The spreading virus: blame it on the messenger
I have long suspected that “the multiculturalism and racial tolerance many Western countries profess to practise are no more than a facade”, said Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). So it is with a grim sense of satisfaction that I have read all the reports of harassment and prejudice against Asian-looking people around the world since the outbreak of the coronavirus, upsetting though they are. “We Chinese have practically been accused of bringing on Armageddon”, despite the fact that the virus has been linked to two dozen deaths outside mainland China. Some restaurants in Japan and Italy are refusing to serve Chinese people. In Britain and Canada, Asian people have been abused in the street. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a cartoon featuring the Chinese flag with viruses in place of the five stars, along with the headline “Yellow alert”.
The response of some Western countries and their media has been appalling, agreed Shen Yi in the Global Times (Beijing). Last week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) carried an opinion piece entitled “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia”. That’s a very offensive phrase in China because it was originally used in the mid-19th century when the country was “brutally bullied and humiliated by the Western imperial powers”. It’s equivalent to the Chinese media using the N-word to describe African Americans. The headline rightly prompted the expulsion of three WSJ reporters from China.
“If in doubt, blame everyone else and dress it up as an international conspiracy.” That appears to be the mantra for Beijing’s propagandists, said Gordon Watts in the Asia Times (Hong Kong). Whether it salvages the reputation of President Xi Jinping, who is under pressure over his administration’s handling of this crisis, remains to be seen. This is a clear case of blaming the messenger, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times – one that has only highlighted the regime’s key weakness, its fear of information. It was the same fear that led it to suppress early news of the virus. Banishing three WSJ reporters (who had nothing to do with the offending article) will compound the regime’s problems by removing a valuable source of accurate news. The Journal has done pioneering work exposing the effects of pollution in China, just as the likes of The New York Times and Reuters have done vital reporting on official graft, frauds and scams there. “Suppress this kind of reporting, and the first people who will suffer information blindness are China’s leaders.”