What Do Corona and Chinese People Have in Common?

And no, it’s not the virus

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Around the world, Asian people are increasingly being beaten up, singled out and denied service for looking Asian. Meanwhile, 16% of regular Corona drinkers think the beer may be linked to the coronavirus due to its name. Beyond ill-informed discrimination, what do Corona and Chinese people have in common?

To answer that, let’s take a quick detour to the brain.

We love to compartmentalize. We take things that exist in continua and put them into labeled categories. Why? They’re great short-cuts in a world of complexity. And they come in handy sometimes.

Take colors for example. They exist in a continua- in this case, a spectrum. Between every blue and green there are infinite shades of both. To make sense of them, we chop them up into loose, recognizable categories. Navy blue. Teal. Mint. Doing so makes them both easier to remember and communicate.

Use these categories often enough with positive reinforcement, and you’re able to use them almost instinctively. You don’t need to think too hard to recognize something as ‘red’. It just is.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

The same happens with language.

Call the coronavirus a ‘Chinese’ virus often enough and soon, the word ‘Chinese’ and all categories related to being Chinese (from looking Asian to East Asian food) are equated to the coronavirus.

Report death tolls from ‘coronavirus’ often enough, and suddenly, people start questioning whether it’s related to Corona beer. Meanwhile, Chinese people get associated with the spread of a deadly disease.

Here’s where the problem begins. Getting too used to a certain pattern of thinking means it’s harder to recognize things that fall out of that pattern. Think of magicians playing card tricks. They direct the audience’s attention towards one thing (the magic act), so they do not notice the other (the mechanics).

Likewise, ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ and ‘Chinese virus’ direct you to think about Wuhan or China as the origin and propagator of the virus (the magic), rather than virology and sanitary practices (the mechanics).

Compound this psychological mechanism with fear, and the problem gets bigger.

BruceBlaus / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

While the amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for emotional System 1 thinking like the ‘fight-or-flight’ response, the frontal lobes are responsible for System 2 like logical and rational thinking. When under low or moderate threat, the frontal lobes are usually able to override the amygdala. But when under a strong threat, the amygdala takes over.

When this happens, the amygdala triggers the body’s stress response, which effectively directs blood away from the frontal lobes and towards the muscles in preparation of a quick getaway. Reducing a person’s ability to use System 2’s logic and reason, the person becomes more likely to exaggerate the threat of unfamiliar things, people and places. In this case, being overrun by emotional System 1 also makes the person unable to logicize that the coronavirus is not ‘Chinese’, nor linked to Corona beer.

This then triggers irrational behavior in an attempt to get rid of the threat. It could be abstaining from drinking Corona beer, refusing to serve a Chinese patron, or violently lashing out on Asian-looking people.

It’s not just Asian people and Corona beer though who have affected by this inborn fear mechanism. Thailand’s health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, recently made negative comments about Europeans saying that they ‘never shower’ and are more likely to spread the virus than Asians. But this didn’t come from nowhere. Sentiment against Western tourists had been building for some time in the country, making them a very convenient scapegoat.

This sort of thing happens in practically every epidemic. During the Black Death for example, Jews were a popular scapegoat in an already anti-semitic Europe. Similarly, black people were often targeted during the Ebola outbreak in the US, a country known for controversial racial dynamics.

So what does this all mean for Corona and Chinese people?

Me on a beach probably drinking Corona

Thanks to our fear response, the similarities between Corona and Chinese people are nothing extraordinary. Although nothing to celebrate, it does mean that none of this should come as a surprise. And hey, it allows us to raise some pretty interesting questions: Is it possible to rewire the fear response?And if not, is it possible to hack it?

While rewiring fundamental human behavior may still be difficult to pull off en masse, hacking it seems very realistic.

Just as it’s easy to hack our fear responses by name-dropping in one direction, it may be equally possible to hack them the other way by name-dropping in another direction.

After all, no one calls H1N1 the American virus, even though the CDC says it was first detected in humans in the US. Likewise, no one refers to the common cold (coronavirus OC43) as ‘coronavirus’.

Recognizing the power of names, Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, even apologized for linking the coronavirus with China. Sure- maybe it’s too little, too late, but better late than never.

Now just imagine if the ‘Wuhan virus’ or ‘Chinese virus’ had been ‘COVID-19’ or ‘SARS-CoV-2’ all along. ‘Corona’ would merely be a naming coincidence, if the virus would be known as a ‘coronavirus’ at all. Meanwhile, China would be part of a global arsenal to tackle the real ‘mechanics’ of the issue, rather than a victim of a label borne from fear and intent on splitting the world in two.