Truman Peng

pengtruman@qq.com

I WOKE up yesterday morning to see the hashtag #FireFauci trending on Twitter, which really came as a shock to me, considering how Dr. Anthony Fauci is actually kind of like the American version of Dr. Zhong Nanshan in China. The U.S. is already losing its domestic battle against the COVID-19 outbreak, yet people are still grumbling about the stay-at-home order and believe 5G is the root cause of the pandemic.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a top medical expert on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force team, is now facing threats for his advice to keep the country as locked down as possible, according to CNN’s report last Friday. As he gradually becomes a household name in America due to the now-regular White House press briefings on COVID-19, Dr. Fauci also puts himself in danger of becoming the target of some ultra-right-wing groups, which claim liberty above all, including precautions against the virus.

While political conservatives are weary of Dr. Fauci’s aggressive plan to flatten the curve, and are obsessed with the potential backslide on freedom and human rights, liberal media organizations, however, are portraying him as an emerging hero, a truth teller that dares to contradict the president in public. You could literally see the divide in the country, which really just goes to show how broke and inefficient the system is when faced with a pandemic like this.

To make matters worse, some people in the U.S. are buying into various conspiracy theories, and some even believe that COVID-19 was somehow caused by 5G, advocating people to boycott the technology by destroying cell phone towers.

Jerry Kowal, an American vlogger who has become a sensation on the Chinese video-sharing platform, Bilibili, broke down what he believes to be the real reasons behind the U.S. Government’s failure to control the virus in his latest video.

He said, “unlike the sibling relationships among Chinese provinces, the states in the U.S. are more like neighbors in an apartment building, with the federal government being the property management.” He then compared the outbreak in New York City to a water leak incident in one of the residents’ home, and therefore, the other home owners who normally just mind their own business wouldn’t want to help, and neither would the property manager because he deemed it as a domestic affair.

In cases like this, the states and the federal government often engage in a constant argument over who, and to what extent, should be responsible for damage control. Some blame the president for not doing a good job preventing the virus from spreading all over the country, some raise questions about the unprecedented power granted to the government to take restrictive measures, others spread conspiracy theories to turn the spotlight away from their own mistakes.

The bicameral system and the separation of powers in the U.S. have long been hailed as a beacon of modern civilization and democracy, yet somehow a pandemic like this has easily shattered the theory of U.S. “system superiority.”

Maybe this could serve as a reminder to all of us that there is no such a thing as one universally applicable system for all countries, we all have our strengths and weaknesses when it comes to certain things, so why not just show some humility and respect towards our differences and instead focus on our shared interests and common goals when cooperating with one another? As for the case of fighting the COVID-19 outbreak, China does have some valuable lessons for the U.S. to learn from.

(The author is a Shenzhen Daily reporter.)