Responses to health risk and suffering: ‘China’ in the Italian media discourses during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic

The origin of the pandemic: far-flung risks

The news of an unknown pneumonia in Wuhan (China) reached Italy on 5 January 2020. In the earliest published news, the press predominantly used the label ‘Chinese virus’ (Cerati, 2020) and referred to a ‘mysterious pneumonia’ (Reptv, 2020). Newspapers portrayed viral outbreaks as a recurrent phenomenon in the PRC, referring to other past epidemics such as SARS (2002/03). Sole entitled an article ‘fear of Chinese virus is back’ (Carletti and Miele, 2020), while Corriere, in one article, claimed that ‘it is not the first time in the last 20 years that diseases never seen before, as the 1997 avian flu and the 2003 SARS, originate in China’ (Ricci Sargetini, 2020). Libero, referring to a dossier published by Repubblica, aimed to ‘shed light on the reason why Asia is the land of viruses’ that often become a global issue (Galluccio, 2020a). The article explains that this is due to the preservation of traditional customs, the choice of eating specific animal species and above all, the predilection for popular markets where hygiene and sanitary norms do not exist. The recurrent practice of the media to link new events to historically established health risks not only instills fear in the spectators but asserts the responsibility for the exporting of allegedly manufactured disasters (Nerlich and Halliday, 2007). Italy was not alone, as the UK newspapers in January and February also bred fear (Chaiuk and Dunaievska, 2020). The very first news about the virus exposed the Italian public to a spectacle already experienced in the past. At this stage, the media established a distance between the comfort zone of the Italian spectators and the Chinese emergency, thus nullifying the urgency of moral engagement and agency (Chouliaraki, 2008b).

As soon as more details about the possible origin of the virus in a food market became available in January, Chinese food and hygienic standards turned into a debated theme across Italian media. Newspaper articles presented the Wuhan market as the hotbed of the epidemic, where live, wild, and exotic animals are illegally sold. Repubblica, for instance, wrote about the ‘well-known problem of wild meat consumption’ (Anonymous, 2020a) and how ‘the consumption of exotic animals is considered a symbol of wealth and a panacea for health’ (Santelli, 2020) in rural China. Chinese culinary traditions overall were seen as something archaic in the eyes of the Italian people. Media attention on food markets generated the wide circulation of videos on social media to prove that these reported Chinese eating practices were not prejudices but daily habits. The most common videos portrayed street sellers who slaughtered rats (Il Grande Inganno, 2020a), people who ate mice (Il Grande Inganno, 2020b), and the killing of rats (Animaliberaction, 2020). This theme triggered a greater controversy when the President of the Veneto Region, Luca Zaia, during an interview on Antenna 3-Nord Est (a local television channel), suggested, ‘I think China paid the consequences of this epidemic because we all have seen them eating live rats’ (RaiNews, 2020). Zaia further claimed that due to the hygiene standards of Italian citizens and the advanced cleaning and nutrition systems, the hospitalization and death rates in Italy were low.

What emerged from this initial media coverage was a general attribution of the Coronavirus spread to cultural practices in China without providing the social, historical, and cultural contexts. This narrative follows an imagery that highlights how cultural habits in China do not reflect those of advanced and civilized countries with which the Italian spectators identify. Hygiene is ‘a set of behaviours that animals, including humans, use to avoid infection’ (Curtis, 2007: 11). The assumption about the alien eating habits is reminiscent of Douglas’s (1966: 48) Purity and Danger, in which she discusses pollution and the concern with contagions as an effect of contact with ‘inappropriate elements’. Anomalies, represented by rotten food and poor sanitation, become polluting when not regulated by ritualized forms of cleaning introduced to protect the community’s well-being. Douglas’s (1966: 35) classical formulation that dirt is ‘matter out of place’ points to how societies create the distinction of what is deemed exotic and therefore, does not fall into the norms that are historically and culturally prescribed for in a modern and civil society. This explains the discursive construction of China as dirty and dangerous, contrasting the civilized and safe practices found in countries such as Italy. ‘Reflection on dirt’, Douglas (1966: 14) writes, ‘involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death’. In this sense, the emerging but distant Covid health risk becomes a metaphor for the presence of the Chinese in Italy, reflected in the next theme in reporting the management of the pandemic.

The management of the pandemic: persistent racist ideologies

The second major theme in the Italian media discourse concerns the Chinese Government’s reaction to and the management of the emergency, primarily from January to late February. The news reportage reproduced a stereotypical and conflicting image of China that also reflected the paradoxical views toward the Chinese in Italy. Distrust toward China and the Chinese comes from a historical ideology – yellow peril – that ‘combines racist terror of alien culture [. . .] and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East’ (Marchetti, 1993: 2). The yellow peril ideology can be linked to the sizeable Asian population and China’s expanding military and economic power (Kawai, 2005). As stated previously, this fear contrasts with the positive contributions of the Chinese in Italy and the international connections that the migrants have brought. This ambivalent discourse reverberated across Italian media through the developing epidemic narratives.

After disclosing the origin of Covid, the Italian media suspected China was covering up something more frightening from the rest of the world. Besides rampant conspiracy theories (e.g. an incident in a bio-weapon laboratory) (Locano, 2020a), the Italian press shared the view that the information published by the Chinese Government had been unclear, incomplete, and/or delayed (Anonymous, 2020b; Locano, 2020b). The Chinese state was accused of misinformation, which caused a great impact on the international understanding of the pandemic, and thus its prevention and treatment. While Fatto recognized that, in comparison with SARS, Chinese authorities had been prompter and more transparent in raising the alarm, it nonetheless highlighted ‘the ancestral Chinese temptation to secrecy, coverage, and unfamiliarity with advertising and divulgation’ (Gramaglia, 2020), hence evoking longstanding stereotypes of the Chinese. The assumed Chinese inclination to secrecy was further reinforced by multiple cases of censure against journalists, doctors, and citizens that were reported across Italian newspapers (Anonymous, 2020c; Galluccio, 2020b). The reports suggested that China’s ‘resounding sequence of errors in managing the crisis’ (Marro, 2020) and the delayed reaction of the authorities (Cattano, 2020a) engendered an uncontrolled situation. Fatto portrayed ‘armoured cities like a catastrophic movie set’ (Cattano, 2020b); Libero described how Wuhan plunged into ‘an apocalyptic scenario’ (Spinelli, 2020); Corriere compared the Chinese epidemic to an ‘internal war’ (Santevecchi, 2020a). The ideological leanings of the papers therefore did not substantially alter their perspectives in the initial coverage. Such an alarming picture was reinforced through footage on social media, which circulated scenes of collective panic and people collapsing on the street or in front of hospitals without help (Politically Incurrect, 2020).

The depiction of the management of the epidemic in China at this stage was mostly about discrediting China’s ability to curb the virus and willingness to assist the global community in understanding the health risks. In conjunction with the portrayal of distant suffering, the media discourses engendered a lack of interest toward the victims, both those affected and the fatalities. Instead, the reportage emphasized feelings of dismay and outrage, especially toward the Chinese Government. Such a focus contributed to the lack of an emotional engagement with the health and humanitarian aspect of the crisis, suggesting that the emergency remained distant from the then-safe space of the Italian spectators.

The pandemic within I: biopolitics and national responses

Until mid-January, Italian newspapers perpetuated the idea that there was no or low risk of the introduction of Covid-19 in the EU and Italy (Anonymous, 2020d). Italian political authorities, together with the scientific community, issued reassuring promises of the lack of serious danger to public health. One of the first concerns that arose within the Italian debate was the economic impact caused by the reduction of Chinese tourism and trade (Sacchi, 2020). Italy responded to the economic threat by promoting Italian tourism and commercial activities to avoid a potential economic stagnation, supported by all the main Italian political parties regardless of their political affiliation (see Sala, 2020). While there was a clear underestimation of the Covid-19 threat and an attempt to present an image of the country as secure, responsive, and open to tourism, established forms of xenophobic discrimination and racist incidents against Chinese and people of East Asian descent were reported in Italian cities. A bar in Fontana di Trevi (Rome) displayed a notice with the Chinese caption ‘do not enter’; a young Chinese in Turin was forced to get off the bus; stones were thrown against Chinese students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone; in Venice and Florence, Chinese tourists were assaulted with insults and spits, among many other racist acts (Anonymous, 2020e; Miyake, 2021).

Conversely, in an interview, Vittorio Feltri – journalist and founder of Libero – claimed that ‘Perhaps this is why [the Chinese] are not victims of racism. They live confined in their neighbourhoods; they mind their own business; they do not disturb. I wonder why Africans are not welcomed with such warmth in our country. And there is an answer: I’ve never seen a yellow person [sic.] dawdling on the street or begging’ (Agostini, 2020). Feltri has a history of controversies for anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny; and this interview represented the populist Italian ambivalent attitude toward migrants of Chinese origin, and the historical and contemporary imagination of the Chinese and other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, this image of the invisible and hardworking Chinese (Gelpi and Tarantino, 2009) has been subverted since the 1990s when Chinese migrants began to be seen as a potential threat to the Italian social fabric and as economic competition. This may also be exacerbated by the populist rhetoric tinted by an anti-immigration stance, raised in Italy as a combined effect of the economic crisis and so-called refugee crisis. The Italian public and political debate increasingly shaped migrants ‘as the reason for all society’s ill, ranging from economic aspects such as unemployment and the reduction of wages to issues such as the proliferation of crime and insecurity’ (Bulli and Soare, 2018: 140). Therefore, despite the depiction of people of Asian descent as overall better than other ethnic groups – for their reticence, obedience, and efficiency – they pose a threat to the white majority because of their economic, political, and technological power (Kawai, 2005).

By the end of January, an increasing number of newspapers changed direction and recognized the existence of an alarming development of the epidemic. After the confirmation of two positive Covid-19 cases, both of which were Chinese tourists, on 30 January in Rome, the Italian Government introduced the first restrictive measures. These restrictions primarily concerned airport controls for citizens coming from the Chinese red zone, including measurement of body temperature, tests, and quarantine. In addition, celebrations for the Chinese New Year’s Eve were canceled in Milan and Rome, and all flights from and to China were suspended. Further measures of ports control were introduced in early February. The Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, addressed the nation on 4 March announcing that ‘since January, when we had just two cases, we have implemented measures that appeared drastic but, in reality, were simply in accordance with and proportioned to the citizens’ health protection’ (Governo Italiano Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 2020).

As the pandemic is associated with risk and national security, it also legitimizes strong actions aimed at reaffirming or reinventing a sense of survival and safety within a threatened community (Aaltola, 2012). Aaltola suggests that a strong antagonist element within pandemics – such as the invisible cause of a disease – is often assigned to an established enemy. This usually corresponds to human carriers within specific geographical borders or ethnically, sexually, nationally, or culturally distinct groups of people (Aaltola, 2012). The identification of the first virus cluster in China and the embodiment of risk in Chinese people offered additional legitimacy for introducing exceptional governmental actions that were biopolitical mechanisms aimed at protecting the safety of the Italian population. Foucault (2003) presents biopolitics as one of the two key technologies of power in modern times, in addition to discipline. While discipline is exercised on individuals and seeks to control their bodies, biopolitics deals with the management of the population (Kelly, 2004). In particular, the initial forms of control exercised over the movements of Chinese people, identified as the main source of infection, reflect Gros’s (2014) analysis of the fourth stage of security, where biopolitics becomes a mechanism to control human circulation and to protect citizens from the risk of death.

In these early restrictive measures intended to reduce the risk of contagion, there was a clear racist assumption that all Chinese people were virus bearers and spreaders. Foucault (2003) discusses ‘state-racism’ as strictly linked to the emergence of biopolitics in modern societies; since the state’s primary obligation is to protect its population, everything or everyone threatening its safety must be erased. The exclusion of the Chinese from Italian society has been justified by the supposition that they were harmful to public health. The threat was identified not only as external but from the ‘Others’ within: the Chinese with Italian citizenship and Italians of Chinese/East Asian origin. The racially motivated attacks in Italy show that everything related to China and/or Asia – including shops, restaurants, and neighborhoods – were categorized as dangerous and therefore, excluded as agents and sites of contagion. In this way, as Aaltola (2012: 668) argues, pandemics propagate ‘geographies of fear’ where any perceived signs of disease must be removed or projected to distant places and/or externalized onto local out-groups (Sontag, 1998). Tuan (1979) further suggests how such scenarios of hostility are circumscribed within already existing or latent conflicting political relations and enmities, which was shown in the urgent political debates on the national responses to control the virus in Italy.

This was clear in the exploitation of the emergency by Italian sovereigntist and nationalist parties to reiterate anti-immigration ideologies and promote border securitization; in particular, the League, the Conte II Government’s opposition party, highly criticized the government for being unable to defend Italy and Italians. The former Deputy Prime Minister and Northern League politician Matteo Salvini emphasized in his social networks (Salvini, 2020) the risks of open borders for introducing the virus. The identification of an external menace has been used to reinforce and justify measures to protect the nation from polluting outsiders. Research demonstrates how, especially in relation to the rising popularity of the far right and its anti-immigration rhetoric, both institutional and main political actors have endorsed aggressive policing and militarized border control, thus inflaming public anxieties and security concerns (Castelli Gattinara, 2017). The politicians’ exploitation of the risk related to the pandemic reproduced longstanding racist ideology in the name of contagion control and national security.

The pandemic within II: from spectator to actor

Despite the regional lockdown of areas in the north of Italy on 20 February, the number of positive cases surged, leading to multiple government decrees to curb the spread of the virus. On 9 March, the Italian government imposed a national lockdown. Italy rapidly became the new Covid-19 hotbed, jeopardizing geo-political balances at the European level. The country had to deal with new challenges: the collapse of the national health system – in Northern Italy in particular – and the general marginalization that the Italians were now experiencing abroad. In one month, Italy assumed the role that was previously assigned to China, moving from the role of spectator of an Asian emergency to the role of major actor within the same emergency in Europe. While the story – the Covid-19 pandemic – remained unchanged, the countries in question and the relationships among them underwent a significant transformation. Security measures that Italy had previously issued to control Chinese people and international movements in the name of national security were criticized as they were now directed toward Italy and the Italians (Anonymous, 2020f).

The news reportage from 20 February to the end of March reflected a media discourse in Italy that highlighted the rigor and efficiency of the Chinese state’s concerted effort to fight the virus; however, the Italian newspapers cast a democratic gaze on a regime perceived as totalitarian when they reported the adoption of draconian measures implemented by the Chinese military apparatus. These included ‘death penalty for those who hide symptoms’ and indictment of public security for ‘every citizen responsible for the spreading of Covid-19’ (Anonymous, 2020g). Newspapers also reported the use of technology as a means of citizens control, referring to the police’s use of AI to locate people who did not use masks, smart helmets to identify potential coronavirus carriers, and the new Alibaba app to check the state of health of citizens. This revolutionary system of surveillance and containment was seen as a cause for concern within the Italian community, and China was described as ‘the main player within strategic sectors of data management and intelligent software’ (Biagio, 2020).

Criticism, however, subsided when the Chinese approach proved to be successful. Articles published in March contained more favorable opinions toward the PRC, which ultimately became a role model (Mereta, 2020; Santevecchi, 2020b) in the management of the pandemic. By the end of March 2020, when the rest of the world struggled against the uncontrolled spread of the virus, China declared the lowest level of infection since the beginning of the outbreak. The coordination of the Chinese Government in coping with the emergency and the compliance of Chinese citizens in respecting strict protocols reconfirmed the contradictory attitude toward the Chinese in Italy, highlighting rigor and discipline of the Chinese regime and its people yet confirming the stereotypes of people of Chinese descendent we discussed previously. These contradictions were reinforced when, on 13 March, China sent medical supplies and a team of medical staff from the Chinese Red Cross to help Italy fight the epidemic. At the beginning, there was praise and publicly shared gratitude toward this humanitarian gesture. Chinese people were no longer depicted as a threat, but, conversely, as a rescuer and a partner within a shared struggle. After this initial phase of emotional engagement that linked Italy and China, however, multiple sources evaluated the Chinese aid with suspicion again. Several articles argued that China took advantage of its success in tackling the pandemic and commitment to send aid to European countries to improve its image, regain credibility, and reaffirm its power worldwide (D’Argenio, 2020).

By the end of March, the news about China became almost irrelevant for the Italian struggle, and discriminatory language against Chinese people was no longer a major pattern in Italian media. Instead, a sense of commonality in the Italian struggle reinforced nationalist narratives. After the national lockdown and the severe loss of lives, public signs of national belonging and pride were visible: citizens singing the national anthem from their balconies, Italian flags hung at windows, applause, exclamations of encouragement for Italian doctors and the shared use of the hashtag #everythingwillbefine.