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Winton [email protected]
SHANGHAI Disneyland reopened its doors last Monday, becoming the fi rst Walt Disney Co. theme park in the world to resume operation after the COVID-19 closure.
The reopening of the park is an encouraging signal that China has embarked on a steady road to restor-ing normalcy in daily life, business activities and consumption boost-ing. According to media reports, facilities adjacent to the park, including Disney-town, a shopping, dining and entertainment complex, and some other theme parks in China have also been put into operation recently.
Domestic consumption plays a key role in China’s eco-nomic recovery and growth, especially as the country’s foreign trade is facing great downward pressure. However, consumption rebound is surely not an easy target for China to achieve. A recent online poll found that more than half of the Chinese families surveyed plan to increase their savings and reduce consumption even when the contagion is fully under control in China. Under these circumstances, if the gov-ernment does not take proactive policies to boost consumption, the general public will become more fi scally conservative, more cautious and even more aware of risks in the future as part of their response to the fi scal impact of the pandemic.
An important tool of con-sumption stimulation is to maintain a high
employment rate, especially retaining jobs for low-income earners. Low-income earners mainly include freelancers and those who work for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the country. Job retain-ing will not only ensure their incomes, but also increase their willingness to expend a certain amount of money in daily life.
To beef up consumption, many local governments across the country are issuing vouchers in targeted indus-tries. Vouchers are restricted to cover only a small portion of consumption expenditure such as online shopping and food deliveries. For example, with strict social distancing
measures in place to halt the spread of the pandemic, dine-in services at restaurants have greatly dwindled; however, the demand for food deliveries has recently soared. But sometimes consumers have to pay addi-tional fees much more than the value of vouchers’ face value to redeem them. Since cash is
essential for the elderly and low-income families, in addition to vouchers, the provision of cash to consumers should also be considered at the same time.
Domestic demands for home improvement and buying new cars had been thriving before such demands were sup-pressed by the pandemic in the past months. Local govern-ments should think of applying moderate stimulus measures to real estate, automobile, home appliances and other indus-tries by taking measures such as lowering down payments for fi rst-time homebuyers, giving subsidies for new energy vehi-cles and offering more license plates for gasoline-fueled cars in some big cities.
Taking advantage of emerg-ing technologies is a good way to stimulate offl ine purchases. Brick-and-mortar stores have revolutionized sales with the support of digital resources. Video sharing platforms such as Bilibili have helped rejuve-nate traditional business sec-tors. Through state-of-the-art technologies such as AR, VR, 5G and other live-streaming marketing tools, some local governments are also utilizing a series of online-to-offl ine marketing campaigns to help businesses promote their spe-cialties to successfully unleash pent-up consumer demand.
The travel industry is also an important element for boosting consumption. Requiring self-protection measures has made long-distance travel more dif-fi cult. However, short-distance tours within a province, at least touring around a city, are espe-cially welcomed by travelers because of less expenditure, greater control over cleanliness, the fl exibility of time schedule and privacy. Meanwhile, special offers from hotels, airlines and travel agencies will also stimu-late consumers’ wanderlust.
(The author is editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)
08 OPINION CONTACT US AT: 8351-9441, [email protected] May 18, 2020
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Caught in the middle. Luo Jie/www.newscartoon.com.cn
Consumption boost a matter
of strategy
Shen [email protected]
THERE is enormous evidence of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s persistent lying, fabrication and defamation, which evokes the era of McCar-thyism.
McCarthyism, according to Britannica, is a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate alle-gations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.
In 1950, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy declared in a speech that he had “here in my hand” a list of a large number of com-munists working in the State Department, lifting the curtain on McCarthyism. During that era McCarthy made a series of indiscriminate accusations against and investigations into various government depart-ments about suspected Commu-nist infi ltration and affi liations.
What Pompeo has said in recent months against China is reminiscent of that old era, as is evidenced by at least the following three aspects.
First, Pompeo’s persistent reference to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus.”
On Feb. 11 the WHO announced that the new coro-navirus would be known as COVID-19.
“Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing,” WHO Direc-tor-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva. “It also gives us a standard format to use for any future coronavirus outbreak.”
But to Pompeo what matters is whether the name serves his needs. So he not only insisted on using the stigmatizing word, but tried to write the term into an offi cial joint statement following the G7 ministers’ meeting, which was rejected by other foreign ministers, saying Pompeo’s proposal touched the red line.
In contrast, on April 7 Nature magazine published an editorial titled “Stop the coronavirus stigma now,” apologizing for
previous news reports that linked the coronavirus to Wuhan.
Second, Pompeo’s repeated accusation of China’s cover-up and disinformation campaign in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We strongly believe that the Chinese Communist Party did not report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization,” Pompeo said April 22.
And the truth is: China reported the outbreak to the WHO on Dec. 31 and shared the virus’ genome sequence Jan. 12. According to Reuters, on Jan. 3 Gao Fu, director of China’s CDC, called his U.S. counterpart Robert Redfi eld to discuss the outbreak. On Jan. 23, Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, underwent a lockdown, as a nationwide battle against the new virus started.
While China has bought the U.S. Government time to study the disease and avoid being dragged into a similar posi-tion, that time was squandered, which has resulted in economic, social and political quagmires.
Pompeo would not stop there. On May 3 he further attacked China for its mounting efforts to hide the extent of the virus spread, while stockpiling medi-cal supplies. China Daily chose the ancient word “abracadabra” to refer to this kind of “let-it-be-as-I-say” allegation.
Third, trying to sell his theory on the virus’s origin, alleging the virus was leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
On May 3, Pompeo alleged that there is “enormous evi-dence” to support the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab.
But to his dismay scientists around the world have shown that the virus originates from nature.
In a paper published in Nature Medicine on March
17, leading infectious disease experts at the Scripps Research Translational Institute said it was “improbable” that the COVID-19 had emerged from a lab, citing comparative analysis of genomic data.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a renowned U.S. infectious dis-ease expert, said in an interview with National Geographic that there is no scientifi c evidence to back the theory the coronavirus was made in a Chinese labora-tory.
Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO Health Emer-gencies Program, said at a WHO press briefi ng in Geneva that “we are assured that this virus is natural in origin, and we haven’t received any data or specifi c evidence from the U.S. Government related to the reported origin of the virus.”
On May 9, China published a lengthy article striking back at 24 preposterous
allegations and lies in the most sweeping and detailed rebuke of accusations over its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. The article gave a point-to-point rebuttal of the lies that were fabricated by U.S. politicians to “shift the blame to China for their inadequate response to COVID-19.”
The dirty blame game should be over, as the evidence has rolled out a clear picture that Pompeo and his like are the present-day McCarthy, who has left a legacy to play on ideas of secrecy, espionage, geopoliti-cal confrontation and threat by using lies and defamation to scare Americans into submis-sion.
McCarthy knew no bounds to his lying, and eventually the U.S. Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch exposed his lies in immortal words. “Until this moment, Senator… You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Have you no sense of decency, Mr. Pompeo?
(The author is the executive deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.)
McCarthyism evoked
