The coronavirus spreads racism against—and among—ethnic Chinese

“YO VIRUS-BOY! Don’t infect us!” So Andrew Zhou, a Chinese-Canadian in Vancouver, has been taunted in the school playground. On February 8th Hao Chunxiang, a Chinese university student in the Netherlands, complained on Facebook that the lift in his dormitory had been spray-painted with the words “DIE CHINESE”. In Japan the hashtag #ChineseDon’tCometoJapan has been trending on Twitter. Rhea Liang, a doctor in Australia, tweeted that one of her patients had refused to shake her hand because of her ethnicity.

Amid global anxiety about the spread of the new coronavirus, first detected in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the tens of millions of ethnic Chinese living outside China and Taiwan are particularly uneasy. Anecdotal evidence abounds that fear of the virus is generating racial phobia against them. The virus has so far infected more than 70,000 people and killed more than 1,700.