Chinese state media on Thursday rushed to blame “the rising anti-Asian [crime] wave in the U.S.” on the “toxic political influence” of former President Donald Trump, who had the temerity to point out that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China.
“U.S. media that have ramped up their propaganda machine to disparage China in recent years, and pinpoint China as the origin of the COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic that has ravaged the world should also shoulder fair share of responsibility for instigating hatred towards Asian groups,” China’s state-run Global Times hissed.
The Global Times struggled a bit to find an anti-Asian crime that could be plausibly pinned on someone who seems like they might have voted for Donald Trump, eventually settling on the case of “76-year-old Chinese-American woman Xie Xiaozhen,” who was “attacked in San Francisco by a white man in his 30s” on Wednesday.
“San Francisco police did not disclose a motive behind the attack and it was not clear whether the victim’s race had anything to do with the assault. They are working to determine if racial discrimination was a factor,” the Communist newspaper noted.
The Global Times found an anonymous Chinese-American living in New York City who said he has “been subjected to racist invectives from people here, thanks largely to Trump’s effort to deflect responsibility and blame China for his Covid-19 handling failure.”
As the Biden administration discovered to its consternation when Chinese diplomats ambushed it with Democrat Party rhetoric in Alaska on Thursday, Chinese state media are a keen student of left-wing criticism of America. The Global Times remembered that, for its own political reasons, Democrats in 2020 were happy to endorse the Chinese Communist diktat that all mentions of the true origin of the coronavirus pandemic constitute anti-Asian racism:
Trump had frequently railed against the “China virus” and “kung flu.” Yet his administration also instigated conflict among the world’s two largest economies — on trade, security and technology — and has propelled a growing number of Americans to regard China as the “greatest enemy” of the US, according to a Gallup poll this week.
After the attack, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, and Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pointed out that the former US administration and certain politicians’ words and deeds contributed to US domestic hostility against Asian Americans.
The Trump administration’s reckless behavior only ripped a hole in long- simmering racism and white supremacy, which was silenced by society’s mainstream “political correctness,” said Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University.
Turning to U.S. media, the Global Times slammed the New York Times right along with Fox News as a fountain of anti-Chinese bigotry and tore into an Asian American journalist for perpetuating anti-Asian racism by daring to notice that China loves to use allegations of anti-Asian racism in its propaganda:
One example would be Melissa Chan, an American journalist who works for Deutsche Welle, who came under the spotlight after she forwarded a Foreign Policy article “Anti-Asian Attacks Are Blighting the United States” on Twitter on Tuesday. She commented that “In addition to condemning anti-Asian attacks, these experts note that racism serves as propaganda gold for China which attempts ‘to portray itself as the head of the global Chinese diaspora.'”
Her tweets have generated criticism. One of the replies to her tweet tagged Deutsche Welle, urging it to think twice while hiring “propagandists” like Chan. “How much more blood do you need to see to stop extremists from spreading more hate?”
Another Global Times’ screed on Thursday dragged Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) into the dock because he “floated a conspiracy theory which suggested the virus was manufactured in a Chinese bioweapons facility in February last year,” and then blasted former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for saying there was “enormous” evidence to back up that theory.
The “bioweapons facility” theory is a reference to the American officials referencing the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), known to be studying coronaviruses at the time of the initial outbreak in 2019. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) – which has been eager to stay in Beijing’s good graces throughout the pandemic crisis – grudgingly admits the Chinese have refused to provide the data that could either prove or disprove the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Global Times dismissed every single documented allegation of CCP malfeasance as a false allegation concocted by anti-Chinese racists and political opportunists:
Some Western media outlets and scholars, as well as some anti-China think tanks, also played an ugly role in fanning hate against Asian Americans. They spread rumors and stigmatize China over a broad scope of issues, such as the origins of the pandemic, the CPC leadership, affairs related to the governance in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, portraying China as an “evil state” that poses an “existential threat” to the US. Adrian Zenz, a German rumormonger, talked the lie of the century that China is committing “genocide” in Xinjiang, but his lies have been welcomed by US media. His lies often hit the headlines. Josh Rogin, an American journalist and a political analyst for CNN, groundlessly blamed China’s COVID-19 “cover-up” for why people are still missing the origins of the pandemic.
Those accusations are groundless. But negatively influenced by those China-haters and their vile rhetoric against China, many Americans mistakenly believe China is the “culprit of the coronavirus” and a “threat,” unleashing a tsunami of hate, Sinophobia, xenophobia and scapegoating. As a result, the discrimination and violence against Asian Americans have seen a sharp rise.
The Global Times wrapped up by threatening to hold the Biden administration responsible for any further anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States unless it displays “the vision and courage to reverse the propaganda war against China.”
“Asian-Americans won’t be ‘silent lambs.’ Large ‘Asian Lives Matter’ protests may not be far away if hate crimes against them continue to occur,” the CCP paper predicted.
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