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This T-shirt was created by Christchurch-based Chinese New Zealand artist Cat Xiao in February 2020. At the time, the vast majority of reported deaths from Covid-19 were in mainland China.
Cat, who is originally from Wuhan—the epicentre of the first Covid-19 outbreak—says of her motivations for making the shirt:
"After Covid-19 was discovered in Wuhan, the news, political conspiracies, race wars and region discrimination articles flooded my social media. When I went online to check how was my hometown Wuhan, these articles popped out.
“One of my friends lost her mother and couldn’t get to see her for a proper goodbye, couldn’t even have her relics, everything was burnt in an incinerator. But at that stage when the world was not alerted, their tragedies were just another story for the internet residents to consume.
“I made this T shirt to tell others that behind the masks there are lives being lost, families being torn apart and cities losing their backbones.”
Since December 2019, when the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has spread rapidly around the globe. Anxieties fuelled by the pandemic have in turn triggered waves of racial and xenophobic behaviour towards marginalised peoples. In Aotearoa, ethnic Chinese and New Zealanders of East Asian heritages have borne the brunt of these racist forms of rhetoric, abuse and behaviour, paralleling developments in neighbouring and allied countries such as Australia.
Individuals from Wuhan living both within and outside of mainland China have also been targeted by people who blame Wuhanese for the global pandemic. Xiao has responded, through her shirt's message, by emphasising the humanity of victims in Wuhan and grief over the city’s climbing death toll.