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Opinion | China’s coronavirus soft-power push will fail if it cannot defend freedoms – at home and abroad

  • The backlash against the popular Wuhan Diary shows that the Chinese government struggles to allow people the freedom to express basic human emotions
  • On a global scale, how China deals with Africa’s debt could determine how it is viewed

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
A man flies a kite along the Yangtze River in Wuhan on April 8, after the Chinese authorities lifted a more than two-month prohibition on outbound travel. Photo: AFP

Most of Europe had fallen. Britain was barely holding its own. A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism. This was the situation in late 1941, before Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States to war in defence of freedom. In 2020, it is déjà vu.

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At this hour of crisis, there is no doubt what humanity is fighting against – a virus, a lower species that has no capacity for reasoning, and therefore knows no fear and bears no shame.

But what is humanity fighting for today? Yes, we are fighting to outlast a lower species. The destruction it has caused is only dwarfed by a pandemic that killed 50 million people a century ago.

Rest assured that humanity will survive this time. But it will be a meaningless victory if human ideals, beyond species survival, are not defended.

During the draconian lockdown of the Chinese city of Wuhan, Fang Fang, a writer and poet previously unknown to most Chinese, became one of the most visible Chinese writers in the world.
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