“There’s actually been a dramatic drop in customers [in San Francisco] going to Chinese restaurants, frequenting Chinese businesses,” Wong told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.
“There’s been as much as a 70% drop reported in some of the businesses in [San Francisco’s] Chinatown. So, it’s pretty dramatic, and we’ve seen the same kind of examples of racist comments and that sort of thing in San Francisco. We’ve seen reports from all over the world, especially the Western world, in London, New York, everywhere - we are hearing these reports from different sources, including the mainstream news,” Wong added.
Over the weekend, hundreds of Chinese Americans marched through San Francisco’s Chinatown carrying banners with the slogan: “Fight the Virus - Not the People!”
“We had a huge rally, just over 1,000 people, across the political spectrum. We had people in the Chinese community who were pro-China, anti-China. We had people who were for the Hong Kong protesters, against the Hong Kong protesters. We had just a complete, across the world political spectrum - Chinese Americans and Chinese from different parts of Asia all united together in a rally to protest racism against Chinese [people] because of the coronavirus,” Wong explained.
Racism toward Chinese people may be increasing as the number of infected people in the US rises, Wong said. There are currently 101 cases in the US and there have been six coronavirus-related deaths - all in Washington state.
“Racism is kind of part of the larger picture of what’s going on. There’s a huge campaign starting from the very top in Washington, DC, where they [US politicians] are saying that we are having this great power competition between China and the US, and China’s an existential threat … that feeds into the racism, and it does so in a very calculated way. China is not an existential threat … China has made it very clear: they are not interested in world domination. If you look at history, throughout history, China has always been there for the past 5,000 years. It’s always been a large, strong country, but it’s never gone on a world conquering spree like the West did during the colonial period,” Wong added.
“Their [China’s] philosophy was that for a country to reach out and try to conquer endless other countries is an overreach that eventually causes the country to become overextended and would lead inevitably to collapse in the space of 100 to 200 years, maybe 300 years. That’s a foresight that the Chinese had that’s basic to Chinese long-term thinking, and that’s why China has survived for 5,000 years while other world empires came and left - the Romans, the Greeks, the Byzantines, Alexander the Great,” Wong explained. “World conquest is just not a sustainable policy for any country, no matter how powerful they are.”
China’s response to the coronavirus has been swift and appropriate. Out of the 3,085 global deaths as a result of the disease, the majority of them - 2,803 - have been contained in China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the disease. In addition, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV announced Monday that Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei, has closed down one of the 16 hospitals that were built in record time to combat the virus. The hospital was closed after it discharged all of its patients.
“The rapid rising trend of virus cases in Wuhan has been controlled,” Mi Feng, a spokesperson for China’s National Health Commission, said Monday during a press briefing, Reuters reported. “Outbreaks in Hubei outside of Wuhan are curbed, and provinces outside of Hubei are showing a positive trend.”
Chinese experts have also announced that most of the country’s provinces will likely have control of the coronavirus outbreak by the end of April.
“China reacted very swiftly. They locked down the city - Wuhan - and other cities. They put up these hospitals, treated people very quickly. They knew that the disease has a certain cycle, and that cycle is coming to the end, and they’re on the verge of defeating it - that's what it looks like to me,” Wong explained.
By contrast, the first round of coronavirus testing kits in the US were made in a contaminated lab, resulting in a delay in testing across the nation.
In a recent statement to Axios, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn said that government agencies worked to resolve the manufacturing issue.
“Upon learning about the test issue from CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], FDA worked with CDC to determine that problems with certain test components were due to a manufacturing issue,” Hahn said.
“We’re [the US] much more vulnerable than China because of our system and because the government will not step in and do what’s necessary to fight the virus. So, we’re very much at risk, and they’re not even tracking it very accurately,” Wong added.
