LettersWest or East, ignorance of the other is a failing common to all

Readers discuss the Western foreign policy focus on Russia and China, how the stigma of mental health issues affect medical workers, the rise in Covid-19 cases in Hong Kong, and the needs of the local poor

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Despite globalisation, an interest in international affairs is not the priority for most people. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:30am, 25 May 2023

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Alex Lo is not ruling out the Chinese being more ignorant than the West (“Demands for peace to stop people dying are far from outrageous”, May 17). That was also the case with us in Russia even during the Cold War confrontation between communism and capitalism.

In 1976, my sister rushed into her classroom shouting “Mao Zedong is dead!” and was shocked to be asked by the other girls, “Who is he?”

With market reforms now succeeding throughout the former Soviet Union, we are even less interested in international affairs. In 2011, a group of Moscow State University freshmen, including my 17-year-old son, were bundled into a hall to listen to someone speaking English, and only my boy recognised in his lecturer the then British prime minister David Cameron.

The famous physicist Ernest Rutherford is widely quoted as having said: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” The West’s foreign policy is likewise either moving its troops and navy to Russia and China or stamp collecting, i.e. neither here nor there for the rest of the world.

Mergen Mongush, Moscow