China haters' ignorant, false rhetoric should fool no one

It was kind of fun to find that popular social media platforms from X, Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, iFunny and Imgur all have an account titled "Victims of Chen Weihua Memorial Foundation".

While I don't know who hosts these accounts, their lists of victims are getting longer and contain mostly Western government officials, politicians and media personalities whom I have criticized on X, formerly Twitter, for their groundless anti-China rhetoric that is often hate speech.

Interestingly, when one professor at a Canadian university introduced me at an online seminar, she did not mention my real job title but said "Chen is known for blasting those anti-China Western politicians on Twitter".

Smear campaigns against China are not new, but they have revived in recent months after having subsided for a brief period.

For example, US Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas has very little knowledge of China and probably has never been to the country, but he posts absurd anti-China rhetoric on his X account almost daily.

In one tweet, Cotton claimed that China "has waged economic war on Arkansas farmers and manufacturers". This is despite the fact that the fluctuations in bilateral trade were a direct result of the US trade wars against China and the rest of the world.

Without any evidence, he accused the Code Pink, an anti-war grassroots nonprofit organization, of being funded by China simply because the organization ran a campaign saying "China is not our enemy".

As a reminder to Cotton, more than 200 members of the US scholarly, foreign policy, military and business communities signed an open letter to Donald Trump during his first presidency in July 2019, arguing that "China is not an enemy". All these people, including former US ambassador to China Stapleton Roy, former State Department top official in charge of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton and former US Trade Representative Carla Hills, know China far better than Cotton. Cotton, of course, would not dare accuse these people of being funded by the Chinese government.

Cotton drew fire back in early 2024 for his racist comments after he repeatedly questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean, for his citizenship and relationship with the Communist Party of China, questions that fully exposed his ignorance of China and Asia.

Like Cotton, Laura Ingraham, a TV presenter on Fox News, is another reckless China hater. In one tweet, she claimed that Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD is aiming for global domination with cars that can be monitored, started, stopped and redirected.

If that were an issue, shouldn't this also be a concern about EVs made by Tesla, General Motors, Volkswagen, BMW and Hyundai?

Unfortunately, Ingraham sided with Tokyo in the ongoing diplomatic spat with Beijing over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's provocative remarks relating to Taiwan. But by endorsing Takaichi, who has long held a revisionist view of World War II history, Ingraham has dissed the hundreds of thousands of brave US soldiers killed and wounded fighting Imperial Japan, including the Flying Tigers.

Ingraham and Cotton are just two of the many on the list of Victims of Chen Weihua Memorial Foundation after I refuted their baseless anti-China rhetoric on X.

It's puzzling why people like Cotton and Ingraham are so obsessed with defaming China. After all, China is not their area of expertise at all and their primary concern should be US domestic issues, such as the country's huge national debt, its dysfunctional politics and growing inequalities.

As for Cotton, he should simply stay laser focused on fixing problems in Arkansas, given that it is still the fourth poorest among 50 US states and eighth in the poverty rate.

Unlike Cotton and Ingraham, Chinese lawmakers and celebrity TV presenters never indulge in smear campaigns against the US. Fixing your own mess at home is a far better choice than wasting time and blindly pointing fingers at others. In Cotton and Ingraham's cases, blaming China for every woe in the US.

I won't stop refuting those China haters but I do hope there will be fewer of them given how false and absurd their rhetoric is.

The author is a China Daily columnist.

chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn