It's hard to miss the angry chorus of rising voices, mostly from US leaders and their nativist acolytes, selfishly politicizing the current health emergency and groundlessly blaming China for the novel coronavirus pandemic that has changed the way we live and work. There are myriad reasons for this, both recent and historical.
While it's easy for some to use hindsight to criticize officials in Wuhan and its parent province of Hubei in the face of a massive, cascading health emergency that has dwarfed any other in living memory, at the moment even the most biased observer has to concede that China has tamed a frightening disease until one or more of the numerous vaccines and other treatments being tested can be developed and distributed to people across the world to drive a stake through the heart of the monster called the novel coronavirus, which is invisible to the naked eye.
It's also a fact that China cooperated with the World Health Organization by making public the identification of the novel coronavirus on Dec 31 and sequencing its genome 10 days later, which are necessary to develop diagnostic tests and treatments. By contrast, it took five months for Canadian scientists to do so during the 2002-03 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak.
But it's racist to unleash hatred against the Chinese people in the United States, and many other Asians (since to most Americans "they all look alike"); in fact, in the tribal society that the US has become, its chief gave his bigoted followers permission to savage Asians physically, verbally and psychologically.
Racism in the US targeting Chinese people is nothing new. Chinese flocked to the US to do the back-breaking work during the California gold rush and to build the transcontinental railroad. Their reward: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers, the first American law preventing the members of a specific ethnic group from immigrating that was not replaced until 1942. There have been numerous other outrages such as the one in 1899 when Honolulu's Chinatown was torched due to the misperception that Chinese-Americans carried the bubonic plague.
Why did some US politicians play the racist card?
The most logical answer is that consistent with their sociopathic self-centered personality, they needed a scapegoat to hide their profound failure to act for nearly 11 weeks from when China informed the WHO of the discovery of a new virus, belittling the possibility of the coming health emergency in the hope of propping up the stock market and gaining brownie points in the domestic political game. The US federal government wasted precious time doing nothing to mobilize federal resources and coordinating with the US states.
Sadly, millions in the US and elsewhere suffer as a result. It didn't have to be this way. The US administration's quick action would have dramatically reduced the number of deaths and blunted the direst economic consequences. Indeed, much of the more than $5 trillion allocated globally by G20 members to inoculate people across the world and prevent a global economic meltdown could have instead been repurposed to prepare the world to deal with new pandemics and building a community with a shared healthy future for mankind.
In a more ideal world, as it has done before－for example, during the 2008 global financial crisis－the US would work with China and other countries to contain the pandemic, and join forces with China and other economies to overcome profound economic shocks. In our real world, however, the leadership the US has provided in times of crisis during the past years is conspicuous by its absence, leaving China to step up to the plate and fill the vacuum.
The author is a senior fellow at Center for China and Globalization.
