A Rise in Anti-Chinese Rhetoric Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Wickenden, Washington, Lizza, Obama, Wnyc, News, Barack, Politics

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter Hessler has been in one of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world: starting in January, he was quarantined with his family in Chengdu, China, presaging what life would soon look like in America. Now, as restrictions lift in China, Hessler says that the experiences of the two countries have diverged. China’s government spent the lockdown setting up systems to check people’s temperatures on a wide scale and do contact tracing when someone becomes ill. But, although China’s response has been effective in containing the virus so far, one scientist told Hessler, “There is no long-term plan. There’s no country that has a long-term plan.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, perhaps the only common ground in the Presidential campaign is to attack China’s handling of the outbreak, which, candidates claim, cost lives around the world. The Trump Administration has implicated China in spreading the virus; Joe Biden’s campaign positions him as the tougher leader to take on China. Evan Osnos, who previously reported from Beijing and is now based in Washington, tells David Remnick that both sides count on the fact that China’s government ignores whatever American politicians say about it during campaign season.

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1:19.7	Peter Hessler reports from Chengdu where social distancing policies are being rolled back.
1:25.3	And Evan Osnose discusses how China's handling of the pandemic has become a
1:29.7	political issue in the United States.
1:34.9	A couple of months ago, I called up Peter Hessler, a staff writer who lives with his family in the
1:40.2	Chinese city of Chengdu. He was just before our country had started going into lockdown,
1:45.5	but Peter and his wife and his daughters had already been under strict quarantine since January,
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