Vision China calls for unity in virus battle
The international community needs to better consolidate its efforts and transcend all possible differences to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic, a common enemy facing all mankind, said speakers at the latest edition of Vision China.
Jointly organized by China Daily and Tsinghua University, the event entitled “Fighting COVID-19: We are all together” was broadcast online on Tuesday to a global audience.
“Public health security is a common challenge facing all countries, and COVID-19 is the common enemy of all mankind,” Chen Xu, the chairwoman of Tsinghua University Council, said while addressing the opening.
“Solidarity and cooperation are the most powerful weapons to fight the virus, and the only effective course of action,” she said.
Zhou Shuchun, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily, said that the fast-spreading pandemic has put all people in the same boat.
President Xi Jinping has stated since the onset of the epidemic that China upholds the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind and calls for nations to unite in building a community of common health.
“This is a time for unity and solidarity,” Zhou said in his opening remarks. “This is a time for reason and responsibility.”
He said the sacrifices made by the Chinese people have served to stem the transmission of the virus, which gave the rest of the world precious time to prepare for the looming crisis.
Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization, said that he was impressed by China’s efforts to fight the outbreak after he visited the country in February.
The Chinese people’s sense of social responsibility, which is embedded in the nation’s culture, and their experiences in fighting the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003 are key elements of China’s fight against the virus, he said.
What’s more, China’s responses in terms of speedy diagnosis, isolation and treatment have effectively helped to contain the outbreak.
Aylward stressed that when the WHO names diseases like COVID19, it always tries to avoid attaching it to a place or to a country because this does not help as global understanding and cooperation need to be fostered.
He Yafei, a senior veteran diplomat, said the global response to the pandemic has been “very much fragmented”, and called for more solidarity and unity.
“Some take one kind of measure which is more leisurely, the other maybe more restrictive. There are no coordinated, concerted actions to show that we are in this together,” He, a former vice-minister of foreign affairs and former viceminister of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, said in his speech.
Robert Kuhn, a renowned China expert and a recipient of the China Reform Friendship Medal, said that nations will collectively win when fighting together against the virus, and will collectively lose when they argue and blame each other.
“Containing the global pandemic, like bolstering the global economy, depends on US-China collaboration,” he said.
Kuhn said the two countries can either work together to fight the pandemic, developing drugs and vaccines to kill and stop COVID-19, or suffer an outof-control global pandemic and a chainreaction cratering of the global economy.
“Nourish the virus with US-China competition. Or starve the virus with US-China cooperation,” he said.
Jim O’Neill, chair of the international think tank Chatham House and a former commercial secretary to the UK Treasury, said that the world economy is facing a crisis even bigger than in 2008, and a more complicated situation because this crisis is triggered by public health instead of simply economics.
“We need urgency, imagination and determination around the world, and if we do not, the recession the world inevitably already got into in the past few weeks will end up being very severe,” he said in his speech.
Also speaking at the event were two people who stayed in Wuhan, the Chinese city hit hardest by the virus.
Zhang Ruiru, a 20-year-old Tsinghua University student, went back to her home city of Wuhan for the traditional Lunar New Year holiday. Both of her parents were later diagnosed with the infection and have recovered.
Zhang said the fight against the outbreak has made her fully realize the strong unity of the Chinese people.
Megan Monroe from the United States, who has been working as a teacher in Wuhan, decided to stay in the city and started to post videos online since the first day of the city’s lockdown on Jan 23.
“I think that everyone needs to look at other countries and especially look toward China to see what China has done for this virus, because we can only overcome this together.”
The event on Tuesday was the 10th Vision China event since its launch in 2018. Each event has featured global opinion leaders invited to discuss Chinese topics of international significance.