Wuhan epidemic: some cultural context
This article is perhaps a bit incongruous with everything I have written before. It is not about AI or data science or responsible tech, but it does touch directly on why my job and my team exist in Wellcome: to help improve health around the world using all the tools at our disposal. It is just that this time the right tool is a bit of ethnography, not an algorithm.
We are all aware of the serious situation playing out in Wuhan, a city in the heart of China that has been stricken by the coronavirus epidemic. Wellcome’s best scientific minds are doing their best to help manage the situation and I have never been more proud of working here than when CEPI, a programme we co-founded four years ago, announced that it is kicking off the process of developing new vaccines for this virus.
But this blog post is not about the scientific and health efforts, amazing though they are. What I want to write about instead is the place that is at the heart of the epidemic and its people. This is personal for me. My wife is Chinese, my children are half Chinese, half Russian. I have family and friends all over China, including in Wuhan, where in the early 2000s I carried out a number of field-trips as a young anthropologist, researching a book about traditional Daoist practices.
Too often when epidemics strike in far off lands all we get fed, news wise, is a steady stream of horrific images of ghost towns and people in hazmat suits. It is, I believe, important to challenge such narratives, because they tend to dehumanize the affected people, reducing them to featureless victims, or, worse still, sub-consciously assigns blame with headlines in the press about “illegal wild-life meat markets” that started the epidemic.
From a scientific and medical perspective, it is important to give the facts, like the source of the epidemic, and, if it is an illegal wild meat, then that is important to acknowledge. However, from a cultural narrative perspective, if all the media stories portray about the people affected is that some ate illegal food, it creates a distorted picture and slides into unconscious victim-blaming, devoid of context.
As the epidemic spreads, it is preceded by a wave of fear and misinformation and such victim-blaming can become more pervasive and overt: scary images and quotes from mainstream media start getting amplified and warped on social media channels that algorithmically bias towards more extreme views, gifting them greater prominence. Over time, the fear can mutate into xenophobia. Already, my Chinese friends and family living in the West and with no connection to the epidemic have started to report isolated incidents of discrimination against them caused by the fear spread by the media and social media.
To challenge the negative narrative, we need alternative narratives that give the context, richness and humanity back to those caught up in the epidemic. Here is my attempt to do this. It is a personal portrait of Wuhan, its culture and people, therefore it only captures a small part of the complex whole.
Wuhan has for centuries been a major river port on the Yangtze river and a gateway to the Wudang mountains in northern Hubei Province. Apart from being a major transport hub (often referenced in the media to explain the rapid spread of the virus) it is also a cultural centre, with multiple heritage sites of international significance, such as the Wuying Pagoda and the Yellow Crane Tower, made famous in a number of poems, including this one from China’s greatest poet, Li Bai (701–762):
My old friends said goodbye to the west, here at Yellow Crane Tower,
In the third month’s cloud of willow blossoms, he’s going down to Yangzhou.
The lonely sail is a distant shadow, on the edge of a blue emptiness,
All I see is the Yangtze River flow to the far horizon.
The Yangtze, is one of the main arteries of China, together with the Yellow River and the Grand Canal, and it has shaped the city of Wuhan and its predecessors, making it a place of travellers and tourists even at the time of Li Bai.
Many of the ancient sites in Hubei Province around Wuhan are associated with Daoism, one of China’s original religions, as the Wudang mountains have been the centre of its practice since at least the Tang Dynasty (618–907). According to tradition, it was also the place where the ubiquitous martial art of Tai chi was first created, or, rather, its progenitor, Wudang Quan. It was that last fact that first brought me to the area in 2004, as the book I was writing was exploring the connection between traditional religious practice and Chinese martial arts.
After the repressions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when many traditional practices were banned and practitioners persecuted, both martial arts and Daoism flowered again in the Wudang mountains. When I was there, I was lucky enough to meet and interview some amazing people, who dedicated themselves to both traditions.
Daoism teaches that a “perfected” man or woman is one who sees through the phenomena of the senses into the underlying unity of the Way, or Dao. This state of enlightenment is achieved through assiduous practise, including meditation, and physical exercises called Daoyin. Indeed, Daoism has long been connected with health and medicine, since one of the objectives pursued by “perfected” people is immortality, or, if that is too big an ask, at least longevity.
For this reason, Daoism has gifted the world an unrivalled corpus of thousands of medical texts produced over a period of two and a half thousand years. This includes a manual on gymnastics from 4th century BC, called the Nei Yeh. It also includes numerous texts on herbal medicine, including the medieval texts on traditional Chinese herbs, which the Nobel prize-winner, Dr Tu Youyou, used as an inspiration to identify the active ingredient in the anti-malarial drug, Artemisinin.
However, not everything can be written down. I was particularly interested to study practices that are transmitted orally or through imitation of movements and posture. For example, breathing exercises called qi gong, and martial performances of set moving routines, called tau lu. As well as traditional music and food.
One potential effect of the coronavirus that I have not seen discussed in the media, but which I fear greatly, is the damage that it could do to Wudang mountains’ Daoist heritage. Many of the monks who provide continuity with the way Daoism was practised before the Cultural Revolution, all the way back to pre-Communist days, would be in their eighties and nineties now. Also, since Daoism requires regular fasts and seclusion, they may well be particularly weakened and vulnerable.
I worry about the effects of both the virus itself and the side-effects of the quarantine which could cut off many of the mountain villages, where these traditions are observed. If we lose that generation of practitioners, we lose all the oral and performative history and tradition that they may not have committed to paper.
It is events like these that make you truly understand the complex nature of epidemics, their cultural effects as well as their scientific determinants. Even as we try to stop the epidemic from spreading and help those affected, we need to remember that we are talking about real people, with complex societies, rich culture. They deserve both our empathy and our respect. Epidemics know no borders: it could have been any of us.
