COVID-19 and anti-Asian racism in the United States

Researchers have long documented the prejudicial linking of infectious diseases with specific identity groups such as the association of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) with ethnic Chinese and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) with homosexual individuals, leaving irreparable marks of stigma on the target group (Ali, Reference Ali2008; Keil and Ali, Reference Keil and Ali2006; Fullilove and Fullilove III, Reference Fullilove and Fullilove1999). Social psychologists demonstrate that such a process of stigmatization directly affects the victimized through discrimination, automatic stereotype activation as well as overt violence (Major and O’Brien, Reference Major and O’brien2005; Quinn and Chaudoir, Reference Quinn and Chaudoir2009). The association of COVID-19 with China has similarly accompanied the stigmatization of ethnic Chinese and broader Asian populations, as the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes has soared around the world, especially in America and other western societies (Russell, Reference Russell2020).

In the United States, critics have attributed rising anti-Chinese and anti-Asian American racial animus at least partly to the politicization of the pandemic including President Trump’s reference to COVID-19 as “Chinese virus” or “China virus” (Aratani, Reference Aratani2020; Tavernise and Oppel, Reference Tavernise and Oppel2020). Mass media and other political elites such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also insisted on using such labels as “Wuhan virus,” further strengthening its conflation with China and, by extension, ethnic Chinese people (Su et al., Reference Su, McDonnell, Ahmad, Cheshmehzangi, Li, Meyer, Cai, Yang and Xiang2020). Past research demonstrates that racially divisive and inflammatory political messages have strong “emboldening effects” on the public’s prejudiced attitudes against marginalized groups in society (Lajevardi and Abrajano, Reference Lajevardi and Abrajano2019; Lajevardi and Oskooii, Reference Lajevardi and Oskooii2018; Newman et al., Reference Newman, Merolla, Shah, Lemi, Collingwood and Ramakrishnan2019; Siegel et al., Reference Siegel, Nikitin, Barbera, Sterling, Pullen, Bonneau, Nagler and Tucker2019; Valentino, Wayne, and Oceno, Reference Valentino, Wayne and Oceno2018). American elites’ explicit – and strategic – use of such racially charged terms, in other words, appears to have stoked mass xenophobic and discriminatory reactions to ethnic Chinese people within the country.

More importantly, this politicization of the pandemic has adversely affected broader Asian American communities, giving rise to a historic surge in reported hate crimes against the minority population regardless of their diverse ethnic and national origin identities (Jeung and Lee, Reference Jeung and Lee2021).Scholars have explained such a rapid racialization of COVID-19 as rooted in deep-seated American stereotypes of Asians who have been lumped together as a monolithic racial group (Kimura, Reference Kimura2021; Li and Nicholson Jr, Reference Li and Nicholson2021). Furthermore, dating back to the late 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, Asian Americans have long been viewed as “perpetual foreigners” in American society, unassimilable to the mainstream and sometimes even more loyal to their countries of origin (Kim, Reference Kim1999; Wu, Reference Wu2002). Against the backdrop of such longstanding anti-Asian racial stereotypes, the pandemic has ushered in the revival of what critics have termed the ‘yellow peril’ syndrome in America today (Zhang, Reference Zhang2021).

A question remains as to whether the pandemic and its association with China have led to a net increase in anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiments among the American public or, alternatively, stable individual-level racial attitudes formed prior to the pandemic have shaped behavioral responses to the health crisis. To help adjudicate these two possibilities, I present a survey experiment designed to directly assess the presumed short-term effects of the message linking COVID-19 with China on the racial attitudes of the American public. In the survey, I include separate measures of attitudes toward Chinese and Asian Americans to examine if the observed effects are restricted to views toward ethnic Chinese population. The experiment thus tests the following first hypothesis:

By including an additional treatment arm on the identical COVID-19 message without any reference to China, I also examine the possibility that the widespread linking of the coronavirus with China would instantly lead to heightened racial animus upon hearing about the health crisis. In addition, by including a battery of racial attitude measures that concern other racial and ethnic minorities, ^{Footnote 1} I will estimate the distinct adverse consequences on Chinese and Asian Americans while probing any spillover effect to broader racial conservatism. ^{Footnote 2}

Next, I examine theoretically meaningful heterogeneous treatment effects based on the public’s partisan identity and prior beliefs about race. First, given the fact that President Trump publicly emphasized the association between COVID-19 and China, I expect that Republicans would be more receptive to the message and express higher levels of racial conservatism upon receiving it, compared to Democrats and Independents. Second, given the above discussion on how the American public tends to lump together diverse ethnic groups under the single racial category of “Asian” (Junn and Masuoka, Reference Junn and Masuoka2008; Kim, Reference Kim1999; Le Espiritu, Reference Le Espiritu1992), I expect to find that respondents’ pre-existing essentialist view of race would significantly moderate the treatment effect on attitudes toward Asian Americans. Specifically, building on the literature on racial essentialism in social psychology (Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst, Reference Haslam, Rothschild and Ernst2002; Jayaratne et al., Reference Jayaratne, Ybarra, Sheldon, Brown, Feldbaum, Pfeffer and Petty2006), I hypothesize that those who believe in the fixed nature of racial categories will be more likely to express higher levels of anti-Asian American sentiment upon receiving the treatment messages. With the experimental data, I thus test the following second hypothesis:

Experimental design

To test my hypotheses, I recruited a national sample of 2,025 Americans through Lucid Theorem (Coppock and McClellan, Reference Coppock and McClellan2019) during the early phase of the pandemic in May 2020. In line with the preregistered survey design, ^{Footnote 3} the sample size was determined based on the power analysis taking into consideration that the anticipated effect size between the two treatment conditions would be relatively small to detect. According to the power analysis, as can be found in the appendix, about 600 subjects per experimental condition were judged to be sufficient to yield a large enough power for the experiment. The obtained sample was well balanced on key demographic covariates including age, gender, and race ^{Footnote 4} and included 1,852 respondents who self-identified as white, black, or Latino/Hispanic Americans. The analyses below relied on data from this final set of respondents.

Figure 1 visualizes the design of the survey experiment. ^{Footnote 5} First, after providing their consent to participate in the study, respondents were asked a battery of standard demographic questions. ^{Footnote 6} A shortened version of the racial essentialism scale (No et al., Reference No, Hong, Liao, Lee, Wood and Chao2008) was placed at the beginning of the demographic questionnaire so as to minimize any priming effects of answering the racial attitude measure. Next, after reading a common introductory prompt, participants were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions. First, the control condition delivered a placebo message on pet product sales. Second, the ‘Coronavirus condition’ reminded the participants of the rapid ongoing spread of COVID-19 in the United States with information on the total number of confirmed cases as of the survey fielding date. The last ‘Chinese origin condition’ conveyed the same message as the previous condition with one additional note emphasizing that the virus originated from China (see Appendix 1.1 for full details).

Figure 1.

Experimental Design.

One alternative experimental design would be to present the last treatment message that refers to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or “China virus” so as to emphasize its association with China. For this study, I chose to employ a more general treatment message without any reference to such politicizing – and unavoidably partisan – rhetoric. First, focusing exclusively on the US-specific labels of the virus would make the study difficult to replicate and compare with results from other studies with samples outside the country. Follow-up studies will be able to employ a similar study design to probe the downstream effects of alleging the link between COVID-19 and China on the rise of anti-Asian sentiment beyond the American context. Alternatively, it is possible to use both the “Chinese virus” label and the Chinese origin message in the treatment. This, however, would compromise the tractability of treatment effects: it would be hard to assess to what extent the treatment effects derive from respondents’ partisan attitudes and views of President Trump. In short, the current design leverages the advantage of abstracting away from the specific political debates and contexts in America involving President Trump’s rhetoric on COVID-19 and utilizes a more general frame that implicates China as the origin of the virus.

To answer the outcome measures, respondents were then asked to express their level of (dis)approval of statements from the following measures of negative sentiment toward ethno-racial minorities in American society: Asian American Resentment (Kim, Reference Kim2022), ^{Footnote 7} Latino American Resentment (Sergio and Ocampo, 2020), and Symbolic Racism (Kinder and Sears, Reference Kinder and Sears1981; Sears, Reference Sears, Katz and Taylor1988). ^{Footnote 8} To provide a more comprehensive list of racial attitude measures, I also administered the standard racial stereotype and favorability scales as well as racial policy questionnaire regularly employed in the literature and the American National Election Studies. As explained above, target racial groups included both Chinese Americans and Asian Americans for the stereotype and favorability scales. After answering the outcome measures, all respondents completed a factual manipulation check question. ^{Footnote 9}