“We want everyone to know what we were worried about—our lives, our jobs, our businesses, and our survival in the United States.”
–Julie Tang, community leader and rally organizer, 2022
As COVID-19 spread across the United States in early 2020, San Francisco’s Chinatown community was already being shunned, even targeted by those who considered the disease “the China virus.” Because Asian Americans had been subject to racist scapegoating and violence so often in the past, they organized a rally to call on their fellow citizens and residents “to fight the virus, not the people.”
On February 29, 2020—ten days before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—1,000 members of San Francisco’s Chinatown community marched in solidarity.
The Chinatown rally was part of a long tradition of Asian American resistance and solidarity in the face of racist animosity. While the FBI reported that anti-Asian hate crimes increased 77% in 2020, Asian American communities across the country pushed back.