In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the Chuanshan port area of the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in east China’s Zhejiang Province, Sunday, March 29, 2020. Authorities in China are working to restart its industries as number of new coronavirus cases and deaths fall in the country. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP)
Calling out China for their lies and bad actions over the Wuhan coronavirus is not racist.
The fact that some have pushed the claim that calling out China’s culpability is racist is troubling on a few different levels.
First, because it serves the propaganda of the Chinese Communist government. So wittingly or unwittingly, you are helping spread their propaganda.
But secondly, because it can inhibit the proper response you should take to a public health emergency like a pandemic. If your response to a virus spreading in China is to say that cutting off travel with China is “racist” or “hysterical xenophobia,” you’re doing it wrong. If your response is like Italy to encourage people to “hug Chinese people” again as a pandemic is beginning to spread, you’re doing it wrong. Fighting actual racism is a good thing. Encouraging people to go out to parades and events as a pandemic evolves not so much.
Third, we need to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for their actions, infecting the globe, and we can only do that if we are truthful about it. Denying that is giving them the freedom to lie, as they have in their attacks trying to blame it on the United States. Denying that lets them off the hook to do it again and it denies all those all over the world who China owes a lot their justice.
But some don’t seem to get it.
The DCist ran this story today:
One local says he saw graffiti with anti-Chinese sentiment in Rock Creek Park https://t.co/fjogAlDFW1 pic.twitter.com/YKAVDNDAMT
— DCist (@DCist) April 22, 2020
First, it’s hard to see how this is “racist” or why this is even a story. Except of course to virtue signal about how we shouldn’t be calling out China.
But the DCist cites Aaron Mak who found the ‘graffiti’ as he was walking on the Rock Creek trail, “China is criminal,” written in white chalk.
“I hadn’t seen anything like that in my day to day life,” Mak says. “So, it was just kind of striking in that way.” Mak, who lives near Adams Morgan, says he walks that path every couple of days, and was sure the message was fairly new. [….]
Mak says there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak that started there late last year, but this is not the way to do it. “Given how many hate crimes and racist incidents and xenophobia we’ve seen just taking over the U.S.,” he says, “it strikes me as irresponsible if you’re actually trying to make some kind of critique of the Chinese Communist Party, rather than attacking Chinese people as an ethnicity.”
He adds, “I guess I can’t know their intentions, but even if that was their intention, that’s unacceptable.”
It doesn’t say Chinese people, it says “China” which everyone understands to mean the government and it’s a statement that is pretty hard to argue with. There is a fundamental distinction between Anti-China sentiment and Anti-Chinese sentiment.
How much you want to bet that this is then counted on the ledger sheet as a “hate crime?”
Just so I’m clear when I post this? I’m referring to the CCP, the communists in control of the Chinese government who are responsible for the havoc wreaked on the world.
— Trader Doc (@TraderDoc69) April 22, 2020
