Myopia of US hawks must not be allowed to mar big picture of pandemic fight

Despite the rapport revealed in the telephone conversation on Friday morning between US President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, and Trump’s endorsement of Xi’s pro-solidarity speech at the G20 summit held the day before, relations between the two countries could still be caught in the undertow of the dramatically worsening pandemic situation in the United States at any time.

It was in early March, when the situation in the US first began to look grave, that US politicians, most notably the secretary of state, began to try and stigmatize China by using phrases such as “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese virus”. Now that the number of confirmed infections in the US is soaring, jumping from 85,000 to about 130,000 from Friday to Sunday, more deflection of the US public’s ire onto China can be expected.

The US administration is full of China hawks and even before the novel coronavirus outbreak they were peddling prejudice, hatred and antagonism toward China. Now at this time of crisis, resorting to the comfort of the China-bashing that they are familiar with, they risk sabotaging the much-needed solidarity between the two countries.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for instance, has spared no efforts in trying to portray the virus as a threat emanating from China, claiming that China intentionally kept the world in the dark about the seriousness of the situation. This belies the fact that China kept the World Health Organization informed of the outbreak from the moment it was first identified, and the speed and scale of China’s response to the spread of the virus were evidence in themselves that the situation was grievous — it was not simply on a whim or the exercising of power that more than 60 million people were put into lockdown in Hubei province and the national economy into suspended animation.

Mocked by some US politicians as being “medieval” and “authoritarian”, China’s decisive lockdown of first Wuhan, the provincial capital, and then Hubei province, was indispensable to curbing transmission of the virus nationwide and allowing limited medical resources to be effectively concentrated. Seeing these measures have enabled China to bring the outbreak under control, other countries are now trying to emulate them.

Nevertheless, to the China hawks in the US, China can never do anything right and whatever it does is ruinous to the world, just as the US can never do anything wrong and whatever it does is the saving of the world.

Yet not far ahead, there will be a point on the upward curve of lives lost in the US, when the nation will realize that it is not China that has drawn that line but the shortsightedness of some in the US.

The groundless charges made against China represent the dangerous myopia of the hawks in the US, whose ideological blinkers mean they are unable to see the bigger picture of a threat more real than that from China. The world is at war against an invisible common foe, name-calling and blamegaming are in no one’s interest.