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Letters | Coronavirus outbreak: stop kicking China and Chinese communities when they’re down
- The slings and arrows of racism and anti-China sentiment are being aimed at Chinese-Australian businesses and the Chinese economy. But the desire to get ahead of China should not negate the obligation to help those suffering from Covid-19
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The headline of an opinion column by Brian Wong warns: “The West unleashes a new strain of racism in the name of coronavirus prevention” (February 23). Wong’s experience of being avoided by fellow passengers who feared he could be a coronavirus carrier, during a train trip from Oxford, is a twice-daily occurrence for me. On the train to and from the hospital where I work, those seated next to me, a doctor without symptoms and not in a mask, agitatedly give me a wide(r) berth.
Mike Seccombe’s timely revelation in The Saturday Paper about the race-based abandonment of Chinese-Australian business induced by Covid-19 contagion reinforces Brian Wong’s contention. The slings and arrows of racism at the person-to-person level are now being aimed at the whole Chinese-Australian community.
Anti-China sentiment is also evident in Henry Olsen’s call in The Washington Post to abandon a weakened China, at a time when the country has been floored by the coronavirus epidemic. Olsen’s anti-humanist proposal seeks to bring to a halt the engine of China’s prosperity to benefit the West.
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If we heed Olsen’s suggestion that we kick the life out of a weakened opponent, our moral barometer drops to rational but ugly opportunism. I’d remind Olsen that the race to get ahead of China should not negate the obligation to help the infected and the suffering in China. His exhortations have the whiff of rats abandoning a sinking ship, as do Australian consumers’ decisions not to patronise local Chinese businesses.
I’d urge cooperation to build channels of trust, communication and information-sharing to slow the rapid global spread of Covid-19. This clarion call is issued to the better angels of human nature, as China and the rest of the world face a borderless contagion.
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