‘The China Virus’ - Invasion, Contagion, and the ‘Yellow Peril’
At a Glance
Section titled “At a Glance”| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2020-12-01 |
| Journal | Critical Quarterly |
| Authors | Darryl Jones |
| Citations | 2 |
Abstract
Section titled “Abstract”‘No-one would have believed, in the last years of the 2010s …’ In fact anybody who had been paying attention would very easily have believed it. For those of us with a background in Gothic Studies - or certainly for me - perhaps the most dislocating thing about the Covid-19 crisis is the inescapable sense that we have been here before. Gothic culture provides us with a template, a hermeneutic, and innumerable prefiguring narratives through which to recognise, interpret, understand, and make sense of where we are. Killer diseases, the infected, invasions, permeable membranes, rotten blood, social breakdown, and race war; grotesque, abhuman leaders, and their Gothic Bodies; the erosion of reality and the Land of Mist; the Sense of an Ending, of apocalyptic fears, and the Decline of the West. To say anything in this context, it sometimes seems, is to risk Stating the Bleeding Obvious. But these are politically urgent times, in which the Bleeding Obvious needs to be Stated. as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that infusoria under the microscope do the same.44 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 9. The body itself, as Mary Douglas theorised in Purity and Danger, is a closed, bounded system, our very skin forming a boundary between self and other, order and disorder, unity and entropy, subject and abject. Her book is an analysis, to quote its subtitle, ‘of the concepts of pollution and taboo’.55 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). Deeper still, at the cellular level, our cells have walls, boundaries to repel attacks from alien and impure threats. But our borders are always vulnerable: they are membranes which are porous, permeable, or fragile. Every widespread disease of the nation, be it mental or physical therefore shows us the life of the population under abnormal conditions, and all we need to do is recognize this abnormality and signal it to the statesman so he can dispose of it. … Do we not always find the diseases of the population traceable to defects in society?77 Otis, Membranes, 8. In my own lifetime, outbreaks of the deadliest diseases have still carried uncomfortable colonial or Orientalist resonances. In 1967, workers in a pharmaceutical plant in Marburg, Germany, contracted a virus which was not only extraordinarily deadly, but whose symptoms were unbelievably horrifying and painful, the worst imaginable death, like Purity and Danger made agonising flesh - all your skin falls off, your insides liquefy, you bleed from every orifice, you die. All the Marburg victims had come into contact with monkeys imported for medical research from Uganda. In 1969, in the village of Lassa, Nigeria, a nurse fell ill with a disease whose symptoms included bleeding from the skin and excruciating backpain. According to some estimates, there are as many as 500,000 cases of Lassa fever annually in West Africa. It is transmitted to humans from mice, and fatalities during epidemic outbreaks can rise as high as 50 per cent. There is no vaccine for Lassa. In 1976, in Yambuku, Zaire, a 30-year-old man was diagnosed with what would become in the public imagination the archetypal killer disease, the astonishingly deadly Ebola, named after the nearest river. Ebola seems to have jumped the species barrier following the consumption of bushmeat, most likely fruit bats. AIDS, the human version of a West African primate disease, seems to have jumped the species barrier with the consumption of monkey meat in the Congo, perhaps as early as 1959.1010 The information in this paragraph is drawn from Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (London: Penguin, 1994). And so it was that Covid-19 seems to have jumped the species barrier, crashing through our permeable membranes, possibly following the consumption of bat meat from a market in Wuhan. This geographical origin has brought about a conflation with a long history of ‘Asian’ or ‘Asiatic’ influenza viruses. In his analysis of the H5N1 avian influenza, first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, Mike Davis writes that ‘influenza epidemics usually arise in southern China (especially in Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta) where huge numbers of pigs, domestic ducks, and wild waterfowl live in traditional ecological intimacy’.1111 Mike Davis, The Monster at our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York and London: New Press, 2005), 17. Pigs have generally been the most hospitable intermediaries in the antigenic shift of viruses across the species barrier to humans. The global pandemic in Steven Soderbergh’s remarkably prescient Contagion (2011) begins with a bat infecting a pig, which is in turn served at the Macau restaurant at which Gwyneth Paltrow is a diner. There’s much here that is familiar to a student of the Gothic. The racist discourse here is remarkably plural. As a subhumanising method, it has been pounced on by Trump and other political populists. There is, first, the violation of taboos prohibiting unclean eating. No civilised human being, it is implied, would eat bats or monkeys. The classic colonial unclean-eating slur is cannibalism; the eating of monkeys takes us perilously close both to that and to the pseudo-Darwinian racial theories of polygeny.1212 For colonial cannibalism, see e.g. William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For polygeny, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, revised and expanded edn (London: Penguin, 1997), 62-104. It’s strange how difficult the racist imagination finds it to get beyond discredited nineteenth-century science. The resonances of a pandemic caused by the ingestion of bats are surely irresistible for anyone who has read Dracula: unclean eating once again, pollution, rotten blood, infection, invasion, the rupturing of the protective membrane of the skin, the sheer vulnerability of the metropolis, the dangers of cosmopolitanism. The China Virus, the Wuhan Virus, or (with apologies) the Kung Flu all seem to me to be subsets of one of the classic categories of imperial racist taxonomy, the Yellow Peril.1313 For the Yellow Peril, see e.g. Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014); David Glover, ‘Die Gelbe Gefahr, Le Péril Jaune, The Yellow Peril: The Geopolitics of a Fear’, in Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy (eds), Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 47-59; John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats (eds), Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London and New York: Verso, 2014). This is why Trump and Mike Pompeo are so insistent on using them. In the wake of the so-called Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901, The Times thundered that ‘all Western civilization must now arm for vengeance. The Chinese must be treated as cannibals and Peking razed to the ground.’1414 Bulfin, Gothic Invasions, 139. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996) armed the American right with a new (old) hermeneutic for interpreting twenty-first-century geopolitics: liberal democracies, and the capitalist order which sustained them, were engaged in an existential struggle for survival against inimical ideologies and nations.1515 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). In 1996, Peter Navarro, then a professor in the Business School of the University of California, Irvine, and now Donald Trump’s Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, published The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won. In 2011, he followed this up with Death by China: Confronting the Dragon - A Call to Global Action.1616 Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won (London: FT Press, 1996); Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon - A Call to Global Action (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011). The Yellow Peril is a term from geopolitics, which soon jumped the species-barrier to become a term of popular culture. ‘Die Gelbe Gefahr’ was coined by, or at least popularly associated with, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who claimed to have had a prophetic dream in which he saw Buddha riding a dragon at the head of an apocalyptic storm which threated to consume the whole of Europe. In 1895 he commissioned the artist Herman Knackfuss to produce a (widely circulated) image in which the Archangel Michael leads a group of European women warriors, each in national costume, against the coming storm.1717 Tchen and Yeats, Yellow Peril!, 12-13. ‘The Yellow Peril’ had its first serious English usage in July 1900, in the context of the Boxer Rebellion.1818 Frayling, The Yellow Peril, 133. Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan … Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect. … Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.1919 Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, in The Fu Manchu Omnibus, vol. 1 (London: Allison & Busby, 1995), 15. Further quotations from this edition will be incorporated into the main body of the text. ‘My scorpions - have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my collection of fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No? But Mr Nayland Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon! And we must not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes - my spiders, that sit in the dark and watch - then leap!’ (99) Legal theorists and historians sometimes distinguish between ‘torture’, which at least ostensibly has a telos, the gathering of information, and ‘torment’, which has none beyond the inflicting of pain for spectacle.2323 Ibid., 9. See also Bob Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Shane O’Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Yellow Peril torture, a recurring feature in the popular imaginary, is pure torment. Fu Manchu, unsurprisingly, is its foremost practitioner. The Devil Doctor, Rohmer’s first sequel, supplements Fu’s standard ‘Wire Jacket’ with ‘The Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom’, in which ravenous rats escape from a cage by gnawing their way through the victim’s abdomen. The Fifth Gate, ‘the Gate of Sweet Desires’, sees ‘the admission of the twentieth rat’ (417). No one ever gets to the Sixth Gate, the Gate Celestial. He has the backing of a political group whose wealth is enormous, and his mission in Europe is to pave the way! Do you follow me? He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has ever dreamed of it. (34) the most truthful way of regarding illness - the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.2424 Susan Sontag, ‘Illness as Metaphor’, in Essays of the 1960s and 70s, ed. David Rieff (New York: Library of America, 2013), 677.