A LOOK AT THE STIGMA AGAINST ASIANS AND ITS LINK TO COVID-19 AND GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS

The new situation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has reaped many lives and, above all, has caused other never-before imagined damages, such as a large increase in physical and/or verbal aggression, including various means of harassment, against Asians via the internet in several countries. According to Jianhua Xu from the Department of Sociology at the University of Macau, the stigma against Chinese- speaking people is not recent but has gained renewed force in the wake of the pandemic. Accused of being responsible for the origin of the new coronavirus and, consequently, for its spread, the residents of the city of Wuhan (the first epicenter of the pandemic), Hubei (the province in which the city of Wuhan is located), and Mainland China as well as Chinese people and those individuals whose appearance denotes Asian origin in general have been stigmatized. Based on a survey by scholars in Macau, which was published in January 2021, apart from the fear of contracting the virus, there are other factors of discrimination, such as food culture, political ideology, racism, and the custom of wearing a mask, regardless of its mandatory nature.