Commentary by Xinhua writer Wu Xia
BEIJING – One of the most bizarre characteristics of America’s 2020 presidential election is that political attacks on China have gone well beyond common sense.
The vicious rhetoric against Beijing has hit one fresh low after another this week at the ongoing Republican National Convention. At the gathering, China hawks in Washington trumpeted the White House’s hard-line approach toward Beijing, attacked China over so-called transparency issue during the COVID-19 pandemic, and continued spreading xenophobic language over the origin of the pathogen.
For those convention speakers busy producing and circulating a toxic political virus of their own amid the raging pandemic both inside the United States and around the world, smearing China seems to be an almost omnipotent excuse to cover up their many failures – the terrible pandemic handling in particular – and the only viable winning strategy in the coming November election.
Those China hardliners in fact slapped themselves in their own faces when they were brazen enough to boast that the United States is not a racist country while constantly making ill-founded accusations against China that suggest otherwise. Such apparent cognitive dissonance and their wicked political motivation to scapegoat China are too obvious to miss.
Due to Washington’s hellish handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is the hardest-hit country on the planet, with almost 6 million confirmed cases, and about 180,000 deaths. No lie will be persuasive or manipulative enough for the White House to shift blame to others.
The pandemic is also making some of America’s long-standing social-economic problems such as racial discrimination even deadlier, and a divided America harder to heal.
‘Racism pandemic’
Adding to the coronavirus pandemic is a “racism pandemic” in the US, as American Psychological Association President Sandra L. Shullman said recently.
“The deaths of innocent black people targeted specifically because of their race – often by police officers – are both deeply shocking and shockingly routine,” she commented.
In the most recent example of this, footage from Sunday posted on social media showed Wisconsin police shooting a black man seven times in the back as he leaned into a vehicle, sparking angry protests and leading county officials to impose a curfew. This incident came not long after African-American George Floyd lost his life due to police brutality.
According to a recent study by the non-partisan APM Research Lab, “black Americans continue to experience the highest actual COVID-19 mortality rates nationwide – more than twice as high as the rate for whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates.”
As those Washington politicians lie about their readiness and competence to make America a safer and better place, large-scale protests continue to decry police violence in cities across the United States, and more people are dying because of a yet to be contained deadly virus.
The American malaise does not have a Chinese cure. It is impossible for Washington politicians to contain the rampant virus or to fix racial discrimination by lambasting China. US decision-makers know well where the true remedy lies. – Xinhua
