 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 were being thrown by 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 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 and at worst in actively malicious after. My sense is that it's not really taking. It's very hard comparing just the visible indicators of this 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 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 prevalence of conspiracy theories that attribute the origin of COVID-19, for example, to a Chinese lab, that try to put all this in a sort of biosecurity framework that lends 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 the presence of people of Asian descent is ipso facto in and of itself, the inclusion of a necessarily foreign and dangerous element within one's own population, 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 that with the sort of apocal challenge to US credibility to at least sort of the ideological foundations of US hegemony in the world system that is presented by its catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, we're seeing the Trump administration in particular double down on the targeting of particular Chinese researchers and indeed academics of Chinese descent, even US citizens in the United States itself. I think there's a sort of a fairly broad coalition within the Asian American community generally, including liberals 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 prerogatives of the US state. It relies in many ways on the argument that these are, whether Chinese nationals or US citizens or Chinese descent, who are going to the point of applying for security clearances, who want to contribute to the economic and the in many cases the military betterment of the United States, who are making positive contributions to US economic strength and military supremacy. And the essential weakness of that argument is that it ultimately relies on the same sort of ideological coordinates that form the crux of the entire sinophobic campaign being waged at a bipartisan level, not just by Trump, but in many ways by the Democrats as well, who from the left to the right end of the ideological spectrum that they encompass have completely sort of bought into the narrative of China stealing jobs, of it posing a threat to US hegemony and who's presidential nominee now, Joe Biden, in many ways seems to be trying to outdo Trump in some aspects of his sinophobia, accusing him, for example, in a campaign ad of imposing the travel ban on China after the start of COVID-19 too late of allowing in tens of thousands of potential spreaders in a very, very racialized way. And this is why I think that there is absolutely a danger that if Biden wins in November, as it seems like he will, we will see a continuation of this kind of aggression on multiple fronts that you're referring to. But with a veneer, with a face that is much more palatable to the US and its allies, then Trump, who was absolutely willing, particularly for the sake of his base, to alienate traditional sub-imperial allies of the United States, Canada, the EU and so on. And so we're in a moment now where I think there have been many sort of like self-inflicted injuries on the US's credibility there that can very easily be papered over just by a change in administration. And without changing any of the fundamentals, which is that the US is still the hegemonic imperial power. It still occupies a dominant position, thanks in particular to its outsized military budget, which is around 10 times the size of China's. It's actual global reach where it is able essentially to surround China on sort of the Pacific side on southern border and in terms of the US presence in Central Asia on its western border as well with a string of US bases and forward deployments by naval and air forces as well. And where in addition to that sort of physical cordon in some ways around China, it's exerting the same kind of negative aggression on an economic level as well. And I think that the left globally and in particular here in the US, this is something that we as the Child Collective repeatedly return to. We need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this is not an inter-imperial rivalry between equals. It's a country that sort of looking at historical experience of other socialist states, like the USSR in particular, has adopted a long-term strategy of a clear-eyed view of what it takes to actually get to a position where it and other global south countries can actually pursue an independent strategy for their own development, for building their own productive forces. But we're still in very much a weak position compared to the imperial hegemony where it's in no position to mount a frontal challenge to US power. The actual dynamics are still very much unilateral sort of one-directional aggression being levied against it by a much stronger power that is seeking to maintain its position against manifold threats that are very much inherent to 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.