BEIJING-- When countries worldwide are racing to save lives threatened by COVID-19, some ultra-conservative U.S. politicians have been trying to politicize the pandemic for their own gains.
Of their many insidious China-smearing plots, one is to hype up the theory that China should be blamed for the global public health crisis, and should pay for related losses. There are three brazen motivations behind the demagoguery.
The first is to divert public criticism of the U.S. administration's slow and botched handling of the pandemic.
"Bashing China is always good politics in the U.S.," Susan Thornton, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, recently commented during a webcast organized by think tank the New America Foundation.
A recently leaked GOP memo also stressed the same strategy by advising Republican candidates to address the COVID-19 pandemic by aggressively attacking China.
The second is to seize the moral high ground, denying China's achievements in the pandemic fight and preventing Beijing from becoming more influential geopolitically.
Conservatives in the West tend to believe that Beijing is seeking to promote its governance model in other countries, and to elevate its international standing by actively providing assistance to other struggling countries in the pandemic.
Thus, they have gone to great lengths to portray China as the origin of the virus, and to accuse the country of causing the deterioration of the pandemic, offering extremists in some economically overwhelmed countries a handy excuse to shift blame.
The third is using the pandemic as an opportunity to boost the drive to contain China, such as lobbying U.S. allies to ban Chinese enterprises.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Fox Business Network earlier this month that countries should rethink their development of telecommunications infrastructure, including the adoption of China-based Huawei's 5G technology, given China's way in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the escalating China-smearing campaign, their compensation plot will never succeed. Beijing will not pay because of such fabricated reasons, while there was also no such precedent in previous pandemics.
The ravaging pandemic is the common enemy facing the human race. To defeat it, all nations need to work together in good faith. The U.S. conservatives' moves to cover up their own failures by shifting blame and public attention will only harm those still struggling in the pandemic, and render the global fight much harder.
