Aaron Mak, a technology writer at Slate, had read reports of growing anti-China sentiment in the wake of the coronavirus’ global spread, and had been covering the subject some himself, but he hadn’t personally witnessed anything. But on Tuesday around 5 p.m., as he was walking Rock Creek Trail, he saw a message written in what looked like white chalk on the ground near the Klingle Road overpass: “China is criminal.”
“I hadn’t seen anything like that in my day to day life,” Mak says. “So, it was just kind of striking in that way.” Mak, who lives near Adams Morgan, says he walks that path every couple of days, and was sure the message was fairly new.
He says he often sees drawings and phrases written in chalk on the ground near that spot, but not like this one. “Usually it’s positive messages, like, ‘Hope you’re hanging in there,’ you know, ‘Stay safe,’ and everything,” he says. “I think [this] was just an uglier iteration of that.”
A representative for the National Park Service told DCist that NPS police did not have any information about the graffiti and had not received any reports related to it, but would look into it further.
Misinformed fears around the coronavirus pandemic have fueled a rise in anti-Chinese rhetoric and actions, with slurs and terms like “kungflu” circulating on social media, and Asian Americans reporting attacks and harassment, from dirty looks to being spat on. USA Today reported that experts say the pattern is driven in part by similar phrasing from politicians, including President Donald Trump, who has referred to the disease as the “Chinese virus.” (The 2003 SARS outbreak also fueled anti-Asian racism and Asian-American communities braced for a resurgence in the weeks after the outbreak began in Wuhan).
Mak says there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak that started there late last year, but this is not the way to do it. “Given how many hate crimes and racist incidents and xenophobia we’ve seen just taking over the U.S.,” he says, “it strikes me as irresponsible if you’re actually trying to make some kind of critique of the Chinese Communist Party, rather than attacking Chinese people as an ethnicity.”
He adds, “I guess I can’t know their intentions, but even if that was their intention, that’s unacceptable.”
