It was really saddening to find out that the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Bacow, and his wife both tested positive for COVID-19.
In a letter to the Harvard community on March 24, Bacow said: “No one knows what we will face in the weeks ahead, but everyone knows enough that COVID-19 will test our capability to be kind and generous and to see beyond ourselves and our own interests. Our task now is to bring the best of who we are and what we do to a world that is more complex and more confused than any of us would like it to be. May we all proceed with wisdom and grace.”
However, the U.S. administration, led by President Donald Trump, surely lacks wisdom and is even taking irresponsible and disgraceful actions at a critical time when the most powerful country in the world should unite all nations to fight against the rampant pandemic.
In early March, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the disease the “Wuhan virus.” On March 16 and 17, President Trump himself jumped to the front and called it the “Chinese virus” in his daily news conferences and some recent tweets. According to foreign reports, U.S. officials are even commanded by the president to unanimously use these insulting terms to stigmatize China.
Such racist rhetoric not only goes against WHO rules and international practice but also incites and provokes anti-Asian sentiment. The verbal abuse has spiraled out of control in the United States. In San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles, an area with a high concentration of Chinese immigrants, gun sales have recently been 10 times higher than the usual amount as many Chinese and people from other Asian origins are buying firearms to protect themselves from possible racially targeted attacks.
A highly contagious virus is life-threatening, but a political virus would be even more dangerous. Mind barriers are nastier than physical borders. Washington has been under fire for its labeling of the virus from all over the world. Many Chinese netizens said that linking the virus to Wuhan or China is not science-based. As the virus spreads quickly in the United States, many U.S. officials are trying to divert public attention from their own lackluster response to the pandemic outbreak.
Such terms have also elicited criticism from within the United States. In a TV program, CNN anchorman Chris Cuomo rebuked: “Look at President Trump’s news briefing. He didn’t touch anything on the page except changing ‘corona’ in ‘coronavirus’ into ‘Chinese.’ The word ‘corona’ crossed out and changed to ‘Chinese,’ who does that help? That is not about China, it is about us. We are the solution, we must be together.” On March 23, The New York Times also published a commentary to lament such insulting naming.
Under great pressure from home and abroad, President Trump changed his tone and stopped using the xenophobic terms on March 24. “I decided we should not make any more of a big deal out of it,” he said when being interviewed by Fox News the same day.
Scapegoating China for the shortcomings of the United States in tackling the novel coronavirus will harm international cooperation to contain the virus as well as China-U.S. relations. There is hardly a nation on earth that has not been hit by the pandemic, so it is now the time for all countries, especially major powers, to come together and join efforts to tackle the daunting challenge posed by the virus, rather than exchanging insults and accusations. It will be a global tragedy if the United States and China, the two strongest economies in the world, further escalate their tensions at such a crucial juncture.
Such rhetoric has also hurt the image of Trump as the president of a powerful country. With the U.S. stock market gains of the past three years almost wiped out within two weeks, he is eager to play the scapegoating game, especially in a presidential election year. However, instead of hurting China, his smearing has simply amplified his own poor judgment and disgraceful intentions. At the time when COVID-19 had yet to make its presence worldwide, Trump was complacent, and his two-month-long pretense that the virus was nothing more than a common flu was later totally shattered by the virus’ rapid spread in the United States. According to statistics released by John Hopkins University, the U.S. witnessed a total of 121,478 confirmed cases and 2,010 deaths as of March 28.
With the United States becoming one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19, infections being reported in all 50 states and more and more citizens dying of it, can Trump win the hearts and the ballots of Americans by retreating into his comfort zone and using his favored approach of stigmatizing China as the scapegoat?
Cursing China will not stop the aggressive spread of the virus in the United States. As a state leader, like his brave and wise predecessors George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt who once led the United States to tide over great difficulties and engrave their names in history, President Trump should take the responsibility for uniting and leading his country in fighting against the virus and winning the battle.
(The author is the editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)