Hopefully, Biden will ditch Trump’s populist policies

The illegal occupation of Capitol Hill that disrupted the congressional confirmation of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration was planned, instigated and orchestrated by the previous White

House occupant and his loyalists. Populist politics is destructive not only for the US but for the rest of the world. It is reckless, ruthless and rudderless. I hope the Biden-Harris administration will abandon Trump’s wrong policies. To inherit the past administration’s foreign policy without mentioning its author while trying to clean up its ideology domestically would be using double standard and condoning the ideology at home. If not contained, populism would bite even harder and cause more havoc not just for the US and China, but humanity as a whole.

Jia Wenshan, a professor of communication and global studies, Chapman University, California.

Alchemy of political, social, medical issues

Underlying America’s unfolding crisis is the same alchemy of political-social-financial-pandemic issues that amalgamated in the Great Depression, which fueled the rise of the Third Reich — Nazi Germany — in Europe leading to World War II.

The US’ past decades of national debt over-leveraging to support capital markets that enrich the super elite at the cost of debt riddling most households, now crippled by COVID-19, and unable to put food on the tables, are the ingredients of populist movements that surged in Europe and America in another era.

Such movements are resuscitating today, evidenced in hard-line rightist protesters and militia storming the Capitol. It should be clear what comes next.

Laurence Brahm, a US documentary filmmaker living in China.