THE origin of Covid-19 in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, has globally stigmatised the beautiful city in central China; and the epidemic’s spread all over China affecting about 80,000 people (at press time) around the world has done the same to China. The discourse surrounding the coronavirus and its origin city and country has once again revealed the tension between the boundaries of what is national and what is global.
Even in 2004, when I travelled to Wuhan to give lectures at the Central China Normal University after a three-day stay in Beijing, one could tell that the Chinese dragon was roaring to rise and shake off its European burden of colonial history. High-rises were coming up everywhere – Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan. City streets and shops, including the multistorey grocery stores with live seafood in gigantic aquarium-like glass tanks and animals on floors and cages (how sinister they appear now from news reports about the rise of the virus from one of the live animal floors of a grocery store) were crowded with shoppers.
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