Coronavirus fears are undercutting business for Chinese sex workers overseas as alarm over the risks of infection have spread even in countries that have restricted travel to mainland China.
“I don’t mention that I am Chinese any more and I offer a big discount, but clients are avoiding us like we are the virus,” one Chinese woman in New Zealand told the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based media outlet.
That account gives vivid shape to the alarm caused by the outbreak, which developed into a major international public health issue last month after weeks of only a muted response from local authorities. New Zealand, which decriminalized prostitution for citizens and legal residents in 2003, has restricted travel from mainland China, but those preventative policies have outraged Beijing.
“Virus is horrible. What’s more horrible is rumors and panic,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying said on Tuesday, while criticizing the U.S. response to the coronavirus for the second day in a row. “I want to stress that virus knows no borders. The epidemic is temporary, but cooperation lasts.”
New Zealand authorities invoked U.S. travel warnings about China when unveiling their own policy, adding that health experts encouraged the restrictions due to the lack of good information about the virus.
“We have been advised by health officials that while there are still a range of unknowns in the way the virus is being transmitted, we should take a precautionary approach and temporarily stop travel into New Zealand from mainland China, and of people who have recently been in China,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Sunday.
Chinese officials have tried to contain the outbreak by imposing a mass quarantine in Wuhan and the other cities that have been most affected, but Beijing has also complained that some foreign officials have made “discriminatory” comments about the virus. And media reports as far away as France suggest that the outbreak has spurred xenophobic and racist encounters outside of China.
“Business is way down and it’s never been this bad before,” the sex worker in New Zealand said.
Western analysts argue that the response to the outbreak is being hampered by the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, contributing to China’s hesitance to share information about the crisis.
“One stark complication is that the Chinese government, determined to defend its perceived sovereign interests and not suggest to the outside world that it is failing, has yet to welcome external scientists into China to cooperate side-by-side,” J. Stephen Morrison, a global health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted last week.
