‘China Lied, People Died’: The Yellow Peril Politics of Covid-19 Undercounting
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The US elite-led mobilization against China includes assertions about Covid-19’s origin and spread. These claims feature the Yellow Peril canard of Chinese as cruel, inept dissemblers, who covered-up the pandemic’s lethality, unlike more humanitarian and forthright elites in liberal democracies. We show however that undercounting Covid-19 deaths occurs in many countries with diverse regimes and that China has been at least as forthcoming as other major states. China’s undercounting is largely explained by a new disease appearing in an outbreak country. It impacted China’s Hubei province, but had much less effect on the virus’s countrywide advance, and impinged little on its global outspread. US and Indian undercounts had much greater consequences and relate to these countries’ governance systems.
Barry Sautman is a political scientist and lawyer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His fieldwork-based research on China-Africa links has focused on mining and agricultural investments, infrastructure building, localization of enterprises, and African-Chinese workplaces and neighborhood interactions. He also researches Yellow Peril ideology and the Covid-19 pandemic, China’s lending and the Belt and Road Initiative, and Hong Kong nativism in comparative perspective. His articles have appeared in social science and law journals and he serves on the boards of the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network and journal Asian Ethnicity. Co-authored with Yan Hairong, his latest published monograph is 中国在非洲：话语与实踐 (China in Africa: Discourse and Practice) (北京: 中国社会科学文獻出版社).
Based in Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Prof. Yan Hairong’s research interests include China-Africa links, racialization of labor, China’s agrarian change, and collective and cooperative rural economy. She is the author of New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Duke U Press 2008) and has co-authored East Mountain Tiger, West Mountain Tiger: China, Africa, the West and “Colonialism” and has contributed to IPES-Food (till December 2020) and the food sovereignty network in China.
Host: Prof Wen WANG, Div. of Social Science, HKUST