Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media. Coverage intensified when gunman Robert Aaron Long targeted three Asian-owned spas on March 6, killing six Asian women among eight victims in Atlanta, Georgia. Local and national media centered the gunman’s professed motive of a “sex addiction” and police statements disputing whether the crime was racially motivated, even though gendered racism is still a factor when racist incidents don’t meet the narrow and arbitrary requirements of what constitutes a hate crime (FAIR.org, 3/26/21).
While this has given more exposure to the longstanding history of racism towards Asian people in the West, as well as the various ways Asians are often gaslit by having their racial oppression trivialized, Western news outlets have also deceptively omitted the centrality of media-promoted Sinophobia to this latest spike in hate crimes toward anyone perceived to be Chinese.
Western media reports throughout the pandemic have presented the most obvious explanations behind the spike in anti-Asian violence, settling on the Trump administration’s repeated use of the phrase “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” even after being informed that such rhetoric fuels the risk of hate crimes and discrimination against Asian people.
USA Today (2/11/21) acknowledges that Covid messaging can encourage hate crimes, but doesn’t examine corporate media’s participation in the new cold war against China.
Time (3/20/20) pointed out that Trump was “part of a long history of associating diseases with foreign countries.” USA Today (2/11/21) reported that “racist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic may be fueling a rise in hate incidents.” The Los Angeles Times (3/5/21), reporting on a study that found anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 major cities had risen 149% last year—while total hate crimes against all minority groups had dropped 7%—declared that “the rise is almost certainly related to the pandemic.”
But the Trump administration wasn’t the only actor associating Covid-19 with China. Asian writers (Salon, 2/7/20; CNN, 3/28/20) have pointed out the racist logic often employed by the scientific community and Western media in naming an epidemic: If a virus is believed to have originated from and is circulating in Western countries, either refer to it by a generic numerical designation (e.g. H1N1), or reference the animal believed to be responsible for the zoonotic spillover (e.g., Mad Cow Disease, Swine Flu). If the virus is first detected in a country that the West has stereotyped, then the epidemic will be named after the region it’s believed to have originated from (e.g., Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, West Nile Virus).
The World Health Organization (WHO), breaking with this tradition in 2015, officially named the novel coronavirus that started the pandemic “Covid-19” on February 11, 2020, to avoid stigmatizing Chinese people, even though the virus was informally referred to as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” in Western media reports both before (e.g., New York Times, 1/21/20; CNN, 2/4/20; US News & World Report, 1/24/20), and after the WHO’s official designation (e.g., Fox, 12/29/20; BBC, 8/18/20). Indeed, towards the beginning of the pandemic, US media outlets saw fit to publish loaded headlines in op-eds like “A Communist Coronavirus” (Wall Street Journal, 1/29/20), “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” (Wall Street Journal, 2/3/20) and “Coronavirus Spreads, and the World Pays for China’s Dictatorship” (New York Times, 1/29/20).
Scapegoating China
Despite WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus’s calls to avoid politicizing the virus and “pointing fingers,” because it would hinder international cooperation crucial to combating the pandemic, Western media have also echoed the Republican Party’s strategy of blaming China to avoid accountability for the US’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.
“If China had a different government, the world could have been spared this terrible pandemic,” claims Paul D. Miller (Foreign Policy, 3/25/20). Like one of the Western governments that allowed a thousand times more Covid cases per capita than the Chinese government?
Foreign Policy ran an op-ed, “Yes, Blame China for the Virus” (3/25/20), dismissing calls to avoid politicizing the virus as “nonsense” because the Chinese government’s “missteps are directly responsible for its global transmission and uncontrolled spread.” The Atlantic ran another op-ed, “China Is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World” (3/19/20), stating that the “evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a matter of public record,” and that the Chinese “regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks.”
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen wrote “The Election Is Over. Can We Finally Blame China for the Pandemic?” (12/8/20) arguing that those who tried to avoid blaming China were merely attempting to suppress an inconvenient truth for political gain:
If the regime had taken action as soon as human-to-human transmission was detected, it might have prevented a worldwide pandemic. Instead, Chinese officials deliberately covered up the outbreak, punished doctors who tried to warn the public, intentionally lied to the world about the danger the virus posed, and proactively impeded the US and international response. It is the Chinese regime’s lies and incompetence that are responsible for the most devastating and costly pandemic in American history.
Western media also ran op-eds demanding China pay “reparations” to other nations, asserting that China was not only to blame for the pandemic, but deserved to be punished: Newsweek (5/1/20) published an op-ed by far-right British politician Nigel Farage, which described the “liberal democracies of the West” as being “increasingly pitched against that clever, ruthless opponent called China,” and questioned whether “Western governments really have the collective nerve to ensure” China pays reparations to them. The Spectator (12/5/20) talked about “the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year.”
Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 12/8/20) blames China for not doing enough in December 2019 to stop a pandemic that killed its first identified victim on January 9, 2021.
In “China Should Be Held Legally Liable for the Pandemic Damage It Has Done,” the Washington Post‘s Thiessen (4/9/20) declared, “Somebody has to pay for this unprecedented damage. That somebody should be the government of China.” He accused Beijing of “intentionally lying to the world about the danger of the virus, and proactively impeding a global response that might have prevented a worldwide contagion.”
The inevitable result of Western media actively assisting the Trump administration’s attempts to blame China for the world’s pandemic woes is to give rationalizations to those carrying out anti-Asian violence out of the racist belief that all Asians, wherever they are, are collectively guilty and worthy of punishment for perceived wrongdoings of the Chinese government. But pointing fingers at China doesn’t just inflame anti-Asian racism; it’s also factually inaccurate.
Western media narratives of a supposed Chinese “coverup” primarily hinge on the myth of the Chinese government punishing “whistleblower doctors” like Dr. Li Wenliang, and other falsehoods, such as the Chinese government denying that there was any human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 before January 20, 2020, or needlessly delaying the release of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (FAIR.org, 10/14/20, 1/20/21; CGTN, 4/23/20, 8/22/20).
What nearly all Western media reports criticizing China for not acting faster than it already did omit is that a joint mission report from WHO and China described the Chinese response as probably the most “ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” They also omit that earlier action and information probably would have made little difference, since countries like the US didn’t act on the information it already had when the Chinese government initiated the unprecedented lockdown on Wuhan on January 23, 2020, which was widely dismissed and condemned by US media outlets at the time for being “authoritarian” (e.g., Washington Post, 1/27/20; Atlantic, 1/24/20; Slate 1/24/20).
In actuality, the Chinese government and people went to extraordinary efforts to contain Covid-19, buying the rest of the world time to prepare for the pandemic (which countries like the US squandered).
Foreigners and Chinese people living in China were motivated to produce the independent documentary Blaming Wuhan after seeing the blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations in Western media about what was happening on the ground in China, so that people could see and hear for themselves what Chinese life was really like. The documentary contains numerous testimonies showing that Chinese media’s unified science-based reporting to contain panic and prevent infection—along with the Chinese people’s expressed trust and respect for their government—led to widespread compliance with government directives, as opposed to complying out of fear. The documentary also attributes China’s success in containing the pandemic to greater cultural consideration for the collective good, as well as the government devoting significant resources to contain the virus.
Their testimonies are corroborated by visitors to China such as Dr. Bruce Aylward, an experienced Canadian medical expert who led a team visiting China for WHO (New York Times, 3/4/20):
Journalists also say, “Well, they’re only acting out of fear of the government,” as if it’s some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies. I talked to lots of people outside the system—in hotels, on trains, in the streets at night.
They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves as on the front lines of protecting the rest of China. And the world.
Promoting Sinophobia
The New York Post (1/23/20) reported on a video showing a woman eating a bat “at an undisclosed restaurant in the Wuhan province”—which turned out actually to be in Palau, an island nation 2,700 miles from China.
Despite this, Western media have promoted centuries-old racist stereotypes of Chinese people as exceptionally uncivilized and filthy. Western media reports like the New York Post’s “Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak” (1/23/20) reported on a “gag-inducing clip” featuring an “unidentified woman at an undisclosed restaurant in the Wuhan province clutching what appears to be a fruit bat with chopsticks while nibbling its wing like chicken.” The Daily Mirror’s “Coronavirus: Woman Eats Whole Bat in Disturbing Footage After Outbreak Linked to Soup” (1/24/20) described the video as a Chinese woman “eating a bat in a plush restaurant, despite fears the new deadly coronavirus could have been spread by a soup made from the mammal,” with bat soup being “a delicacy in the country and a popular dish in Wuhan, where the virus originated.”
In fact, the widely circulated video was first shared by Chinese social media users condemning the act, and was later revealed to be the host of an online travel show eating in the Micronesian nation of Palau in 2016. But when Western media operate within an Orientalist framework that depicts all Asian people as a barbaric monolith, factchecking crucial details like time and location don’t matter when they can spread clickbait articles by playing into racist stereotypes instead.
Before the origin theory of Covid-19 emerging from Wuhan “wet markets” was abandoned, I also criticized (FAIR.org, 5/7/20) how early Western media coverage falsely conflated what were called “wet markets” with wildlife markets, even though the vast majority of wet markets don’t keep or sell wildlife.
An op-ed in USA Today (4/8/20) from a former Shanghai-based journalist described how the “strangest animals for human consumption” to his “Western eyes” were “turtles, snakes and frogs,” before condemning Chinese “cultural traditions of medicine, animal husbandry and culinary tastes” for being a “unique incubator of terrible diseases.” Georgetown professor Bradley Blakeman wrote a patronizing op-ed (The Hill, 4/1/20) arguing that “China’s domestic demand and customs for exotic and live food are a direct threat to the health, safety and welfare of the world.”
Business Insider’s “Both the New Coronavirus and SARS Outbreaks Likely Started in Chinese ‘Wet Markets.’ Historic Photos Show What the Markets Looked Like” (2/6/20) maximized shock value and outrage by using photos that are up to 16 years old across China, along with images from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, which undermined the epidemiological need to be specific about what animal species the Huanan Market in Wuhan actually contained, and in what frequency. There are significant regional variations in cuisine in a country populated by over 1.3 billion people, and a more contextual approach would have informed audiences that wildlife actually isn’t commonly eaten in China—the practice being largely restricted to the southeast region and some towns—with one poll finding nearly 97% of Chinese people disapproving of the practice.
One can also find sources critical of the unsanitary eating habits of Americans, as well as them eating exotic meat like turtles, snakes, frogs, squirrels and camels, yet it still wouldn’t be fair to criticize all Americans for the peculiar eating habits of a few.
Reinforcing implicit bias
Western media have also made Asian people the face of the coronavirus from the very beginning of the pandemic, giving excuses for people who already held latent racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Asians to act on them under superficially plausible pretexts. Several reports have criticized Western media practices of lazily and insensitively using stock photos of Chinatown and Asian people wearing masks, even when the people getting infected and dying from the coronavirus weren’t Asian, or in Asian countries. Western media have also used photos of Asians wearing masks, even when the racial background of people testing positive for coronavirus haven’t been released in those reports, reinforcing implicit biases against Asians.
Gothamist (1/31/20) illustrated an article about the absence of coronavirus in New York with a photo of Flushing, a largely Chinese-American neighborhood in Queens.
The most notable instance of this practice was when outlets like the New York Post and New York Times used images of East Asian people in Queens wearing masks on a story about New York City’s first confirmed Covid-19 case being in Manhattan, after contracting the virus in Iran. This particular story is especially ironic, because it was later revealed that New York City was the primary source of infection across the US, with most New York cases being traced back to Europe, not Asia.
The story of Covid-19 itself is especially ironic, as observers, including Indi Samarajiva in Sri Lanka, have pointed out that Western incompetence in containing the pandemic, and hoarding of vaccines, have been responsible for infecting and harming the rest of the world. Samarajiva (Medium, 5/4/20), along with FAIR (6/6/20), has criticized Western media coverage for praising and highlighting the Global North’s efforts in combating the pandemic, while downplaying the superior pandemic achievements of Asian nations in the Global South like China, Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala.
Yet white people have not been blamed or associated with the coronavirus the way Asians have in racialized Western media coverage. This is despite some white people leading anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests, along with the European Union and the US having more than 58 million total confirmed cases as of April 7, 2021, with China barely surpassing 100,000 total confirmed cases—even though China has around double their combined population—according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project.
US imperialism & anti-Asian racism
Several Asian observers have already made the connection between US imperialism and expansionism in Asia, accompanied by bipartisan aggressive and fearmongering rhetoric about China, leading to racist stereotypes, anti-Asian violence and state persecution of Asian people (Nation, 3/19/21; Washington Post, 3/19/21). Dehumanizing portrayals of Asian people have been necessary to prepare Westerners to rationalize massacring millions of Asian people in the West’s historical legacy of invasion and colonization, as well as to justify paranoid and blanket state persecution of Asian people living in the West, often with many false accusations, and little evidence of alleged Chinese infiltration and espionage (e.g., USA Today, 8/23/20; Newsweek, 10/26/20; Foreign Policy, 9/28/20).
Looking at the alarmism in Western media coverage throughout the years, one can easily get the impression that China is a hostile and expansionist power seeking to dominate the world, as the US has done since World War II:
- Axios (7/9/20): “China’s Extraterritorial Threat”
- Foreign Policy (10/12/19): “Can American Values Survive in a Chinese World?”
- Economist (10/4/18): “China Has Designs on Europe. Here Is How Europe Should Respond”
- The Week (3/29/18): “The Looming Threat of Chinese Imperialism”
- Washington Post (3/12/21): “China’s Rise Is Exactly the Kind of Threat NATO Exists to Stop”
- The Hill (1/21/21): “Xi Jinping’s China and Hitler’s Germany: Growing Parallels”
China has repeatedly declared its explicit desire for a “multipolar” world and “win/win cooperation,” with “no ambition to seek hegemony, much less to replace the United States,” which it contrasts with a US preference for “unilateralism” and “zero-sum games” (People’s Daily, 9/10/20). As with most nations, China’s past and current foreign policy has unscrupulous aspects, but Chinese state media have also criticized the non sequitur that aspiring to become a more powerful nation necessarily means desiring world domination, citing the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence codified in China’s constitution (People’s Daily, 5/21/15). While government declarations of principles shouldn’t always be taken at face value, these are recognizably different arguments from Chinese media than the ones commonly found in US media propagandizing the desirability and necessity of US supremacy (FAIR.org, 12/11/20).
And despite Western media’s dehumanizing and incoherent portrayals of Chinese people being a monolith of brainwashed robots supportive of their government, while simultaneously being cognizant people with agency being governed against their will, one can find a wide diversity of opinion on China and the US’s place in the world there:
The debate around whether Chinese officials can be trusted generally ignores the question of whether US officials can be trusted not to start a war, or fearmonger about an ascendant China to retain US hegemony. A Defense News analysis (2/17/21) argued that “lawmakers, Pentagon leaders and defense industry–funded think tanks have been ramping up ‘great power competition’ rhetoric for years as a ploy to justify greater military spending,” and that China’s military investments are clearly “meant to keep invaders at a safe distance rather than project its own military power forward,” with the Chinese military advantages evaporating “beyond its shores.”
In Defense News (2/17/21), Dan Grazier notes, “When spending levels threaten to dip, discussion of a new national security threat ramps up to coax defense spending safely upward.”
Even establishment commentator Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post, 3/18/21), generally noted for his celebration of US power, mocked the threat inflation surrounding China, citing the US having 20 times as many nuclear warheads as China, the US having over 800 military bases around the world (many surrounding China) compared to China having as many as three, and China spending roughly only one-third as much annually on its military as the US (FAIR.org, 10/1/19).
And while the Western-centric question of whether China is a threat to us is a convenient distraction from the more pertinent question of whether the US is a threat to China, the Union of Concerned Scientists (5/7/20), for example, has pointed out that China has had an unconditional no-first-use pledge ever since it first developed a nuclear deterrent in 1964, whereas the US maintains the right to target China with a nuclear first strike. China is not planning to build a hostile missile network, or deploy Chinese soldiers near Western borders, as the US is doing to China (Nikkei Asia, 3/5/21, 7/5/20). Despite being more powerful than ever, China has never invaded another country in over 40 years, whereas at least 800,000 people have been directly killed in the US’s ongoing post-9/11 wars.
As a Korean American, it’s not hard to see the parallels between today’s Sinophobic hysteria over China’s rise with historic white supremacist fears of nonwhite people seeking retribution, or inevitably becoming just as bad as their oppressors: from white slaveowners fearing revenge from newly freed slaves, to Western media paranoia about Black South Africans slaughtering white South Africans and Palestinians killing Jewish people upon ending apartheid (FAIR.org, 2/1/19). When one is aware that Western media spread the exact same Yellow Peril propaganda of deceptive and ruthless Chinese ambitions for global domination even while Western imperialist powers were dominating China during its Century of Humiliation—and before the Chinese Revolution brought the Communist Party of China to power—current speculations over China’s alleged desire for hegemony seem more like projections and an unfalsifiable thesis, rather than evidence-based fear.
Racist critiques
While Western media like to self-present as “objective,” “impartial” and ideologically normative, FAIR has repeatedly criticized their bias in favor of white supremacy and the political and business establishment. And when we recall that US foreign policy has been designed by white supremacists, along with US newsrooms remaining predominantly white, it’s fair to question whether race is still a factor behind US foreign policy and Western media’s vilification of both the Chinese people and the Chinese government, especially when US journalists have held more hostile views towards China than the general public (Columbia Journalism Review, 11/5/18; Newsweek, 5/2/19). With US public opinion of China plummeting to all-time-lows as a result of the US’s expanded information warfare against China, it’s no surprise that Asian people are suffering from racist violence (Mintpress News, 5/18/20, 3/1/21).
It’s not inherently racist to criticize the Chinese government, but it is racist to insist on criticisms based on dubious evidence and outright falsehoods, or to prioritize hypocritical critiques of China when the West has committed more egregious atrocities than the worst Western media allegations against China (CounterPunch, 1/4/13; Mintpress News, 12/16/20). It’s racist to assume China is inherently dishonest, has nefarious motives behind all its actions, and presumed guilty of alleged wrongdoings without investigating the accuracy of Western media claims, or without critically considering non-Western views of China (e.g., Hankyoreh, 6/21/20; Medium, 10/26/20; South China Morning Post, 10/21/20). Yellow Peril and Red Scare propaganda has serious consequences for the Asian diaspora, as anti-Asian racism is spiking in Western countries as an inevitable result of Western imperialism (Time, 3/8/21).
Just as official condemnations of Islamophobia didn’t spare anyone perceived to be Muslim from state persecution and racist violence in the wake of the US’s post-9/11 wars, Asian people will continue to be targeted, despite disingenuous condemnations of anti-Asian racism, as long as the new Cold War against China continues. When many Westerners can’t even distinguish between hating the Chinese government and the Asian diaspora, it’s hard to believe familiar claims of only hating the Chinese government and not the Chinese people.
Featured image: Bloomberg illustration (5/21/20) of Chinese Covid policy.
Bravo! Our sudden lurch to declaring China an enemy is so reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, when all of a sudden a group hate is declared, and the gulllible public accepts it. Is it that our military needs credible enemies to justify their budgets ?
Let’s recall that starting in the early 1970s with Nixon’s opening to China, we pulled China from being a giant Communist adversary into being a state capitalist trading partner, that has modernized to an astonishing degree.
Why now the sudden reversal?
Sudden? There’s plenty of communication from CPP members declaring asymmetric war on the USA and there is zero doubt they want freedom from the US Dollar and long to be the world’s superpower. China spy technology was found in electronics years ago. They played a role in printing fake ballots. There’s cyber warfare that originated in Chinese IP addresses. I’m sure there’s plenty of similar tactics that emerge from the West, but to say sudden lurch seems questionable. I do not recall China ever denouncing communism. So, even on the thin surface, the USA is at war with China over ideas, human rights, and the Republican form of democracy. The Nixon move was a vision of hope that China would learn the benefits of capitalism but, unfortunately, the cheap labor that many US companies drool over has not helped. BOTH countries are jointly responsible for the atrocities regardless of where they occur. If you want to change people’s lives for the better then you must accept joint responsibility for the effects of broken systems.
To Eric,
I don’t know man, I have a hard time believing any of that. My sense of plausibility is way more skeptical than what some corporate family owned media empire says is true, or what the latest conspiracy theory has to say online.
It is sad that so many other’s have tuned out real people and tuned in the noise they get from their Tubes (TV and internet device.)
I hear you, but disagree, and thanks for your opinions. Peace
Literally everything you just said is factually incorrect. You are just regurgitating propaganda. Open your eyes – did you even read this article?
Thanks for exposing the racism contained in mainstream media’s coverage of China and Coronavirus.
Great analysis!
Its wild really how deranged a year of negative media blitz has managed to turn westerners. The way people talk about China has gotten so fucking brazenly racist and ridiculous.
So Wuhan virus is racist? La Crosse Encephalitis? Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever?
Lyme Disease? German Measles? Ross River Fever? Those are ALL WHITE. Is that racist or are you just a lazy reporter with an agenda?
How about Lou Gehrig’s Disease? Legionnaire’s Disease? Huntington’s? Parkinson’s? Hartnup? Mrtimer’s? THomsan’s? Carrion? ALL WHITE GUYS. Again, are just a lazy reporter with an agenda?
West Nile? MEHRs? Ebola? Hendra? Spanish Flu? Zika?
Those are all racist?
I didn’t see you report that most anti-Asian attacks are done by blacks. Afraid you might seem racist? I noticed you didn’t talk about the recent lady walking to church attacked by Brandon Elliott let out of prison for murder. With that one you’d have to explain the black man and why he was let out of prison (a left wing ideal).
Cho, you never apologized for scaring people that Trump wasn’t going to leave the White House. He left. You were wrong there. You are wrong here. You are a fear monger and a VERY LAZY reporter with an agenda.
Tim,
The words “Wuhan – virus” is a racially loaded slur, hurtful AF in this way, but the words themselves do not exist as physical substances. There is no virus in physical reality that scientists refer to as the “Wuhan – virus.”
Until you can point to a single scientific, medical or virological resource who officially refers to the novel coronavirus in such a racially loaded way, you are spinning nonsense, and making a blatant category error in trying to compare real physical viruses like legionaries to a culturally and psychiatrically harmful mental term like “Wuhan – virus.”
The error is that you are comparing one thing with no physical analog, to others which have physicality.
It is sophistry 101 to do this….and looks foolish to fallaciously compare a racial slur like “Wuhan – virus” to real diseases and viruses, both are harmful, but both have different types of intrinsic existence. You’d have to be a fool to deny this.
Viruses are an actual physical thing that science can measure.
Racial slurs only exist in a cultural and psychiatric sense but do not have physical agency. To say it only exists “mentally,” is not to say it is harmless.
Essentially you are comparing one non-physical but psychiatric thing – a racist slur – to physical things – viruses and diseases. Do you see the problem dude?
The problem is that you’re an idiot. Many things have a scientific term AND a common term. Lou Gehrig’s disease and ALS by way of example. Wuhan is descriptive. Black is descriptive. They are not racist. All blacks are dumb is racist. Noting that a virus comes from Wuhan is descriptive. I’m assuming you’re an adult. How did you have no wisdom? To you, everything and everyone is racist.
Tim,
“Many things have a scientific term AND a common term.”
Ironically, neither of your comments mentioned the legitimate terms used, coronavirus, or SARS-Cov-2.
What is it about the idea, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” that you find to be wrong, false, or unjust?
You said you want to see better ethics and morals. Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “The kingdom of God is within you?”
When we constantly go out of your way to talk disparaging about one group of people, or another, we are disparaging those whom house God’s Kingdom….no?
Not to make this about sectarian religious belief, but that piece of wisdom, one of only a few directly attributed to Christ, is ancient and goes back way before the Abrahamic religions.
The wisdom that we are all fundamentally the same one-being, and hurting one of us hurts us all, is ancient knowledge….the earliest known texts date back to at least 2600 BCE, in the Indus Valley, Southern Asia.
Are we attacking the Chinese by calling a virus Wuhan (the country of origin)? No. I’ve given enough evidence of our doing it to our own cities.
It is racist for Coward to say Lime disease or Rocky Mountain Fever but not Wuhan. Why he is a racist is unknow, but he is.
Are Chinese citizens being attacked more frequently now? Maybe. I do know that most of their attackers are black. Let’s not imply that whites are doing this to try to help a narrative. FBI stats show that the most common attacker is black.
No it is common knowledge that things are named where they are found. Ebola, from the Ebola river, Rocky Mountain, etc. To be more accurate, however, I’d refer to this virus using the names of its creators, something like the Fauci-NIH/Wuhan virus. CCP is only partially to blame for allowing the illegal GOF research to operate there after it was kicked out of the USA for optics under Obama, yet still funded by Fauci. Occam’s razor suggest the simplest is true: They continued research on the patented coronavirus and it leaked out near the only lab that was doing that research, perhaps as early as October 2019 and Pharma swooped in to capitalize and deal. It is no wonder that the lab also leaked the genetic code for the virus at the onset of the pandemic–because they likely created it and knew the codes a priori. No independent work ever had to be done to isolate the virus since they already had the blueprint for its manufacture.
The China CDC referred to: ” Wuhan viral pneumonia” Are they racist against themselves? Science Direct spoke of the Wuhan Virus 1/25/20. AsiaTimes spoke of the Wuhan Virus. Were they racist? The World Medical Association referred to the Wuhan Virus. Gilead Sciences referred to the Wuhan Virus. American Council on Science and Health referred to the Wuhan Virus. Japan Times referred to the Wuhan Virus. ChannelNewAsia referred to the Wuhan Virus.
Just a little bit of research on your end would have shown this not to be racist. You’re as bad as Josh Cho. You’re both lazy and racist / fear mongers.
No, actually, you are wrong. I’m not going to waste time pointing out the false equivalence, various inaccuracies, and overwhelming ignorance of everything you posted, since it is quite clear you have an agenda and have no intention of changing your narrow mind.
Everything in Cho’s article was evidenced and well-sourced, and indicative of strong critical thinking – perhaps that is why you are so threatened by it? Good day Mr. CIA sir…
No, actually you are wrong. I’m not going to waste my time explaining to you the false equivalence, various inaccuracies, and overwhelming ignorance of everything you just said, since you have a clear agenda and no intention to change that narrow view of yours. This article by Cho was evidence-based, well-sourced, and indicative of great critical thinking – perhaps that is why you feel so threatened by it? Good day Mr. CIA sir…
No, actually you are wrong. I’m not going to waste my time explaining to you the false equivalence, various inaccuracies, and overwhelming ignorance of everything you just said, since you have a clear agenda and no intention to change that narrow view of yours. This article by Cho was evidence-based, well-sourced, and indicative of great critical thinking – perhaps that is why you feel so threatened by it?
No, actually you are wrong. I’m not going to waste my time explaining to you the false equivalence, various inaccuracies, and overwhelming ignorance of everything you just said, since you have a clear agenda and no intention to change that narrow view of yours. This article by Cho was evidence-based, well-sourced, and indicative of great critical thinking – perhaps that is why you feel so threatened by it? Good day Mr. CIA sir…
this work is more than a PhD thesis work in both depth and substance. Congratulations!
I’m going to cull out what I consider racism vs. the U.S’s new full spectrum warfare which is politically motivated.
1. Depicting Chinese who were born in China as dirty, bat eaters who shop in ‘wet markets’ (ewe) without explaining that just means live market, not wet as in unrefrigerated fish. Yes, that is racist (thanks Tucker Carlson).
2. Our depiction of how China mis-handled the virus plays into the ‘in China, life is cheap’ meme. You people are soulless. This overlaps with our FSW (warfare).
3. We largely ignored the successes of S.Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Thailand in containing Covid19 outbreak. I kept hearing about studies in Denmark and other other EU countries. We don’t trust East Asians in addition to the Chinese and it works against us.
The new Cold War (full spectrum warfare) the U.S. started against China reinforces this but is motivated by our desire to maintain global power. What did China actually do to us? Okay, they spied on us but everyone spies on everyone, so what.
In turn, we accuse them of genocide, are building a military block to contain them, and an economic block to stop buying their products like 5G.
Life isn’t cheap in China? Tell that to the 75M who died under communist Mao.
get your lies and propaganda out of here
The Washington Post has the number at 45M. Are they lying too? How about the DailyMail? You probably agree with them. Are they wrong just this time?
Stalin (12M), Mao (75M), Pol Pot (2M). All mass murderers. All products of the left and big government. Hitler (7M). Only big governments can commit such large atrocities. Unarming the populous and it makes these atrocities easier. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.
Hi Josh
Your analysis covers a lot of ground. However, the U.S. Hybrid War against China is actually worse. The Neo Con Project for New American Century actually talks about using, “advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Chapter 5: Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force.
China has indicated the Wuhan Military Games in Sept. 2019 was the source of the Covid 19 coming from the United States military participants
The nature of the confrontation is Geopolitical with China’s Belt and Road versus AngloZionists wars in the Middle East and NATO expansion eastward towards Russia
From the first I came to China and subsequently lived here, I was at first surprised and then not at all to hear Chinese that I have met badmouth their government. In fact, comlaining about the government’s a favorite dinner topic and more often than not, to my wife’s embarrassment, it’s been me defending their government as opposed to mine whose grevious faults I know all too well. Still, these days, the Chinese appreciate their government a lot more than possibly they used to. China’s not perfect, of course, but the biggest threat to world peace is the Empire and that Empire’s not on my side of the Pacific, continue to be safe, I know I am, Mike Liston, Beijing
I guess I’m fortunate in that I haven’t read any of the horrid examples of journalism Joshua Cho features here. The only place I learn about this coverage is from pieces like this. If you want to read about China you can pick up something translated by Red Pine; there’s a copy of the Tao Te Ching with centuries old commentaries which reveal much about history and culture. The translations of the Buddhist hermit Stonehouse are also quite good; he lived in the mountains during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China. Also, I recently read Bruce Cummings’ book on the Korean War, and it has some in it about China and also the Japanese occupation of the country.
This seems somewhat slanted. Trump was pretty clear in distinguishing the virus as the “China Virus” and coming from the CCP rather than the Chinese people, whom we adore. From what I know of the CCP’s tactics and our own Fauci and NIH involvement in Gain-Of-Function research it would be more proper to refer to SARS-CoV2 as the Fauci-NIH/Wuhan virus. The coronavirus patents predate all of this. Research was stopped in the US under Obama and moved to China and still funded by US entities. If anything, health leaders in both countries are jointly responsible for this.
To Eric Newhuis,
“The coronavirus patents predate this.”
Is an utterly naive comment, and just speaks to a simple-minded understanding of what a patent actually is.
There is a conspiracy theory circulating online that because pharmaceutical companies had a preexistent patent for one or more of the ingredients in the vaccine, this entails “proof this was all planned.”
A patent is not a proof of concept, it is nothing but a general intellectual property application. Pharmaceutical companies, especially ones who use U.S. taxpayer funded research, patent their techniques and formulas in advance, so they have legal protections in court concerning future trademarks. This is important and alleviates some financial risk, in creating brand name drugs whose primary components share ingredients with other manufacturers.
Right now there are patents for “Warp Drive” and “Teleportations Device.” This in no way implies or proves some company somewhere has this technology.
If we had a teleportation device that worked at warp speed, we would teleport you poor souls back to a time when you actually used your cognitive faculties for endeavors other than “claptrap.”
In late December 2019, group of Chinese scientists analysed and identified the new corona virus that had been spreading across Europe, Asia and North America since the summer of 2019. It provided the basis for scientists around the world to begin developing vaccines to combat the deadly Covid19 virus. Due to budget cutbacks and poor maintenance ,the main US high level virus lab at Ft Detrick had been shut down the Spring of 2019 due to a faulty air ventilation system – absolutely essential for this type of research.
CCP propaganda. Being against the Chinese CCP is not Asian racism. Taiwan is the only real China.
Paid for by the CCP
Why do you cover for China unleashing the Kung Flu, commie?
Josh Cho – apologist for all things China, hater of America, sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome (that’s probably racist since it has a name in it).
Great commentary! I will share on my social media. If you don’t mind, I’d also like to share this on my website, Roots to Resistance.
Bias and prejudices are in everyone. Whether we admit to our prejudices or not does not change the facts. By dent of our upbringing and value systems, we all harbour prejudices of varying degrees and constantly need to suppress our ingrained prejudices precipitated on our inherent values. Too often, we witness the very people protesting about the damaging psychological effects of cultural biases and/or racism – subjecting others to the very same vitriol to which they have ‘protested’. I have personally witnessed this too often. Chinese against perceived lower-class of Chinese, Indian against Indian, African against African, Japanese against Japanese, Arab against Arab, Anglo against Anglo, etc. etc.
However, having said that … gas-lighting based on racial and/or perceived ethno-cultural background is a sickness which is intrinsically very, very dangerous, particularly when it is engineered to foment divisions amongst the unsuspecting, to achieve geo-strategic obscenities and financial windfalls to the architects. So, it is monumentally important not to be sucked into the stupidity of racial profiling, gas-lighting ‘games’. The end result is WE ALL lose and only the psychopathic architects make off with the spoils … again and again.
The age-old fabricated, Anti-Arab, Anti-Russian, Anti-Chinese, etc. has worked for too long in greasing the wheels for resource theft …
Josh, it is now settled that the Wuhan Virus came from Wuhan. Where is your apology?
Your ignorance is indicative of how incapable people such as yourself practicing any type of critical thinking and are inherently just trying to hang on to the last days of western white imperialism.