Stigma against Chinese cuisine in the first year of the pandemic cost Asian restaurants in the United States an estimated $7.4 billion in lost revenue in 2020, a recent study found.
In a year in which tens of thousands of restaurants closed and many barely scraped by, the study — published online last week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour — reported that Asian restaurants across the country lost 18.4% more in foot traffic than other restaurants in 2020.
Prominent reports of anti-Asian racism, from harassment to direct violence, flooded the country in the years after the pandemic’s outbreak. Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that formed in response, recorded nearly 11,500 such incidents from March 2020 to March 2022.
But the goal of this study, in addition to determining “the cost of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to researchers from Boston College, the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research, was to highlight instances of anti-Asian discrimination that were less overt despite significant economic impact.
“When you have something like folks just choosing not to eat in a Chinese restaurant, that is something that’s a lot more subtle and under the surface, but it’s also a lot more common,” said co-author Masha Krupenkin, an assistant professor of political science at Boston College.
Justin Lipsky, the director of public policy at Minnesota’s Chinese Community Center, said he saw these statistics play out in his area. In the months after the pandemic began in March 2020, Chinese American restaurants in the Twin Cities area faced hateful social media comments to smashed windows and other forms of vandalism.
He said the $7.4 billion figure is unsurprising, especially when taking into account compounding factors such as deep-rooted and racist stereotypes that Chinese food is cheap or unclean. Those…
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