Chinese official and popular discourse framed STDs as foreign contamination of pure Chinese blood

Evidence

On popular levels, the myth of “international syphilis” (guoji meidu) has contrasted the pure blood of Chinese people to the polluted blood of outsiders, said to have become immune to syphilis after centuries of sexual promiscuity. Official discourse and popular culture have also explained AIDS as an evil from abroad, and prostitutes who offered their service to foreigners were singled out for severe punishment in the late 1980s. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3355

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral-panic theory and to the ‘blaming foreigners for disease’ pattern seen in the syphilis scares and in the Complaints About Immodesty-style framing of outsiders as carriers of pollution.
• SEED: Article angle: how nations racialize disease by blaming foreign bodies, from international syphilis myth to the AIDS-testing of African students.