Can We Criticize Both Trump and China?

It’s not only possible but necessary, argues our columnist.

Despite the wide-scale disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis, one thing remains sadly intact: the era of idiotic tribalism we are witnessing in the United States. This is seldom more visible than on the issue of China’s role in the crisis.

On one hand, President Donald Trump appears determined to make China his scapegoat. It is too tempting for him: By taking the offensive like this, he builds himself a straw man target, instead of having to answer the numerous serious and legitimate criticisms of how he has handled the crisis. Among these targets: the now well-documented, flippant statements he has been making for weeks about the threat of the virus. Add to that, the setbacks of America’s federal government, which have also been part of the picture for weeks, concerning screening and a lack of cohesion and clarity on the part of the administration.

For the president and his allies, including several voices within America’s conservative media, China serves, almost automatically, as a pretext to deflect questions about the American response to the pandemic. Night after night, Fox News hammers away at China.

The question is rarely asked, however, why, even after mass testing has been shown to be a key route out of this crisis, the number of tests barely reaches 100,000 a day. This, in the world’s richest country, with a population of over 300 million.

Conversely, since Trump has made China his designated punching bag, the president’s critics have overwhelmingly remained silent on the subject of the Chinese government or, worse still, have come to its defense. According to these critics, his use of the terms “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese virus” is racist since they promote discrimination toward people of Asian origin, although the use of these terms didn’t seem particularly controversial before Trump himself started using them. No more than the use of the terms “Russian flu” (pandemic in 1889), “Spanish flu” (1918) or even … “Asian flu” (1956).

Beyond hollow debates on semantics, China’s damning track record on the coronavirus is, at this point, an irrefutable fact. The regime did at first, for months, attempt to stifle any information on the crisis; Chinese health professionals who sounded the alarm were either arrested or disappeared suddenly. It relayed false information to the World Health Organization, with murderous consequences, including that human-to-human transmission had not been demonstrated. The WHO relayed this information to the rest of the globe as recently as January.

At the same time, China released bogus statistics concerning the number of infections and deaths linked to the virus. That was the conclusion of a report by American intelligence agencies, a report that chronicles not errors made in good faith, but a deliberate effort to conceal facts and mislead the outside world. These figures were used to establish analyses and models for other countries, starting with the United States.

During this time, inside China, the regime used inhumane measures to “fight” the virus, going so far as welding shut the doors of its own citizens’ residences. Then, claiming to have “conquered” the virus, it sent representatives abroad to lecture countries dealing with high rates of infection, such as Italy, and to accuse Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom of having escalated the crisis. Today, Chinese authorities are again allowing the sale of animals such as bats in unsanitary markets. This, all the while closing cinemas across the board, in an implicit admission that, contrary to their claims, the crisis is not over.

Major American media outlets, including The New York Times, have been praising China for weeks. And, at least until Chinese figures were seriously called into question, reported them.

At the moment, criticizing America’s management of the crisis places you on one side of the debate and criticizing China’s places you on the other. Yet, the two aren’t, and don’t have to be, mutually exclusive. In fact, the propensity to challenge both countries is what should distinguish one form of government from the other.

That is oxygen itself in a democracy. And democracy, pandemic or not, must keep breathing.