Is it true that people seems to blame CHINA for the expendable plague?
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Answer:
The Black Death was reportedly the second bubonic plague pandemic which wiped out almost 50 million people in Europe in the fourteenth century. According to the World Health Organisation, the disease is easily treatable now owing to antibiotics and remains endemic in some parts of Africa. According to Origins, which traced pandemics throughout history, the Black Death of Europe descended from the ancient plague which affected Rome in 541 to 549 CE.
The second outbreak of the plague originated somewhere in Central Asia and it moved to China in the 1200s from there before proceeding to Europe.
Soon after news broke about a suspected case of the plague in China, Twitter was flooded with tweets of desperation and frustration with people wondering what else 2020 had in store for the world.
Unsurprisingly, there were some tweets that reeked of racism.
Some blamed China for every possible disease in the world while others hinted that the Chinese government had a role to play in this. While most conspiracy theories have no weight in evidence, their existence in such sheer volume is proof of racism.
Let's look at some instances to prove how pandemics and racism have always gone hand in hand.
In 1882, then US President Chester A. Arthur signed an executive order passing the Chinese Exclusion Act and xenophobia and racism had important roles to play here. According to Time magazine, one of the main reasons why the law was quickly approved was because the Chinese were believed to be harbingers of death and disease, especially cholera and smallpox.
An Asian professor in the US spoke to The Mercury News where he said that Asians, and especially the Chinese, have always been treated as filthy and dirty and a source of contagion which could kill white Americans. This has deepened discrimination and often encourages harassment on grounds of race.
In Honolulu in the late 1800s for example, the Asians were viewed as exotic and romaticized while at the same time, they were thought to be carrying diseases. Their living conditions, often overcrowded, were thought to be the den of deadly diseases, like smallpox and pague.
During the 1899 plague outbreak, Chinatown in Honolulu was quarantined first. Interestingly, white Americans who had visited Chinatown were not. Buildings were locked down and burned when plague patients died in them. One such day, one of these fires went out of control and ended up destroying over 5,000 homes in Honolulu. The fire, which became a landmark incident of the times, quickly became a symbol of the impact of racial discrimination based on assumption that a particular race was spreading disease.
Not just the Chinese, the same happened during the Spanish Flu. While the name of this particular outbreak suggests it originated in Spain, the reality is somewhat different.
The first case of Spanish flu was actually reported in Kansas, United States. In 1918 and 1919, when the influenza was at its peak, most nations around the world censored coverage to keep misinformation from spreading. However, only Spanish media fiercely covered the flu and its latest updates. This led to the misunderstanding that Spain was ground zero for the pandemic. But that did not seem to matter, for discrimination against Spaniards had already begun.
More than a century later, history is being repeated once again.
US President Donald Trump has left no stone unturned when it comes to blaming China for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In March this year, he repeatedly called the novel coronavirus "Chinese virus" and a few weeks ago, he called it "Kung Flu."
The first case of coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China and has been largely speculated to have originated from a wet-seafood market in the same city. However, as the pandemic spread to other countries, the United States of America has been the most affected - both in highest number of fatalities, as well as the maximum number of positive cases.
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