trope from the 1920s to the 1970s, with a "key selling point of the films the motif of the cruel Chinese." 20 The Chinese cruelty notion was widespread in the US: popular magazine Life titled a luridly illustrated 1936 article "The Cruel Chinese." 21 7. Assertions of "Chinese cruelty" parallel those of "Jewish cruelty" toward people and animals. The Nazis took up such claims in the Weimar era (1919) (1920) (1921) (1922) (1923) (1924) (1925) (1926) (1927) (1928) (1929) (1930) (1931) (1932) (1933) , absorbing movements against kosher butchering and circumcision and intensifying anti-Jewish rhetoric that posited that the practices evidenced Jewish cruelty and the impossibility of integrating Jews in Germany. 25 Yellow Peril ideology includes "perceptions of Chinese culture as simply one of cruel and unbridled animal consumption," as Bowdoin College professor Belinda Kong puts it. 26 Chinese cruelty is contrasted with purported Western humanitarianism, just as "Jewish cruelty" through ritual slaughter of animals has been contrasted with "an overtly Christian ideal of humane treatment of animals across time and borders." 27 Rutgers University professor of medicine Martin Blaser has also noted common historic and recent accusations of Jews and Chinese as disease vectors. 28 Assertions that Chinese are cruel are often camouflaged as attacks against the 95 million-member Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in much the same way anti-Jewish discourse, including about Covid-19, is directed against "Zionists." 29 Trump supporters elide China, Chinese, and the CCP; thus, his lawyer Lin Wood speaking of the 2020 "election steal," tweeted, "Over time, we have learned that the Democrats were joined by CCP & other foreign countries." 30 8. North American political figures continue to imply that Chinese are cruel. In 2019, US Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stated that "[the CCP] is cruel and relentless in cracking down on any dissent". Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has said Chinese authorities have "ordered a cruel, ruthless and systematic crackdown on ethnic minorities". 31 A Canadian exintelligence official now at a leading think tank claimed in 2020 that, "For the Chinese Communist Party, the party is the only life that really matters." 32 Because "[t]he US-dominated media portrayal of and reportage on China molds the opinion of the audience, including the Chinese overseas, wherever their programming is carried" 33 and privileging of whiteness exists among diaspora Chinese and even in China, 34 some co-ethnics also claim Chinese are cruel. For example, British-Chinese writer Jung Chang has said "What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty […]". 35 9. In the pandemic, US rightwing politicians and their allies elsewhere have implied that Chinese are cruel. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) attributed US Covid-19 deaths to Chinese willfulness, deceit, and "hard-heartedness." 36 National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien said "the Chinese 'enjoyed' the [Covid-19] chaos in the US and expressed their 'joy' with social media posts." 37 Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) put it that in "taking full advantage of [COVID-19's outbreak] […] how heartless they (the Chinese) are in their ambition for world domination." 38 Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Lance Gooden (R-TX) wrote about Chinese officials' "duplicitous, ineffective, and cruel" response to Covid-19. 39 Outside the US, "Tropical Trump" Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro termed Chinese "heartless". His Minister of Education said Chinese propagated the epidemic to gain political advantages. 40 An analyst at Australia's rightwing Lowy Institute has written of "the systemic failures and cruel incompetence" of China's initial response to COVID-19. 41 10. The claim that Chinese disregard human life is belied however by scientists' comparisons between China and the US's seriousness in addressing Covid-19. Harvard University disease specialist Marc Lipsitch put it that "[The US] government's response was something like one per cent-or lessthan what China did." 42 In June 2020, University of California San Francisco and Duke University global health specialists Dean Jamison and Gavin Yamey did a Time magazine podcast entitled "The US Response to Covid-19 is Worse than China's. 100 Times Worse." US deaths per million (dpm) were then 100 times higher than China's, even factoring in undercounts that affect fatality totals in both countries. 43 By September 18, 2021, the ratio was 690:1 and, discounting the outbreak province, Hubei, and considering the remainder of China, where 95% of Chinese live, the US/China fatality ratio is more than 23,000:1. China, with 17.9% of the world's people, had one-tenth of 1% of global deaths; the US, with 4.2% of the world's population, had 14.7% of fatalities. 44 Harvard Medical School professor Dr. William Haseltine has credited the numbers provided by China. 45 11. There are also subjective evaluations of how the Chinese and US governments performed in the pandemic and, implicitly, whether they devalue life. They disfavor the US even in countries allied with it. A Pew survey in 11 Western countries, Japan, and South Korea, asked whether the US had done a good job with the pandemic. In all 13 countries, China rated higher than the US. 46 12. The US's poor showing was despite its much greater socio-economic potential to deal with epidemics. US per capita income is nominally 4.5 times China's and more than three times in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms; the wealth-per-capita ratio is nominally 11:1. In 2020, China's healthcare 42 Robin Wright, "The Global Panic over the Coronavirus," New Yorker (Mar.

2, 2020). 43 (www.listennotes.com/podcasts/times-top-stories/column-the-us-response-to-ECqTDPmliZ1/), (June 11, 2020 spreaders trope is tied to the "cruel Chinese" trope through the idea that a pandemic emerged from heedless consumption of wildlife by Chinese who buy it in marketplace centers of animal cruelty. 52 Western media assumed, when the outbreak began 53 and for months thereafter, 54 that wildlife sold in a Wuhan "wet market" was the virus' point of origin. Wuhan's 50,000 sq. meter Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (武汉华南海鲜批发市场), where 1,180 people worked, had 653 stalls, but only 10 sold live wild animals. 55 There is no evidence the market was where the virus' animal-to-human transmission began. 56 15. Neither bats or pangolins, animals assumed to be involved in creating the epidemic, were sold at four Wuhan markets, including Huanan, that were repeatedly visited from May 2017 to November 2019 by researchers from Oxford University and China West Normal University who were monitoring tick-born disease. 57 The virus was not spread by consuming these animals: SARS-Cov-2 has a polybasic cleavage site genetic mutation that coronaviruses in bats and pangolins lack, making direct SARS-Cov-2 transmission from such animals very unlikely. 58 Scientists affirm that the question of which 62 Studies have found however that the first Wuhan victim and five of the initial seven victims were not linked to the market. The virus may derive from elsewhere, but was amplified in the market, creating an initial Wuhan expansion around December 8, 2019 and another on January 6, 2020. Georgetown University infectious diseases specialist Daniel Lucey said, "The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace" 63 and the source could have been market workers or visitors. 64 17. City University of Hong Kong epidemiologist Dirk Pfeiffer has stated that, "Maybe people got it somewhere else, took it to the market and, for some reason, the market became the first focus of the transmission." 65 Epidemiologist Mike Ryan, who heads the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program, has said human cases preceded the outbreak and the market was a likely amplification point, but whether "by human, animal or environmental spread is not yet known." 66 Wuhan infectious disease specialist Shi Zhengli has said "we did not detect any SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids in frozen animal samples. The market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found." 67 Leading virologist Zhong Nanshan has noted "only traces of the virus in samples taken at the market," found in the non-organic environment, not in animals. 68 Some 336 "frozen animal carcasses" at the market were tested; all were negative. 69 Virologists also sampled farmed animals and livestock around Hubei, but "did not detect any SARS CoV-2 nucleic acids in these samples." 70 18. Initial speculation that the virus arose from consuming or handling animals was unsupported, but gave impetus to discourses of Chinese disregard for human and animal lives by eating wildlife. A New York Times article and other sources termed Chinese "omnivorous", implying they are undiscerning in eating or "eat weird things". The article listed "unusual fare" assertedly sold in the Wuhan marketplace. 71 Such portrayals likely convinced some Westerners that Chinese food consumption created the pandemic. A fall 2020 survey in 13 European States offered respondents choices about the virus's origins. An animals-to-humans "natural jump" was the preferred explanation in Italy, France, Russia, Germany, and Latvia. In Poland, Czechia, Serbia, Hungary, and Spain, the leading choice was artificial creation in a Chinese lab and intentional spread to the world. In Sweden and Britain, some 50% thought the virus spread "due to Chinese people eating bats and other wild animals." 72 WHO has stated however that "it is highly unlikely that people can contract Covid-19 from food" and "so far, we have not seen evidence of people getting Covid-19 from consuming food: Covid-19 is not a food-borne illness." University of Otago public health specialist Michael Baker has said "environment-to-human transmission is […] far less of a risk than the spread of respiratory droplets and aerosols between people." Only 13 of 873,475 frozen food samples tested in China were contaminated. 73 19. Wet markets and wildlife sales in China should also not be conflated, as they have been in Anglosphere countries. 74 Only a tiny portion of wet market sales involve wildlife. 75 Covid-19-related discourses hardly note that only a small and declining percentage of Chinese eat wildlife 76 and many other peoples also consume wildlife, although the Westerners among them are not condemned as peoples for doing so. 77 also the same or higher than in the US and some European countries. It is growing, especially among the young and middle class, while among the whole population meat sales are declining. 78 20. Anthropologists who work on animal-to-human transmission of pathogens-zoonotic diseases-have said the New York Times article "consciously described [the Chinese] markets in a way that would be aesthetically unacceptable to its western audience" and that the "focus on exotic food consumption in China often relies on Orientalism and is in some cases tinged with anti-Chinese sentiment," through presenting "images [that] communicate a sense of disgust toward the eating habits of the Chinese." Most marketed wildlife in China is raised in captivity, by farmers who could not otherwise subsist in China's industrialized agriculture. Anthropological fieldwork found that China's Center for Disease Control (CDC) and local authorities regularly inspect wet markets and that market closings after prior epidemics led to an "uncontrollable black market." 79 UK NGO Traffic wildlife trade expert Dr. Richard Thomas has said "wild-sourced meat is so important for the livelihoods of millions of people in China" and a ban would make it "a lot harder to monitor and regulate." 80 21. Illegal hunting, procurement, transport, and import/export of wildlife was nevertheless made punishable in China in late 2020 by up to ten years' imprisonment and fines. 81 A revised Animal Epidemic Prevention Law bolstered inspection of wild animals, whose use for non-meat purposes is now also "subject to strict approval procedures, inspection and quarantine measures." Governments at county-level and above can ban live trading of livestock and poultry in certain areas. 82 The number of protected wild animal species has risen from 453 to 980, with hunting and trafficking punishable. More than 15,000 people were prosecuted in China for wildlife crimes in 2020's first nine months, a two-thirds increase over those months in 2019. 83 22. Western media largely ignore or dismiss Chinese efforts to curb wildlife consumption however, while not relating Western wildlife consumption to the spread of disease. A study released in August, 2021, based on a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) survey of more than 600 samples from wild white-tailed deer, was the first to detect the virus in animals found in the wild. It determined that nearly half the sample had antibodies that indicate infection by Covid-19's virus. One infection dated from 2019 and some others dated from early 2020, before the first confirmed coronavirus cases among Americans. The study indicated that infected deer may be able to spread the virus to cattle, humans, and other species. 84 The US is the major Western country where wildlife is consumed, with its hunters annually killing some 6m wild white-tailed deer, whose meat could account for 1.36b meals. The US northeast, from which most of the USDA survey samples derived, is the center of such hunting. The testing of residents living nearby the infected deer might reveal whether there were early transmissions from the wild animals to residents that allowed the virus to more readily adapt to humans. 85 IV. Chinese "deceit and incompetence" 23. A Yellow Peril trope of Chinese as duplicitous and inept has existed since Britain and France's Opium Wars against China in the 1840s and 1850s. 86 Chinese have been depicted as secretive, contemptuous, mysterious, and implacable, 87 narratives that re-emerged with the pandemic. Trump said China was secretive about the outbreak's seriousness 88 and "China's secrecy, deceptions, and cover up allowed it to spread all over the world". 89 Our detailed timeline of the epidemic's first two months shows however that China's national government robustly combatted a contagion whose global spread was mainly from Europe and the US, not China. 90 24. Early in the pandemic, many Western analysts asserted that China's authoritarian governance is based on "deceit and incompetence", rendering it incapable of combatting viral outbreaks with the effectiveness of liberal democracies. 91 Asia editor of the UK's Financial Times Jamil Anderlini wrote that, "China's authoritarian system is particularly poor at dealing with public health emergencies that require timely, transparent and accurate information." 92 An oft-repeated claim is that Wuhan and Hubei officials did not release new numbers of cases from January 7-12, 2020 in order to disable the world from knowing there was a pandemic. 93 Though some have claimed that local officials were insufficiently transparent about the extent of the outbreak at its inception, 94 their omissions likely had no substantial effect outside China. Their lapses came at the epidemic's infancy, when even full disclosure would not have influenced other States' policies, because there were then so few cases. 95 How many cases there were then-around January 13, 2020-is unclear, as definitions of a case were being debated and changed. There may have been a few dozen or perhaps hundreds of cases in China, 96 but no deaths outside China. Even when it became obvious that there would be a pandemic, "Some countries, notably in north and southeast Asia, took the threat seriously [while] others-among them the US, Brazil and to some extent the UK-were less alert to the danger." 97 It is common knowledge that Sweden even opted for natural herd immunity, with no active public health measures taken. Imperial College London epidemiologist Katharina Hauck has observed that more transparency about the very low numbers in January would not likely have changed much about the response of countries to the outbreak. 98 25. In the US, Council on Foreign Relations public health analyst Laurie Garrett, however, wrote of "How China's Coronavirus Incompetence Endangers the World," claiming that, China now faces international vilification and potential domestic unrest as it blunders through continued cover-ups, lies, and repression that have already failed to stop the virus and may well be fanning the flames of its spread […] China is […] making a crisis into a catastrophe. 99 26. Trump also pronounced on "Chinese incompetence", 100 tweeting that it was the "incompetence of China and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing!" 101 Some anti-Trump US analysts have agreed. 102 That notion partly derives from the idea that liberal democracies must be superior to authoritarian systems as to all positive attributes. 103 It also implicates the Yellow Peril notion that Chinese cannot perform as well as Westerners on any beneficial public task. 104 Western observers have long pronounced Chinese incapable of aiding the commonweal. American missionary Reverend Arthur H. Smith lived for 54 years in China and in one of his many books on China praised by US and UK media in the early 20 th Century, stated that, "No Chinese can comprehend for a moment such as a notion as is embodied in the phrase pro bono publico. He never heard of such a thing and what is more he never wants to hear of it." 105 Chinese were again portrayed in 2020 as rejecting or mishandling actions that might serve the public good. A University of Helsinki scholar has noted "two anti-Chinese views" brought together in US discourse of the pandemic: "the malevolence and callousness of China's pursuit of world dominance" and "Chinese incompetence". 106 The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece by a prominent columnist that claimed the Chinese government was ineffective vis-a-vis the epidemic. Its headline, "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia," invoked a classic Yellow Peril slogan used to disparage Chinese in the early 20 th Century. The op-ed called China's government "self-serving" and "ineffective" as to the virus and said the epidemic would cause China's "brittle economy" to melt, shrink China's presence abroad, and allow the US to revert to being the world's only superpower. 107 Not long after, however, an inversion occurred as the US was inundated by Covid-19 deaths; so much so that Johns Hopkins University medical historian Marta Hanson could lecture widely on the topic "From Sick Man of Asia to Sick Uncle Sam". 108 27. It was not China, but three other major countries with rightwing regimes, the US, Brazil and India, that prominently failed against Covid-19. In early 2021 they rated at 86, 96 and 98 on Australia's Lowy Institute Covid Performance Index of 98 countries/territories. They then had 45% of the world's Covid-19 cases and, in August 2021, despite their access to vaccines, these three countries still had the same proportion. 109 Countries with a variety of governance systems have done much better, including several with systems like China's. In mid-August 2021, Vietnam had only one-thirty-fifth the US's dpm, despite US income per capita being 10 times Vietnam's. Its performance has been attributed to its "top-down governance". 110 WHO's representative there has said "Vietnam responded to this outbreak early and proactively," with a first risk assessment exercise in early January 2020, just after cases in China were reported. A national virus steering committee was formed and "its handling of the pandemic has been strikingly transparent". Despite few cases, it closed schools in January 2020, began mass quarantines in March and had a national lockdown from April 1. Buildings, streets and communities where even one case arose are quarantined, as are contacts of patients and contacts of contacts. Vietnam's mobilization resembles its wartime experience and hospitals rely on practices from the 2003 SARS epidemic to handle the patient load. 111 28. Vietnam's neighbor Laos has a similar governance system and, as of mid-August 2021, had only 1 dpm. WHO accepts Laos' figures and has said "[Laos'] Government had responded to the pandemic effectively by making timely decisions to introduce and later ease public health and social measures. With support from WHO and other partners, the Government also made great efforts to prepare the health system for early detection, testing and clinical management." 112 Vietnam and Laos's successes have not been much covered in Western media, however. Instead, talk is mainly about whitemajority New Zealand, which is far from high-population regions and among places, such as Australia and Taiwan, that "have used their geographic insularity as a primary defense against the pandemic." 113 Apart from case and fatality measures, peoples' judgments of their governments' anti-pandemic performance are measured. A Singapore-based pollster asked 12,592 persons in 23 economies in April 2020 to do that. The average score was 40. Highest ranked were China (86), Vietnam (82) and New Zealand (67) . The US score was 32 and the UK's 30. 114 In an eight-country summer 2020 Pew survey, the US and UK were the only countries where more people thought their government's response was "bad," rather than "good." 115 Another summer 2020 survey asked 10 questions in 19 countries about aspects of government responses. The mean country-level score was 52.95 out of 100 points. China's was highest at 80.48, then South Korea (74.54). The US was 50.57 and UK 48.66. 116 In October 2020, people in 11 Western countries, Japan, and South Korea rated China and US pandemic performances. A median of 61% said China had done a bad job, but 84% said this of the US. 117 29. Scientists knowledgeable about the Chinese response to the epidemic generally reject the deceit and incompetence trope. Soon after Western political and media figures claimed China was dissembling and inept in handling the epidemic, leading UK medical journal The Lancet carried a statement endorsed mainly by Western scientists, who wrote that, the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable. 118 30. The view that China had failed to mitigate the epidemic and had spread it to the world soon became generally untenable among scientists. In July 2020, The Lancet published an editorial that stated that China had largely controlled the epidemic and, When COVID-19 emerged in December 2019, Chinese scientists were quickly able to identify the virus and shared genomic sequencing data internationally on Jan 11, 2020. By the end of January, doctors from mainland China and Hong Kong had characterized the clinical features of patients with COVID-19, person-to-person transmission, genomic characteristics, and epidemiology, warning the world about the threat of COVID-19 […] 119 31. Even in countries where the "index patient" or "patient zero" was Chinese, an outbreak did not necessarily follow. On January 22, 2020, the day Wuhan's lockdown order issued, Trump said of the virus that, "It's just one guy from China. We have it completely under control. I'm not worried about a pandemic." The "one guy" had returned to Washington State from Wuhan on January 15 and was lab-confirmed six days later. He did not foster the US epidemic: none of his 68 post-return contacts caught the virus. 120 Studies affirm that counter-intuitive result. The few infected Chinese found abroad may not have become significant spreaders because, as UCLA infectious disease specialist Jamie Lloyd-Smith found, "The consistent pattern is that the most common number of [persons to whom a carrier passes the disease to] is zero. Most people do not transmit," but are "dead-ends". A study of Washington State and Germany also shows that "the coronavirus arrived more than once without starting runaway outbreaks. In these cases, there was little or no transmission, and the virus simply died out." 121 32. The virus was brought to the world mainly from Europe and the US, as China took concerted action that sharply mitigated the novel viral outbreak. China's rate of infection outside Hubei has been low and its death rate very low. As of mid-August 2021, 97.3% of China's 4,636 deaths were among Hubei's 58.5m people and Hubei had only 79 dpm, one-seventh the world average, while the US's dpm was 25 times Hubei's. There were 124 deaths among the 1.3415b Chinese outside Hubei or 0.009 dpm-just one death per 10 million people. 122 A late 2020 China CDC serological study of 12,000 people outside Hubei found just two with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, 123 indicating to University of Queensland virologist Ian Mackay that the lockdown largely contained the virus in Wuhan. 124 33. Many US politicians nevertheless continue to assert that China's failures caused the pandemic. Trump said that, "The world is paying a very big price for what they did. It could have been stopped right where it came from, China. It would have been much better if we had known about this a number of months earlier." 125 Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) stated that China's "lies, deceit and incompetence" caused Covid-19 to become a pandemic. Cotton added that "China unleashed this pandemic on the world and they should pay the price.'' 126 The disease was subdued in China, but spread globally mainly from Western Europe and the US. An April 2020 tally found "travel from and within Europe preceded the first coronavirus cases in at least 93 countries across all five continents, accounting for more than half the world's index cases […] compared to 27 countries associated with travel from China." 127 A later count found that from January 1-March 21, 2020, 164 countries had identifiable "patient zeroes"; 26 were from China or had travelled there, 25 of them in January. The other 138 came mainly from Europe, followed by the US and Iran. 128 Not only were most countries' first cases from outside China, so too were most of their imported cases. 129 34. Before becoming President, Joe Biden was as vituperative as Trump in condemning Chinese leaders. 130 He excoriated Trump for having "rolled over for the Chinese" and having "praised the Chinese". Biden asserted that "Chinese authorities were not honest about the early outbreak in Wuhan and sought to cover up the contagion." 131 To shift the blame to Chinese, Democratic politicians joined the attack on China for having wet markets 132 and concurred with most aspects of the Republican view of China as liable for the epidemic. 133 Some Democrats urged their party to not compete in condemning China for Covid-19, but to instead blame Trump, but affirmed without evidence that "China, at a minimum, covered up evidence of the outbreak and was too slow in sharing complete information with international health authorities." 134 A few Democratic politicians disavowed the idea that the pandemic derived from Chinese cultural attributes, such as wet markets, or disputed that Chinese were not sufficient in disseminating information. The National Republican Congressional Committee portrayed them as propaganda-spewing "Chinese assets", disincentivizing other US politicians from breaking with the blame-China consensus. 135 That consensus continued into the Biden era. Thus, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said "President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China." He "blamed Chinese errors for making the pandemic worse." 136 35. Contrary to the trope of Chinese "deceit and incompetence," the US government knew about the contagion almost as soon as China's government did-very early in the epidemic, but long before Trump took any action. A US official with access to the intelligence briefings that Trump officials and Congress received has said that "Intelligence agencies 'have been warning on this since January […] Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were-they just couldn't get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.'" CDC Director Robert Redfield "learned on December 31 of a 'cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology reported in Wuhan, China.'" Wuhan's government had stated that day that a Pneumonia of Unknown Cause (PUC) existed. "Chinese colleagues," including China CDC head George Gao Fu, told Redfield on January 3 of a possible new virus. Redfield immediately told HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who tried to contact Trump. He did not get through to him until January 18 and, even then Trump "interjected to ask about vaping". 137 Trump was warned about the virus more than a dozen times in Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs) in January and February, but "did not seem to absorb the warnings [even though] by mid-to-late January, the virus was brought up more often as either a focal 37. Lipkin later criticized the US and UK governments for being slow to react. He blamed their insufficient and inadequate testing and tracing for rising fatality numbers. Lipkin characterized the Covid-19-related attacks emanating from the US as "baiting and nationalism". 139 38. Besides US officials and scientists learning of the outbreak directly from Chinese sources, they also heard from WHO. US infectious diseases epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove heads WHO's Emerging Diseases and Zoonosis Unit. Moreover, "embedded US government secondees [were] working at the WHO headquarters in Geneva" from the epidemic's onset, including 15-16 US CDC staff and a couple other HHS scientists, most "detailed specifically to work with [WHO] on its COVID-19 response." WHO's Director, Ethiopia-born, UK-trained immunologist Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said, "Having CDC staff means there is nothing hidden from the US, from day one. Because these are Americans working with us." A CDC official served on WHO's emergency committee to assess whether there was a pandemic. Another CDC official sent WHO information to CDC's own daily "incident management" conferences and "Information about what WHO was planning to do or announce was often shared [with HHS] days in advance." 140 the Chinese Communist Party" 147 and that Trump won the US's presidential election. 148 Wanda Markotter, Director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses at the University of Pretoria has said no evidence exists that China's government engaged in a cover-up. 149 The claim by John Sawers, ex-head of British intelligence agency MI6, that "there was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing [the virus] from the West" 150 is thus inaccurate. There is no evidence the Chinese national government concealed knowledge of the epidemic from entities outside China after it became aware it was ongoing. There is also no attestation of "Chinese incompetence," although Western sources continued to press that trope in 2021 through flawed claims that China-made vaccines are inferior to Western-made ones, impugning Chinese and seeking to deny an anti-pandemic option to developing countries, 151 where China is "the first provider of aid […] in particular to some of the poorest African nations." 152 V. Conclusion: Covid-19 Yellow Perilism and anti-China mobilization few additional cases and almost no deaths from Covid-19 from May to July, while the US had millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths. Some 78% of polled Americans said the Chinese government's initial handling of the outbreak is a great deal (51%) or fair amount (27%) to blame for the pandemic's spread, while only 20% said it was not much or not at all to blame, and 50% wanted to "hold China responsible for the role it played in the outbreak of the coronavirus, even if it means worsening economic relations". 153 42. Americans' low ratings of China's pandemic performance contrasts with the rest of the world however. A June 2020 survey of 120,000 people in 53 countries found the US was one of only two countries where more people thought the US responded better than China to the pandemic. Only a third of people globally thought the US responded well, but more than 60% said that of China. 154 A Pew survey of 14 developed countries released in October 2020 showed an average of 84% convinced the US had done a bad job with the coronavirus. 155 43. The negative "China and Covid-19" narrative is inseparable from the portrayals of Chinese since the 19 th Century. The Yellow Peril worldview is now imbricated in a bi-partisan anti-China mobilization that reflects a dialectical relationship of politics and racialization, akin to what the Supreme Court displayed in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 when it stripped the US government of power to outlaw private racial discrimination. 156 The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass saw that as resulting from a political motive-reconciling Southern racists with the US-and the view that the US government had no moral obligation to obviate the racial oppression the decision would unleash. 157 Justice John Marshall Harlan predicted that oppression in his dissent. Ironically, however, even the famously liberal-minded Harlan also endorsed Yellow Perilism. Described by a commentator as "a faithful opponent of the constitutional rights of Chinese for much of his road to wars against Asian peoples. A thorough repudiation of Covid-19 racism requires recognizing that Yellow Peril tropes infuse the US-led anti-China mobilization. That in turn means a disavowal of elites who use such tropes as devices to maintain a hegemony that ill-suits the interests of the world's peoples.

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responses-rated-poorly-by-own-citizens-in-first-of-its-kind-global-survey). 115 "Datawatch: Pandemic Response

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Simonds had at least eight meetings with WHO in January and the HHS health attaché in Beijing had at least three then. Meetings continued in February and March, with WHO officials based in China, including Drs. Tedros and Ryan. A WHO mission went to Wuhan in mid-February, 141 with Americans from CDC and NIH and "its leaders said they were given wide latitude to travel, visit facilities and talk with people". 142 That visit was the third to Wuhan during the epidemic by specialists from outside the Chinese mainland. The first, on January 13-14, was of experts from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau 143 and the second was by WHO specialists on

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The main effect of such actions is to further embed Yellow Peril ideology, through tropes of Chinese cruelty, deceit, incompetence, and infectiousness, among peoples longimmersed in the racist themes that now shape a distinctly negative US view of China's role in the pandemic. A May 2020 poll showed 37% of Americans thought China did a poor job in dealing with the epidemic; by July, 64% thought so, and 43% said a "very bad job

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163 These ideas can only be partly counteracted through repudiation of the anti-China mobilization's empirical assertions, however, as the "liar's dividend" means that those spreading disinformation benefit even when their efforts are disproved

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