 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. There is a much larger context like you yourself said in which the trade and the tech assaults are taking place and there's also the context of at a global level the US trying to build some kind of a consensus. Now this is happening at multiple levels of course. We saw the most recent instances when there was the reference to China being responsible for the coronavirus itself and the disease and the kind of slurs that are being thrown by the president, the US president and the administration. We saw it in global forums where again there was an attempt to sort of conduct a probe into the disease itself. At a global level right now do you see that the US has been actually able to gather allies for this especially among its European allies or has this become more and more a losing cause? That's a really good question. I think that it's still kind of hard to say since we are very much in the middle of the pandemic now but in sort of material terms I think that the very much uncontrolled and disastrous in both human and economic terms spread of COVID-19 that we've seen in the US and the wide public awareness of this globally. The fact that the US is on almost every country's sort of no travel list at the moment is testament to the fact that on balance I think the pandemic has absolutely weakened the United States credibility. Certainly it's soft power apparatus and that the approach of at least the current administration has absolutely been to paper over and occlude and indeed like falsify and exacerbate the scale of the pandemic in the United States while trying with ever greater desperation to pin the blame on China to sort of rewrite the narrative of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to make China out to be at best a negligent at worst and actively malicious after. My sense is that it's not really taking. It's very hard comparing just the visible indicators of the situation now with regard to COVID-19 in China versus the United States to make the claim that China as the very first country hit by it which had to go through all the stages of identifying what was going on, of sequencing the virus, of establishing its human threatened disability of essentially coming up with some kind of protocol exactly for controlling its spread and doing so under the circumstances quite successfully. That I think has just become hard and hard to deny. And this whole thing must be seen as well in as you said the broader context of the US painting China for various reasons whether because of the fact of its increasing global reach, it's very foreign-ness in every sort of major respect to the traditional colonial or new colonial centers of power as this kind of global threat. And this is where you see as well the problems of conspiracy theories that attribute the origin of COVID-19 for example to like a Chinese lab that try to put all this in a sort of biosecurity framework that lend itself very much to anti-Asian xenophobia to targeting of people of Asian descent particularly Chinese both for sort of spontaneous acts of racial violence such as we've seen in the US and across the wider world and sort of on a more systematic level dovetailing with this narrative that you know like the presence of people of Asian descent is ipso facto in and of itself you know the inclusion of a necessarily foreign and dangerous element within one's own population right kind of treating the viral metaphor at the scale of the body politic of the entire country. That's what we're seeing operate on multiple levels and I think it's no accident right that you know with the sort of apocal challenge to US credibility to you know at least sort of the ideological foundations of US hegemony in the world system that is presented by its catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic you know we're seeing the Trump administration in particular you know double down on the targeting of you know particular Chinese researchers right and indeed sort of you know academics of Chinese descent even even US citizens right in the United States itself I think there there's a sort of a fairly broad coalition within within you know the Asian-American community generally you know including liberals against against the sort of naked targeting that we've seen under the Trump administration but I think a crucial weakness of that narrative is that it essentially takes as a given the the prerogatives of the US state it relies in many ways on the argument that you know these are you know whether Chinese nationals or you know US citizens or Chinese descent who are going to the point of applying for security clearances right who want to contribute to the economic and the in many cases the military betterment of the United States you know who are like a positive you know who are making positive contributions to you know US economic strength and military supremacy and the essential weakness of that argument you know is that it ultimately relies on the same sort of ideological coordinates that you know form the crux of of the entire you know sinophobic campaign being waged at a bipartisan level you know not just by Trump but you know in many ways by the Democrats as well who you know from from from the left to the right end of the ideological spectrum that they encompass have completely sort of bought in to to the narrative of you know of China like stealing jobs right of it you know posing a threat to to US hegemony and who's you know presidential nominee now Joe Biden in many ways seems to be trying to outdo Trump in some aspects of his sinophobia right accusing him for example in a campaign ad of imposing the travel ban on China after the start of COVID-19 too late right of allowing in you know tens of thousands of of potential like spreaders you know in a very very racialized way and this is why I think that there is you know absolutely a danger that you know if Biden wins in November as it seems like he will we will see a continuation of you know this kind of aggression on multiple fronts that that you're referring to but with a veneer right with with with with a face that is much more palatable to you know the the US and its allies right then then then Trump who who was absolutely willing you know particularly for the sake of his base to alienate you know traditional sub-imperial allies of the United States right Canada the EU and so on and so we're you know we're in a moment now where I think there have been many sort of like self-inflicted injuries on on the US's credibility there that that can very easily be papered over just by a change in administration and you know without changing any of the the fundamentals which is that you know the US is still the hegemonic imperial power you know it still occupies a dominant position thanks in particular to to you know it's outside the military budget which is around 10 times the size of China's right it's actual global reach you know where it you know is able essentially to surround China on sort of the Pacific side on southern border and in terms of its presence of the US presence in central Asia on its western border as well with with a string of of you know US bases and a forward deployments by by naval and air forces as well you know and where in addition to that sort of physical you know cordon in some ways around around China it's exerting you know the same kind of negative aggression on an economic level as well and and I think that you know the left globally and in particular in the here in the US right this is something that we as the child collective repeatedly return to uh you know we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this is not you know an internal rivalry between equals you know it is uh it's it's it's a country uh that you know sort of looking at historical experience of other socialist states right like the USSR in particular um you know has adopted a long-term strategy of of uh or you know a clear-eyed view of what it takes to actually uh get to a position where where it and other global south countries can actually you know pursue uh you know an independent strategy for for their own development right for building their own productive forces but we're still in very very you know very much a weak position compared to the imperial hegemon where it's in no position to mount a frontal challenge to to to us power and where um you know the uh uh like the actual dynamics are still very much um you know like unilateral uh sort of uh one directional aggression being levied against it by uh a much stronger power that is seeking to maintain its position against you know manifold threats that are that are very much uh uh you know inherent to to uh the global capitalist system as a whole thank you so much for talking to us thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching people's dispatch me