CHINESE VIRUS
The debate over the precise location of the deadly COVID-19 outbreak that swept the globe in the first part of the 2020 decade has survived longer than the pandemic itself, reaching near mythological proportions. Shrouded for the most part in medical language initially, it gradually spilled over into politics, aimed directly at the nation where it originated.
Naturally, if origin could be used to place blame for the killer virus, it came to be– and for that matter as soon as possible– known as the “Chinese virus.” That particular semantic tag wasn’t new, it was published in a book review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (06 December 2011, page D-7). But that wasn’t meant to target the Asian nation with radical racial overtones that would reverberate throughout the United States in particular, rife and ripe for yet another marginalized group to be subjected to linguistic subjugation. That became apparent in January 2020 even before the administration in the White House adopted it as an anti-Asian targeting strategy.
Twitter, ground zero for the “hashtag,” or method to explicitly create a trending topic, was the premier social media platform to introduce “Chinese virus” as a hashtag: #chinesevirus. It appeared on the platform at least two months prior to any other use for it.
Using the advanced hashtag search on Twitter, (#chinesevirus) until:2020-03-30 since:2020-01-01, it was possible to trace it to the first use at the beginning of 2020.
One of the earliest references to the hashtag was posted on 05 January 2020 by MGROnlineLive (@MGROnlineLive)
The particular post had two attributes, the initial text was in Thai language, but the hashtag was code-switched in order to target the expected audience, which of course, was English.
By mid-month, the hashtag picked up steam from not just the average Twitter user, but was beginning to show trending in mainstream media. On 17 January, CNN (@cnnbrk) called it “a mysterious new deadly virus” from Wuhan, China.
By mid-January, news of the virus was beginning to spread across Europe. L'édition du soir par Ouest-France (@leditiondusoir), code switched from French to the English hashtag. A month later, Twitter users went from informative posts circulating around the hashtag to wholesale attacks on China and Asians in general. The vituperative language included other tags surfacing such as #EvilCommunistChina and #ChineseAsianSickMan.
One month later, President Trump found himself answering to mainstream media on calling COVID-19 the “China virus:”
“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,”
In typical fashion, the president abbreviated “because” and repeated himself “at all,” and “not at all,” a method he employed constantly in not just his media responses but in formal speeches as well. To describe it as a “New York” style of speaking would be doing the state an injustice, as it appears to appeal more to a certain segment of the population that supports him. The former president seemed to have an uncanny knack of choosing his syntax carefully and unwisely enough to appeal to the element that made up his voting bloc. He didn’t invent the “China virus,” language myth, it was around on Twitter two months before he was called out on it in the media; but President Trump became the principal purveyor of a myth created through the misuse of language.
It was effective.
Another unexpected twist in pandemic bigotry through misuse of language to perpetrate a myth was the tagging of Asians themselves as carriers of COVID-19. In a 13 February 2020 post by Tina Chen (@m8FgyOfzRMA9OX1), code-switched Chinese symbols appeared alongside English with an image of a Chinese girl in Milan, Italy holding a sign, again code-switched in Italian, that read, “Abbracciami io non sono un virus,” “Hug me, I am not a virus.”
If myths about language include the primary goal to send a message with clear intention and direct interpretation, no better example can be given than the campaign to distort the pandemic record on social media, by the common troller to the highest officials in government. To what degree that ambiguity and lack of language clarity contributed to the side effects of deliberate negative debates on gain-of-function experiments, the lab leak theory and ultimately, the nationwide anti-vaccine hysteria, is hidden somewhere in the syntax, and the self-serving pragmatics of those with an agenda operating other than for the good of the public, locally and around the globe.
Primary Source:
Relevant Links:
#chinesevirus, Twitter, https://twitter.com/search?q=(%23chinesevirus)%20until%3A2020-01-30%20since%3A2020-01-01&src=typed_query&f=live
#ChineseVirus, MGROnlineLive, https://twitter.com/MGROnlineLive/status/1213770945971703809?s=20
“New deadly virus, CNN, https://twitter.com/0lvHealer/status/1218439983297519616?s=20
Les masques protègent-ils vraiment contre les virus ?, L'édition du soir par Ouest-France, https://twitter.com/leditiondusoir/status/1220755073279692802?s=20
“Chinese get out of my country!” https://twitter.com/QemerAy/status/1227711986194100224?s=20
Maegen Vazquez, Betsy Klein, “Trump again defends use of the term ‘China virus’,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/trump-china-coronavirus/index.html
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