The COVID-19 Pandemic and Sino-American Relations

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call to look at the world we live in and the global forces that are shaping it. Joerg Rieger, Distinguished Professor of Theology and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University, points out that the U.S. is ill-prepared to face the pandemic because we have not learned the lessons from the Great Recession in 2008 by addressing growing inequity at the hands of financial capitalism. Indeed, when the market and stock indexes reached record highs in mid-February 2020, it was difficult to forecast the market’s sharp decline and volatility because of a tiny virus that has brought the world to heel.

The pandemic shines a spotlight on issues of race and class in American society. In the early days of the pandemic, celebrities and sports stars could get tested for the virus, while ordinary people with symptoms could not. Though professionals and white-collar workers can stay at and work from home, service workers and other low-income earners cannot. Staying at home is a luxury for them. While the coronavirus does not discriminate along racial and ethnic lines, black and brown people are affected disproportionally because of poverty, ill-health, and a general lack of medical support in their communities. Additionally, Anti-Asian racial incidents are on the rise, exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s labeling the coronavirus the “China virus.”

The COVID-19 pandemic spread at a time of tense Sino-American relations amidst trade wars and political and military realignments in the Asian Pacific. This tension has made global solidarity in combating the novel coronavirus more difficult and challenging. In 2003, when SARS reared its ugly head, scientists in Canada, Hong Kong, and the U.S. collaborated to hunt down the virus. But the blame game between China and the U.S. during COVID-19 has created obstacles in scientific collaborations and the procurement of necessary medical supplies and resources. The pandemic shows how much the world is interconnected, from the production of face masks to travel and migration.

The U.S. has shown itself to be slow and ill-equipped to face the COVID-19 pandemic whereas China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, having learned from the SARS and other previous epidemics, were spurred to action swiftly. Trump’s botched response and the government’s lack of preparation have been deadly. As the U.S. became the epicenter for the virus, the rush to get face masks, ventilators, and other basic medical supplies highlighted the lack of government coordination. Rapid responses to the pandemic have been hindered by a market-driven health care system, the lack of universal health care, and no provision of paid sick leave for many workers.

Many commentators have compared the Chinese communist system to the American democratic system to assess which nation is better equipped to handle the pandemic. But there is no time for finger-pointing or the blame game. Christine Loh, a former undersecretary of the environment in Hong Kong, argues that it is simplistic either to attribute China’s success in controlling the virus to authoritarianism or to blame America’s failings on democracy. She argues that the divergent ways that China and the U.S. have responded to the crisis have much more to do with resources and capacities at hand, cultural and societal values, scientific understanding, political ideologies, and their decision-making structures.

The Chinese government did not warn its citizens or the world of a likely pandemic at the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. Had early warnings been made, many lives would have been saved. Similarly, President Trump played down the severity of the impact of the virus until March and does not want to follow the strategies used by Asian countries to contain and mitigate the crisis. He is halting U.S. funds to the World Health Organization for 60 to 90 days, accusing the WHO of being both “China-centric” and slow in responding to the crisis.

The détente between China and the U.S. has sabotaged global efforts to combat the coronavirus. Countries should not be forced to side with one of these superpowers in order to receive help and resources. When the pandemic is over, the world will need cooperation between the two largest economies in the world for concrete actions to bring about economic recovery. The lives and livelihoods of so many people are at stake.

We cannot forget the valuable lessons we are learning from facing this pandemic: namely, that we depend on each other for survival. Without solidarity with one another and with the least among us, we will fall short in responding to the looming crisis of climate change which will devastate human lives and our habitat on a scale that is hard to imagine. We must commit ourselves to building just and sustainable world systems for we can ill afford to go back to life as usual.

* First published as a blog on the Wendland-Cook Program of Religion and Justice Website at Vanderbilt University.

Vocation of a Theologian in the Trump Era

I was in Greece when Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. I was on a research trip and had just visited the Acropolis, the Agora, and the magnificent museums several days before. The fact that I was in Athens, the cradle of Western democracy, prompted me to think about the long struggle for democracy in human history and its relation to empire.

From left: Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow

Democracy is an unfinished project. On the one hand, people in many parts of the world have struggled for a democratic and participatory government that respects human freedom and dignity. Three young men in Hong Kong, where I was born, have recently been jailed for their involvement in the pro-democracy movement. But on the other hand, the spread and protection of democracy have been used by Western powers as justification for regime changes, removal of elected political leaders, and military coups. The lack of democracy has been used as a signifier of the inferiority of non-Western cultures and societies.

As a postcolonial theologian, who is deeply interested in the relationship between religion, power, and empire, the election of Trump and the chaos of the White House in the past several months demand serious theological reflection.

For some, especially in the Chinese media, the election of Trump shows the dysfunction of democracy and the unreliability of populism. But to see the election of Trump as an aberration is to miss the signs of our time. His slogan “Make America Great Again” appeals to the imperial impulse of many American people, especially working-class white men who perceive that they have lost much power. Trump had to appeal to his base and that was why he waffled in his condemnation of Neo-Nazis, KKK, and white nationalists after the rally in Charlottesville.

Trump enjoys the support of the Christian Right. Eighty percent of white evangelicals voted for him and Jerry Falwell, Jr. campaigned vigorously for him and spoke on his behalf after Charlottesville. Many of us might think the Christian Right misinterprets the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who was a political prisoner under the Roman Empire. But we cannot forget the complicity and lingering impact of Constantinian Christianity that has justified violence, colonialism, racism, war, and genocide in the past and the present.

Learning from Foucault, we need to ask, “Is there something in Christianity that is productive and contributive to the discourse of imperial power?” When we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” and when we sing “A mighty fortress is our God” (Martin Luther), “King of Kings….Lord of Lords” (Handel’s Messiah) and “King of Glory, King of Peace” (George Herbert), what kinds of images do we have for God? What if the Christian ethos inculcates a certain attitude toward authority and power?

Christianity has had a much more ambivalent relationship with empire than we might think. From its very beginning and throughout the centuries, Christianity borrowed from, adopted to, negotiated with, and at times subverting the language of empire and status quo. As a postcolonial theologian, I see it as my vocation to study, research, and teach this complex history so that we can learn from the past, understand the present, and work collaboratively for a better future.

We need public theologians in our time, when many people, secular and religious, are looking for ways to understand what is going on and how to transform the status quo. Religious leaders and theologians such as Wu Yaozong, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, Desmond Tutu, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Ivone Gebara are shining examples who have spoken prophetically to the church and society.

Following their examples, we need to understand religion and power realignment in the Trump era. As a theologian of Chinese descent, I am keenly aware that the relationship between China and the United States will shape the future of the twenty-first century. We need a new political theology that goes beyond its Eurocentric roots to address the rise of Asia Pacific, especially the emergence of China as a global power.

To develop this new political theology, we have to learn more about postcolonialism and international politics. Books such as Sanjay Seth’s Postcolonial Theory and International Relations (2013), Herfried Münkler’s, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (2007); Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road (2013) and the anthology Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order (2015), coedited by Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan are invaluable resources. Within the field of theology and philosophy, I continue to learn much from Enrique Dussel, especially from his acclaimed volume Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History (2011).

Colonialism and imperial expansion cannot be maintained by rational justification alone without the support of structures of feelings (Raymond Williams). Franz Fanon writes, the black man desires and wants what the white man wants. There has been an “affective turn” in the humanities and social studies, which focuses on the states of mind and body that are related to feelings and emotions. In Coming to Our Senses, Dierdra Reber investigates the roles of affect in ordering the neo-liberal global consumerist culture. The introduction of affect theory to the study of theology will open doors to understanding suffering, loss, reconciliation, healing, and other subjects. Moreover, it will help decipher habits of the hearts when people hold so steadfastly and sometimes nostalgically to theological “truths,” ecclesial practices, and devotional patterns of a bygone era.

This new political theology must speak about racial justice as well as racial reconciliation and healing. How can the US as a nation come to grips with the legacies of genocide, dispossession, and slavery? While racial and ethnic minorities may proudly declare that there will be no majority race in 2040, how can we build the infrastructures and movements necessary to help people of all races and ethnicities, genders and sexualities, to transition into this looming reality? What roles can the churches play in bringing people into fruitful dialogue across differences? What kind of theological education will equip future leaders of churches and faith communities to lead people in this transition?

The white nationalist rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville were sparked by the vote to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. While we condemn white hegemony, hatred, anti-Semitism, and racism, a deeper question is how to help people face history, heal from past wounds, and reconcile with a sense of loss of identity. Maya Angelou says, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” The test for us today is to dialogue across political ideologies and spectrum so that history can be interrogated, discussed, and reconstructed together. The statues and war monuments of the Civil War are divisive because the past wounds continue to haunt our present. If Christianity has contributed to a racial discourse that denigrated African Americans and other races in the past, theologians and religious leaders must summon theological and spiritual resources for racial justice and healing today.

The vocation of an intellectual and a theologian is to speak truth to power. We need that courage more than ever in Trump's era of alt-truth and alt-facts.