The blame game

Of the two big-business political parties in the United States, the Democrats for more than half a century have been seen as the more “liberal,” the Republicans as more reactionary. But when it comes to their attitude toward People’s China, they both drip hostility.

The Biden administration is extending what Trump did to whip up anti-China sentiment, not with vile hate speech but with an anti-China foreign policy. Biden has now imposed sanctions on 24 Chinese officials, accusing them of “coercion and aggression” in relation to Hong Kong, which Washington seems to regard as part of its own territory.

With all this anti-China activity going on at the highest level, is it any wonder that it would spill over into anti-Asian violence inside the U.S.? That’s what has happened in a confluence of anti-woman and anti-Asian attacks in recent weeks.

The group Stop AAPI Hate has tracked nearly 3,800 incidents of hate, discrimination or attacks on Asians in the U.S. from March 2020 through February of this year. That figure is now rising sharply. In Atlanta, Ga., six of the eight people killed in a recent shooting spree were Asian women working in massage parlors. 

China is being blamed for the pandemic, since the virus appears to have first jumped from animals to humans there. What is not being mentioned is that China has done an incredible job in defeating the virus and protecting its huge population.

The website Coronavirus Update reports that as of March 21, China had experienced 90,099 cases and 4,636 deaths, with a population just over 1.4 billion. By contrast, the U.S. had 30,521,529 cases and 555,300 deaths with an official 332,339,717 population. To put it another way, with a population of more than four times that of the U.S., China has experienced less than 1/100 or 1% of the U.S. deaths from COVID-19. 

This enormous difference says so much about these two competing systems — one based on capitalist private property, the other on social ownership of the means of production. In China, health care is a human right; here, it is a necessity we must continually fight and pay for. 

Now is the time, more than ever, to show solidarity with our Asian sisters, brothers and siblings who are under attack. They are the targets of not only hateful individuals, but of a system that values wealth and property over human lives. 

This profit system needs to create scapegoats for the misery it causes. Working-class solidarity is the only real antidote to the hatred spawned by this dog-eat-dog system.