There Is No Outside

Covid-19 Dispatches

N+1, Verso Books US

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839762291
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A collaboration between the renowned magazine of literature and politics, n+1, and Verso Books, this collection tracks the course of Covid-19 across the circuits of global capital to New York's prisons and emergency rooms, Los Angeles's homeless encampments, and the migrant camps in Greece; and into the intimate spaces of our homes, our ideas of how to live, and into our bodies and cells. We hear from sex workers without work and sailors quarantined on their ships, witness the pandemic from the quiet devastation of upstate New York and quarantined Rome as well as the streets of Delhi, Kashmir, and London and the emergency room of a New York City hospital.

From some of the most exciting and thoughtful young writers around the globe, There Is No Outside explores the unspooling wreckage of Covid-19 and helps us imagine what might come in the aftermath.
With contributions from Andrew Liu, Rachel Ossip, Gabriel Winant, Francesco Pacifico, Sarah Resnick, Teresa Thornhill, Shigraf Zahbi, Debjani Bhattacharyya, Banu Subramaniam, Mark Krotov, Karim Sariahmed, Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Jack Norton, Laleh Khalili, Aaron Timms, Sonya Aragon, Sean Cooper, Chloe Aridjis, and Marco Roth, and with an introduction by Jessie Kindig.

1

“Chinese Virus,” World Market

The best safeguard against the novel coronavirus is the ability to voluntarily withdraw oneself from capitalism

Andrew Liu

March 20, 2020

1. “Wuhan Virus”?

The city of Wuhan, China is rich with historical significance, but for much of the world before this year it was hardly a household name. A portmanteau of three historical cities at the mouth of the Yangzi and Han Rivers—Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang—Wuhan served as the site of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which ended the last Chinese Dynasty, and in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government temporarily made the city its national capital, as the military fled from Japanese forces along the eastern coast. In recent years, passengers boarding one of the hundreds of ferries that glide through the city center every day would have seen soaring glass and concrete skyscrapers adorned with the names of hotel chains and national banks—an intimidating skyline, but one increasingly common across Asia. Beyond this photogenic core is the familiar combination of new architectural projects, historical landmarks, residential university neighborhoods, and designated free-trade zones for industrial export processing. It is a massive and sprawling metropolis of over eleven million people, more populous than New York City, but by the high standards of contemporary China, and in the unsentimental parlance of the Chinese media, it is a solid “second-tier city.”

But these days, of course, Wuhan is at once more internationally infamous than ever and associated only with one thing: the global spread of the disease now known as Covid-19. During the first weeks of December, several individuals began to report to hospitals in the Wuhan area with severe flu-like symptoms, including fever, dry coughing, fatigue, body aches, and pneumonia-like symptoms. Only later did doctors recognize that many patients either worked at, or were connected to, the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in the city center. The symptoms soon worsened, paralyzing older patients and killing many. On December 30, lab results finally confirmed that the source was a novel coronavirus strain that shared traits with the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak that claimed over eight hundred people worldwide and the MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) virus that emerged in 2012 and has killed nearly a thousand since. The virus has now ballooned into a pandemic with cases in 183 countries. As of this writing, 11,147 people have died from 265,495 cases. In China alone, 3,248 of 80,967 cases have died, almost all based in Wuhan.

For weeks, American news services referred to the disease as the “Wuhan virus.” Last month, the World Health Organization renamed the virus “Covid-19” (Coronavirus disease of 2019) with the explicit goal of minimizing the social stigma of a name that referred to a specific place—and, by extension, a specific people. Not ones to pay heed to international norms, conservative politicians in the US have continued to insist on the phrase “Wuhan virus,” or “Chinese coronavirus,” in a transparent effort to scapegoat and distract from their own catastrophic mismanagement of the worst public health crisis in recent American history. On Monday, a White House official reportedly described the virus as the “Kung Flu.” The following day Donald Trump defended using the term “Chinese virus,” explaining, “’cause it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.” Less equivocal, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton paired a tweet last week about the “Wuhan coronavirus” with a suggestion that China would have to “pay” for what it had done to America.

There is no question that such terminology is racist and xenophobic. Yet the fact that this global pandemic started in Wuhan, and not elsewhere in China, should not be simply overlooked, either. In recent decades, Wuhan has been caught up in the latest stage of globalization, in which international capital continues to extend further inland in pursuit of cheaper land and labor markets, spawning international links for goods such as steel and automobile parts, which remain hidden to the average consumer. It is a major Chinese city, yet outside the core of glittering metropolises along the nation’s coast. It is precisely the unexceptional status of Wuhan as a second-tier Chinese city that is notable. What the global spread of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan suggests is that the culprit here is not the unique circumstances of a particular place, but rather the now-extensive commercial connections that bring ever more of these kinds of places closer and closer together, into a larger and larger whole. In recounting the story of the novel coronavirus, it becomes increasingly clear that its movements have thus far mimicked the pathways of the 21st-century global market.

•••

The specific origins of the coronavirus within Wuhan remain unclear. In February, researchers announced that the virus could be traced back to a wild pangolin sold in the Huanan market, and that it had originally been transmitted from a bat. This is currently just a working hypothesis. But if true, it would square with the theory that SARS and MERS also originated in bats and were passed on to humans by way of wild animals—civet cats and camels, respectively.

The pangolin is a small, anteater-like mammal found across Asia and Africa. Its hard scales, which make up 20 percent of its body weight, have been digested in China for centuries, with overall consumption soaring in recent decades. According to customers and vendors, pangolin scales and meat can be used as a form of medicine to cure a variety of ailments (it is said to nourish the kidneys), but primarily to invigorate men’s sexual performance and bolster female beauty. The exotic nature of the pangolin—and the illegal trading that is central to its distribution—has an obvious analogy in the masked palm civet cat, a small mammal native to India and Southeast Asia served as a delicacy in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, usually prepared with chrysanthemum petals and shreds of snake.

During the 2003 SARS outbreak, investigators in Guangzhou, Guangdong’s massive provincial capital, raided restaurants and discovered bear parts, salamanders, and owls sitting in freezers in the kitchens. These dietary habits are typically described in the media as a branch of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM): practices, herbs, and medicinal cures that have been used for thousands of years in China. So is the novel coronavirus, like SARS, a tragic consequence of a national fondness for TCM? Was the consumption of pangolin a residue of unchanging, primitive Chinese custom? Could it be blamed on “local culture,” as the SARS virus was blamed on the exotic and peculiar tastes so dominant in Cantonese cuisine?¹ If so, would we have to concede that the novel coronavirus is indeed a peculiarly Chinese disease?

Of course not. TCM, in fact, is not a particularly coherent or uncontroversial field. For most people, the term simply refers to acupuncture, or a harmless mixture of ginseng, ginger, goji berries, and jujube in teas and hot broths. While these remedies have existed in Asia for centuries, market prices and cross-border activity have transformed modest practices and local tastes into big business. Beginning in the 1980s, market liberalization opened opportunities for illicit trade and also made many in China rich. The rich were more than willing to seek new culinary adventures by way of that trade, as conspicuous consumption became the ultimate marker of class advancement. In interviews, customers have explained that they seek out rare wildlife delicacies not for their health benefits, but because they’re eager to impress important guests they’re entertaining—or because they’ve had a good day at the stock market. The pangolin trade owes more to the Chinese economic miracle than it does to some archaic superstitious culture.

Because the Chinese pangolin has been hunted to near extinction, most these days are trafficked from Southeast Asia, at the border with Myanmar or Vietnam; in recent years there have even been reports of Chinese markets acquiring varieties from Africa. Local sales of pangolins in Southeast Asia have faded, with suppliers turning their attention to the lucrative Chinese market, a clear illustration of how flexible and market-dependent the taste in wildlife is. By one estimate, some twenty tons of pangolins are shipped into China each year, either alive, frozen whole, or as dried and processed scales. Some of the headline-grabbing seizures include a 14-ton haul of frozen pangolins in Indonesia, 4.4 tons of scales seized in Hong Kong, and an 11.9-ton haul in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. For this reason, most headlines from the pangolin trade are centered on the interstices of Southeast Asia and southern China, the crucial boundary zone of the black-market trade.

It would make perfect sense, therefore, if the coronavirus had broken out in the Pearl River Delta, encompassing Guangdong and Hong Kong, as SARS did. Looking back, the Delta of the early century was the most likely candidate in China for an outbreak on a global scale. At the time, Guangdong was the province most tightly linked with world supply chains and international finance, as Cantonese families had long migrated to Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese communities. With liberalization since 1979, they revived kinship ties in pursuit of business opportunities, as Hong Kong capital introduced the world market to handbag subcontractors in Dongguan. The initial SARS outbreak emerged from a Cantonese man who brought the disease to a massive hospital in Guangzhou. From there, a Guangzhou doctor carried it to a wedding in Hong Kong, and fellow hotel guests then brought it to Hanoi, Toronto, Singapore, Taipei, and Bangkok. In hindsight, the Guangdong/Hong Kong nexus appears as a perfect storm of wildlife consumption and global integration. (Tellingly, in the 2011 Hollywood film Contagion, a pandemic is traced to a Hong Kong chef who prepares a pig.)

But the novel coronavirus did not emerge from the Pearl River Delta, with all its unique geographical and cultural features. Instead it first appeared in Wuhan, five hundred miles inland from Shanghai and six hundred miles north of Hong Kong. Before 20th-century industrialization, Wuhan served as an intermediary hub between the ocean and inland China, facilitating the traffic in household goods such as rice, silk, furs, and leathers. (My own family briefly worked as petty tea merchants there in the early 1900s.) The most famous local dish is a breakfast of hot noodles in a dry peanut sauce sprinkled with scallions and sold in street stalls; if pangolin sales in Wuhan have risen in recent years, therefore, this likely reflects less the particularities of the Wuhan people than the increased fortunes of the Chinese economy as a whole.

And though Americans have long nicknamed Wuhan the Chicago of China, the comparison is inapt. Both became major industrial cities by the early 20th century, but Wuhan’s international links were far more modest. Even today, the fifteen thousand foreigners who resided in Wuhan before the outbreak amounted to less than one tenth the figures for ethnic-Chinese metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taipei.

Nevertheless, even Wuhan can evidently serve as the site for a global outbreak in the year 2020. Skimming the headlines of cases provides some clues as to how the novel coronavirus initially spread. The first wave of people who carried it overseas were the middle-class friends, co-workers, and relatives of residents of Wuhan. There was the Chinese woman working in Seoul who had recently visited Wuhan; the Wuhan woman who visited Bangkok; the tourists who traveled to Vietnam; the full-time Japanese resident from China who visited a Wuhan acquaintance; the German employees of a Munich-area supplier with branches in Wuhan; the Chinese technicians and Iranian businessman traveling between China and Qom, Iran; and the Shenzhen man who went home to see his relatives.

As evacuation stories mounted, so did accounts of global linkages. A Sudanese engineering student at the Wuhan University of Technology successfully avoided the virus and left after six weeks of self-quarantine. The governments of France, Germany, and Japan evacuated their own citizens from Wuhan. Some of these were employees in the automobile sector; companies such as General Motors, Renault, and Nissan have established branches in the export processing zone. And though the source of the Iran outbreak remains unclear, journalists speculate it resulted from the big business between the two economies (China is Iran’s top trading partner), typically Iranian crude oil in exchange for Chinese weapons and capital investment into local infrastructure.

What all these stories have in common is how unremarkable they are: this is contemporary global interchange at its most prosaic. Travel to and from countless other cities across Asia and Europe for business meetings and tourism follows a very similar pattern. Whereas the SARS outbreak was blamed on the peculiar, outlandish diets of the Cantonese people and then traveled through the elite cosmopolitan links between major Asian cities, the so-called “Wuhan virus” points to the utterly mundane way that countless nodal points around the world, including “second-tier” Chinese cities, are interwoven more tightly than ever across global circuits of commerce, education, and tourism.

By comparison, during the “high socialist” era of the 1950s through the ’70s, the rapid spread of a Covid-19–like virus from a fishmonger in Wuhan to hundreds of countries in a matter of weeks would have been unimaginable. In 1957, an “Asian flu” diagnosed in January first traveled in predictable fashion from southern China to Hong Kong and Singapore; it didn’t fan out to the US and Europe until many months later, in the fall. Under a trade embargo by the US, the routes of commerce and travel between China and the world were far narrower, slower, and quieter. Notably, it was only during this window of relative isolation that the government officially stamped out the opium trade, before the infamous drug reentered the country with market liberalization.

But the world has changed. The many ties between Wuhan and the world today suggest a terrifying reality that should be clear to xenophobes and liberals alike. A viral outbreak in any one of these locations, it appears, could easily wind up touching the lives of hundreds of millions of others. Could the next Wuhan be Zhengzhou, Dayton, Bangalore, or Dar es-Salaam?

2. Market Virus

The spread of the novel coronavirus has a clear scientific explanation rooted in the virus’s natural properties, about which researchers are furiously trying to learn more. What is known is that the virus’s crown-like shape comes from outer protein spikes that bind to the throat and then spread to living lung cells, which then produce more viruses that spread to new parts of the lungs and to other organs. But of course, the real-life distribution of the virus has also been shaped by historically specific political factors. It is not just a natural disaster but a social one as well. The coronavirus first traveled through animals sold on the Asian black market, first clung to human carriers in a seafood market, and first spread through the mundane routes of regional tourism, foreign business, and foreign education.

This coincidence between the spread of the coronavirus and the footprint of the marketplace explains why it has been so difficult to contain. As cases began to emerge in the Middle East, Oceania, Europe, and the United States, officials expressed skepticism that drastic measures were necessary to avoid an outbreak. If anything, their comments were focused on potential stock market losses rather than public health risks. It is not that they did not realize the potential health impacts, but that they understood how sickness would prevent people from spending money and going to work. This attitude was crystallized by the outlandish statements of CNBC editor Rick Santelli who said on March 5, “Maybe we’d just be better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over … But the difference is [right now] we’re wreaking havoc on global and domestic economies.” Santelli was rightly pilloried by commentators across party lines, but his comments were also an honest expression of the ways governments and businesses are now being forced to weigh corporate profits against human life to a newly extreme degree.

In the United States, cases had begun to break out in Washington state and California for weeks before Americans started to take the virus seriously. One turning point was last Wednesday, when basketball player Rudy Gobert became the first professional athlete to test positive for the coronavirus, only days after he had mocked the possibility of an outbreak by wiping his hands over microphones and equipment in the locker room. Within minutes, actor Tom Hanks wrote on social media that he and his wife had also tested positive while traveling in Australia. These revelations seem to have accelerated the American response: within days, all major sports leagues were canceled, schools were closed, and a national state of emergency was declared. The most obvious—albeit imperfect—analogy is the blasé attitude so many Americans had taken towards the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, reversed only when actor Rock Hudson and then NBA star Magic Johnson revealed their own positive diagnoses. In the United States, diseases do not appear real when they spread among ordinary people out of the spotlight. It is only when they affect wealthy celebrities and athletes that they begin to be taken seriously.

As a result, we are now left with the absurd reality of the richest country in the world wholly ill-prepared for collective responsibility and action. In a society that has systematically dismantled its welfare state for nearly a half-century, where the supposedly “left-wing” political party regularly throws temper tantrums over the cost of health care, and which has literally installed a real estate developer as its President, we face the remarkable situation that pandemic measures are now being shouldered almost entirely by local and private actors, that reliable testing has been secured by the Gates Foundation and the Utah Jazz but not made publicly available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The novel coronavirus initially emerged and spread across the world through market activities, and our ability to tame it now will be decided by the degree to which we can subordinate market logics to our own survival, rather than vice versa. The endless reports of Americans unable to pay for coronavirus tests, unable to work from home, unable to limit their own exposure to public places and gatherings—health care workers, especially—are an index of the general population’s varying levels of market dependence, or, what amounts to the same thing, class. Disparities that have been growing more acute and life-threatening for decades ha...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. “Chinese Virus,” World Market
• 2. Living Inside
• 3. Coronavirus and Chronopolitics
• 4. Stop Making Points
• 5. Release Them All
• 6. “It Takes More Than a Virus to Make Us Nervous”
• 7. Living as a Virus in Modi’s India
• 8. Technofascism in India
• 9. Architecture Against Trump
• 10. There Is No Outside
• 11. Stay at Home
• 12. Washington County, NY
• 13. Adrift at Sea
• 14. Distance Must Be Maintained
• 15. Whores at the End of the World
• 16. I Must Leave My House
• 17. Where Is Patricia Sigl?
• 18. Quarantine Pastoral
• Our Contributors
• Notes