Editor’s Note: Matthew Bossons (@MattBossons) is managing editor of the Shanghai-based online publication Radii. He has lived in China since 2014. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Shanghai
CNN
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When word began circulating on social media and in group chats in mid-September that one of China’s top health officials was warning citizens to avoid physical contact with foreigners as a precaution against monkeypox, the news hit me with an unshakable anxiousness.
The recommendation was the first of five issued by Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in response to mainland China’s first monkeypox case in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing.
Wu blasted the advice out to his nearly half a million followers on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, and it was quickly picked up and further publicized by state-backed media outlets.
Wu’s choice of words was a far cry from the World Health Organization’s advice, which recommends “limiting close contact with people who have suspected or confirmed monkeypox” and avoids singling out any nationality as at risk of spreading the disease.
Having lived through the wave of xenophobia that accompanied the closure of China’s borders in the spring of 2020 – when Covid-19 was largely under control in China and running rampant abroad – Wu’s proclamation associating foreigners with disease immediately triggered alarm bells.
I moved from my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, in 2014 to live and work as a journalist in the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou. In April 2020, I watched as the city’s expatriate population began to find themselves shunned by locals concerned about imported Covid-19 cases, despite the vast majority of imported cases being brought in by returning Chinese nationals, the foreign ministry said at the time.
Infamously, many of the city’s African residents were expelled from their residences and denied access to hotels despite having not left the country since the pandemic began. Out of fear of contracting the virus, taxi drivers refused to pick up foreigners, gyms turned away non-Chinese patrons and expats on the subway found themselves with…
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