In the mid-2000s, it seemed that the future had finally arrived. For the first time, we were within arm’s reach of the tools that would allow us to defend ourselves against conditions like diabetes, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. With the use of therapeutic stem cells, diseases that had long defied the efforts of medicine could perhaps now be managed, even treated. If we had anyone to thank for this brave new world, it was the Korean biologist Hwang Woo-suk, who in 2004 announced that his team had successfully derived stem cells from a cloned human embryo. (Though human cells had previously been cloned, they had been fragile and short lived; in contrast, Hwang claimed to have generated embryos that were stable enough to yield stem cells that could be used in therapeutic treatment.)1 Because this process used a patient’s own genetic material, the body’s immune system wouldn’t reject these stem cells during treatment. Just a year later, he published another study claiming that he had used this technique to create eleven tailored, patient-specific stem cell lines.
Crowned “supreme scientist,” Hwang was celebrated as a national hero for this monumental discovery, which promised to inaugurate a new era of stem cell therapy. But soon after, everything started to unravel. Within months of the announcement, a collaborator accused Hwang of lying about the source of the original embryos. Closer scrutiny revealed not only that Hwang had used embryos from two of his team’s researchers—rather than solely from volunteers, as he had claimed—but that he had fabricated data in his foundational papers. The extraordinary stem cells turned out to be no more than fiction.
Commentators both domestically and abroad quickly swarmed to condemn Hwang’s actions and unpack the “formidable science–media–government complex” in Korea that had enabled it to happen in the first place, as science and technology scholar Buhm Soon Park writes. Yet, as Park observes, “Hwang-gate” stopped there, and the dominant narrative (particularly among Western outlets) failed to follow the trail of responsibility beyond the “human actors residing in Korea.” Hwang’s global support network, which included a close collaborator from the University of Pittsburgh, Gerald Schatten, was largely ignored by the mainstream accounts. Hwang was sentenced to prison, but Schatten—who had been given $40,000 for collaborating with the team—received little more than a “slap on [the] hand” for his involvement, as an article in Wired phrased it.
A decade later, a similar incident seized headlines, this time revolving around Chinese scientist He Jiankui. In 2018, He announced that he had used a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to modify the DNA of soon-to-be-born twins , making them immune to HIV. His premature use of this technology on humans also earned him a nickname, though a far less flattering one: the “Chinese mad scientist.” International criticism rained down on He, who was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison. Similarly to Hwang, however, the dominant narrative failed to lodge a critique of the broader systems of support that had enabled He to conduct his experiment.
In each of these scandals, bioethical misconduct was seen not as a systemic failure of global science but as evidence of the “drawbacks of research in scientifically and ethically less-developed societies,” as sociologist Sang-Hyun Kim put it. The development of these narratives—what they captured, and what they elided—reveals a broader anxiety around Asia that looms in the West. It is a suspicion, a view of the East as a place where bodies are altered and modified in profane ways, that has led critics to focus solely on the Asian actors in the Hwang and He incidents. Indeed, the same impulse fuels the fascination we see bubbling up when Western popular media—such as in If I Had Your Face, a novel set in Seoul whose plot revolves around cosmetic surgery—exoticizes the supposedly extreme body transformation cultures of places like Korea, despite statistics that show that such procedures are just as (if not more) common in countries like Italy, Brazil, and Greece.
The unease around the Asian body grew to new heights during the COVID-19 pandemic: not only did individual Asian people come to be seen as vectors of disease, but Asia more broadly was viewed as an infectious threat to America’s metaphorical “body.” As cases of this mysterious virus cropped up in the US, there was the acute sense that the “over there” had finally made it here. During those early months, it wasn’t hard to notice the gazes that would shift whenever I got on the train. Most of the time, I wrote off these glimmers of disquiet; no one was resting easy, myself included. But whenever a pair of eyes would linger on me a little too long, or someone would lean a bit too far away in their seat, there was another, more directed fear that could be felt. They weren’t just afraid of the virus; they were afraid of me.
The US busied itself with futile efforts at self-immunization, shoring up its border walls—as if it could put a hazmat suit over the entire nation—and threatening to ban TikTok out of fear that Chinese ideology might infiltrate the minds of the youth. This combined panic over infection—literal, political, cultural, and economic—remains palpable. Earlier this year, a Bloomberg report used COVID-19 as a segue to discuss US biotech vulnerability to Chinese influence and intelligence. “Four years after Covid-19 first appeared in China,” the article begins, “Washington is assembling a plan to reduce the US biotechnology industry’s vulnerability to its top geostrategic rival.” This rhetorical sleight of hand introduces COVID-19 as an inciting event, positioning America’s defensive posture as the inevitable response. A global pandemic, the development of Chinese biotech, and vague notions of US national security become interwoven into one tangled ball of anxiety.
These intersecting narratives of infection, modification, and vulnerability betray a deep-seated fear that structures the West’s relationship to the “Far East.” It is one that emerges from the belief that although Asia has been given the gift of modern technology, its culture and people are still premodern—leading to the multiplication of these monstrous interminglings that threaten to spill outwards. From embryonic experimentation to dysmorphic body augmentation and bat–human viral transmission, these kinds of things are simply bound to happen over there, where they can’t keep their boundaries straight. There is something biologically unsettling about what is happening across the Pacific, something threatening to come over here if the West lets down its guard for even a moment.
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To zero in on the precise source of this fear, we must first understand how Westerners think about who (or what) is, and is not, “human.” In his landmark diagnosis of Western modernism, We Have Never Been Modern, the anthropologist Bruno Latour argues that this culture is, on the surface, obsessed with “purification”—creating neat classifications that structure the world and clearly define our place within it. Creating tidy distinctions between “nature” and “culture,” and between “human,” “animal,” and “machine,” modern culture works hard to position these categories as universal, objective, scientific truths that reflect reality as it really is: a natural order through which everything can be organized.
Conveniently, this manufactured paradigm grants humans privileged status. “Man” is placed outside and above the domain of nature, granting him permission to shape the world around him to his benefit.
But maintaining the neat demarcations of this natural order isn’t always so easy. Latour observes that the same societies that participate in this process of purification are often simultaneously engaged in the creation of “hybrids”—things like bioengineered bodies that defy the distinction between “natural” and “artificial,” “human” and “technology,” undermining the very rules it has established. Though America loves to pay lip service to this natural order, its actions often belie it; after all, the US is no stranger to transgressive biomedical research. For instance, the Tuskegee experiments, conducted by the US Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972, intentionally withheld treatment from Black men with syphilis to study the progression of the disease. And as recently as 2019, it came to light that a facility in Iowa was conducting tests on hydration and sexual arousal on its disabled residents. As much as it positions itself as protectors of the sanctity of humanity, the “civilized” West is, in practice, quick to forget this duty at its earliest convenience.
Instead of reckoning with these events directly, modern Western culture—from its media apparatuses to government bodies and academic institutions—busies itself with repressing any memory of them. It tries to forget them completely (as in the case of Tuskegee) or, where possible, displace them onto another perpetrator. This impulse toward displacement was clearly at work in the Western response to He Jiankui’s CRISPR interventions. He Jiankui, a product of the mainstream American scientific institution, received his training at Rice University and even received technical advice on his now-infamous project from scientists at UC Berkeley. Yet when his research was criticized, the US research community immediately depicted him as a rogue actor outside the system. Emblematizing such positions, a New York Times article at the time reported, “Experts worry that medical researchers in China are stepping over ethical boundaries long accepted in the West.” By framing these transgressions as phenomena that only happen elsewhere, in the “Wild East,” US establishments retain the moral high ground as allies of this natural order.2
This natural order, structured around the human versus inhuman, also allows the West to elevate itself above the rest of the globe by securing the privileged status of the human exclusively for itself. As scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun have noted, the Asian body is rejected for being “not quite human … not quite lived,” just as the Black body is for being too “primitive.” Tellingly, this exclusion has been reinforced repeatedly during moments when white Westerners felt particularly threatened. In the late 1800s, the growing workforce of Chinese railroad laborers began exacerbating white panic about economic displacement. In response, the American Federation of Labor published a pamphlet titled Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?, which argued that Asian people didn’t need the kinds of nourishment that European descendants did. Asian bodies were characterized as machine-like: built for hard labor and ultimately expendable. By attributing the success of Chinese immigrants to their inhumanity, white Americans could rest easy, reassured of their own innate supremacy. After World War II, as Asia began to outcompete the West in domains like production and innovation, the technological advances of countries like Japan would be explained away by characterizing its people as robotic, technologically proficient but not truly living, lacking a soul.
This “techno-Orientalist” stereotype would align the Asian body with the machine, constructing an imaginary Asia “infused with the languages and codes of the technological,” as literary scholars David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu write. Moreover, as political scientist Quinn Lester observes when discussing what he calls “bio-Orientalism,” the West would also rely on biological metaphors to explain Asia’s size and growth—giving voice to the concern that the East was host to an overexpanding population that would soon overrun and consume all.3 There was the sense that Asian people were not only too mechanical and nonliving, but also too reproductive—constantly replicating themselves like a cancer, preparing to overwhelm the West’s biopolitical boundaries at any moment.
This is how the contemporary Asian body comes to be “viral.” It becomes a walking paradox, everything that the human is supposedly not: porous, unstable, part animal and part machine, ever growing, not an individual but a swarm, situated between life and nonlife. This characterization enables the West both to explain the East’s growing geopolitical influence (without losing its imperial sense of superiority), and to use it as a scapegoat for a global technoculture in which all are implicated. Asia emerges as an artificial foil to the West—a projection of its insecurities and failings, a manifestation of the threats to the natural order that places (white) man atop all else.
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It’s tempting to seek to remedy this state of affairs by simply elevating Asian bodies to the status of “human.” Yet we should be skeptical of any solution that incorporates marginalized people into a hierarchy central to Western supremacy, rather than dismantling it altogether. As the political scientist Claire Jean Kim reminds us, Asian proximity to whiteness through things like the “model minority” stereotype is so often used to pit Asian Americans against Black Americans—shifting focus away from the larger system that oppresses both. You can’t beat the house at its own game.
Perhaps the problem is not the virality of Asian bodies but, rather, lies with modern culture’s hallowed ideas of the “human” in the first place. We’ve already seen how much repression and displacement is necessary to maintain the sanctified boundaries of this category. Moreover, as ecologically minded writers like Timothy Morton have argued, we have only come to see ourselves “as a species” by what we have been “doing to other species.” The “human” emerges from the ashes of the natural world, through campaigns of domination and eradication. Forcing Asian bodies to fit this anthropocentric mold risks reinforcing precisely those structures that led us to devastation.
In many ways, then, this challenge is one not just of formulating new attitudes to specific domains like politics or bioethics or race, but, as Hong Kong–based philosopher Yuk Hui argues, of envisioning other ways of existing. There is a deficiency of imagination in today’s culture—one that stems from its inability to go beyond the West’s “Promethean” technological legacy, in which technology is seen as fire stolen from the gods, something that removes humans from the state of nature and makes them exceptional among all other life. To escape this paradigm, Hui argues, we must develop what he calls an alternative “cosmotechnics”—a new way of thinking about our place in the universe and the role of our technical activities in expressing our relation to it. Let us, then, take Hui’s thinking one step further and ask: What might happen if we built such a cosmotechnics not from the Promethean man but from the viral Asian body?
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To sketch the outlines of a cosmotechnics built around the viral, we must revisit the basic tenets of our being in the world. The human is defined by its boundaries—the ways it sits apart from both nature and other subjects. It is self-sufficient, an individual consciousness that needs nothing but itself to exist. The viral, however, is defined by its slippery elisions, the ways that it is constantly interacting with the environment around it, leaving its DNA wherever it goes, mutating and evolving through every contact. Transmission and border-crossing, rather than separation and isolation, is the basic logic of the virus. It encourages us to stop focusing our technical activities on ensuring that we sit apart from (and control) others, and to focus them instead on nurturing all those porous relationships that define us, all the contingencies upon which we depend. Though it is precisely this boundary-violating existence that made Asian bodies so unnerving to the West, these are realities we must now confront if we hope to survive.
After all, our overinflated reliance on the “human” hinders our capacity to navigate the challenges posed by those (literally and figuratively) viral, border-crossing events that are increasingly common in our globalized world. An approach to COVID-19 that is itself viral wouldn’t have resulted in commentators tracing the disease with moralized hand-wringing about the grotesque conditions under which animal–human viral transmission might occur, or in politicians trying to protect the biopolitical “body” of the US through ineffectual border policies and travel bans. Such an approach would, rather, have attuned us to the entanglements that gave birth to this state of affairs, cutting through distracting stories of profane infections, embodied borders, and Orientalist notions of transgressive Chinese science.
Perhaps then it might have been easier to see that “unsanitary” Asian markets are not the only places where humans and nonhumans are in constant biological dialogue with one another; in fact, we are always already participating in such exchanges. This is the revelation behind an ongoing “paradigm shift” in the field of biology that sees us transition our focus away from singular, individual species toward communities of entwined organisms working together (like you and your gut flora). A view of these viral transfers as disgusting exceptions—instead of as a given fact of life for which we must prepare—achieves nothing, especially as researchers predict that species-jumping viruses will only become more common as climate change intensifies.
"The truth is that we, as actors both individual and collective, are fundamentally enmeshed in/with the world. Our technologies weave their ways into our minds and bodies."
Similar questions arise at the level of intergovernmental planning. Were policymakers to cease thinking of the nation-state as a body and instead observe the viral vectors that define our tightly networked, global society, perhaps they could have better anticipated the pandemic’s inevitable spread by focusing their energy on creating systems to absorb transmission—rather than pretending they could keep everyone safe in an airtight bubble. This realization could also have spurred us all to share information (and blame) with one another, rather than retreat into useless secrecy and finger-pointing. In the past, the association between nations and bodies has helped foment the most abhorrent forms of nationalism, a fact that social psychologist Richard Koenigsberg calls out when he observes that “Hitler's extraordinary feat was to have put forth the view that the nation was an actual body—a biological reality—and to have persuaded people to believe in and to act upon this view.” Ridding ourselves of this residual legacy is an important step toward preparing ourselves for the next world-changing event—pandemic or otherwise—that demands planetwide cooperation.
The truth is that we, as actors both individual and collective, are fundamentally enmeshed in and with the world. Our technologies weave their ways into our minds and bodies; the companion species with whom we live shape us, just as we shape them; international trade, data flows, and global corporations rupture the walls of the nation-state; we are not separate from nature but have always existed squarely within it. The crises with which we reckon today emerged because we deluded ourselves into thinking otherwise for so long. Everything we have intentionally forgotten, repressed, or thrust upon others in bad faith—all those messy facts about our total and unavoidable immersion—must be recalled if we hope to use technology to right our relationship to the world we inhabit.
The viral is not here to tell us that we are some “disease” upon the earth to be eradicated, but to remind us that we are not so exceptional, individual, or novel, but transmissive, ill defined, dependent. It is here that we must begin if we hope to harmonize with, rather than destroy, those around us. Tearing down the ideological edifice of man will finally allow us to honestly apprehend our relations and obligations to the world we inhabit. Among its ruins, we will reencounter the viral Asian body once more; yet this time, rather than recoil from its infectiousness, we might finally greet it as kin.
1. See James F. Battey, Statement of James F. Battey Jr., Chair, NIH Stem Cell Task Force before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources on “Human Cloning and Embryonic Stem Cell Research after Seoul; Examination Exploitation, Fraud, and Ethical Problems in the Research,” March 7, 2006.
2. See Yangyeng Cheng, “China Will Always Be Bad at Bioethics,” Foreign Policy, April 13, 2018; “Wild East or Scientific Feast?,” Economist, January 14, 2010.
3. For an example of this anxiety, see Jack London, “The Unparalleled Invasion,” Short Stories of Jack London (New York: MacMillan, 1990).