Crowdfunding fills gaps for virus-displaced workers

AFP/File / SETH HERALDAs unemployment rises due to virus-related closings, more people are turning to crowdfunding efforts to make ends meet

The coronavirus pandemic threatened game over for Endgame restaurant near Seattle.

It shared its plight online at crowd support platform GoFundMe, where donations eclipsed the restaurant's $5,500 goal to stay in business.

"All donations will go to expenses until we are able to resume normal operations," Michael Lamere and Austin Sines said in an online plea for help.

Musicians, podcasters, writers, strippers and others denied income by the coronavirus pandemic are turning to the power of online community spirit to make ends meet.

The health crisis and its massive economic impact have stirred increased interest in crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and membership platforms such as Patreon.

"The generosity we are seeing is rather incredible and unprecedented," said GoFundMe chief executive Tim Cadogan.

The crowdfunding platform, which allows anyone to launch a campaign, has seen more than two million individual donations to coronavirus-related efforts, amounting to about $120 million, according to Cadogan.

COVID-19 related GoFundMe campaigns reflect evolving needs, from raising money to get supplies for health care professionals to supporting local restaurants barred from seating diners to helping the jobless pay rent.

A Coronavirus Rent Relief Fund launched about two weeks ago is raising money to help those left jobless avoid eviction.

"Coronavirus (COVID19) has created one of the most difficult moments in world history, a moment we will surely look back on," wrote the New York fund organizer, who raised some $220,000.

A journalists' furlough fund raised some $46,000 and a Miami campaign has collected $11,000 for struggling restaurant workers.

The platform has some more modest campaigns including a $1,000 effort for dancers -- the Burlesque Community COVID-19 Response Fund in Los Angeles.

"I felt it imperative to help my community of dancers who are already underpaid and have effectively lost any way to make income," said organizer Veronica Voss, who boasts being Miss Hollywood Burlesque 2019.

Many campaigns however fall short, with demands rising and an estimated 17 million newly unemployed in the United States.

In one example, a campaign for the Just Oxtails Soul Food Restaurant in Texas raised just $1,700 toward a goal of $150,000.

- Desire to act -

GETTY IMAGES/AFP/File / Misha FriedmanLuba Drozd makes protective shields for health workers in her apartment on her 3D printers, having raised money for supplies in a GoFundMe campaign

Large operations are also turning to GoFundMe, which relies on "tips" from donors to sustain its business and collects fees that go for credit card processing.

Frontline Responders Fund started by logistics giant Flexport and other companies is among top fundraisers at GoFundMe, having collected more than $6 million to get masks, gowns, gloves and other critical supplies to health care workers fighting the pandemic.

An Americas Food Fund at GoFundMe launched by Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs and Apple, along with the Ford Foundation, has raised more than $13 million.

- Going behind the scenes -

AFP/File / VALERIE MACONThe pandemic has forced the closing of thousands of businesses including Universal Studios Hollywood, adding to the jobless rolls

Meanwhile, some 50,000 new artists launched on Patreon last month.

The appeal to patrons goes beyond performers showing off their crafts to paying for inside glimpses their lives, particularly at this stressful time, said Patreon chief financial officer Carlos Cabrera, himself a musician.

"Orchestras are getting hit so hard; for them it is a double-whammy," he said.

"They depend on in-person events, and the majority of their demographic are older folks who are at high risk."

Cabrera said that he feared financial hardships caused by the pandemic would cause Patreon pledges to plummet but the opposite has happened.

"Way more patrons are creating pledges and raising pledges," Cabrera told AFP.

More than 150,000 artists use Patreon to generate income by offering exclusive content to four million patrons in over 180 countries, according to the San Francisco-based platform established seven years ago.

AFP/File / CHARLY TRIBALLEAUMusicians unable to perform during the pandemic have been hit hard, and many have turned to online platforms for support

The biggest category at Patreon is YouTube video creators, with podcasts in fast-growing second place ahead of illustrators such as artists who draw web comics and authors who release novels by the chapter.

Cabrera is seeing top music talent from around the world who, unable to tour, are recording at home and building Patreon pages to make money.

"I've seen artists go out for a walk in nature and hang out virtually with their fans," Cabrera said.

Jane Goodall says 'disrespect for animals' caused pandemic

AFP/File / Fabrice COFFRINI

World-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall pleaded  

for humanity to learn from past mistakes

World-renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall says the coronavirus pandemic was caused by humanity's disregard for nature and disrespect for animals.
Goodall, who is best known for trail-blazing research in Africa that revealed the true nature of chimpanzees, pleaded for the world to learn from past mistakes to prevent future disasters.

During a conference call ahead of the release of the new National Geographic documentary "Jane Goodall: The Hope", the 86-year-old also said everyone can make a difference.


- How do you view this pandemic? -

Goodall: It is our disregard for nature and our disrespect of the animals we should share the planet with that has caused this pandemic, that was predicted long ago.

Because as we destroy, let's say the forest, the different species of animals in the forest are forced into a proximity and therefore diseases are being passed from one animal to another, and that second animal is then most likely to infect humans as it is forced into closer contact with humans.

It's also the animals who are hunted for food, sold in markets in Africa or in the meat market for wild animals in Asia, especially China, and our intensive farms where we cruelly crowd together billions of animals around the world. These are the conditions that create an opportunity for the viruses to jump from animals across the species barrier to humans.


- What can we do about these animal markets? -

It's really good that China closed down the live wild animal markets, in a temporary ban which we hope will be made permanent, and other Asian countries will follow suit.

But in Africa it will be very difficult to stop the selling of bush meat because so many people rely on that for their livelihoods.

It will need a lot of careful thought on how it should be done, you can't just stop somebody doing something when they have absolutely no money to support themselves or their families, but at least this pandemic should have taught us the kind of things to do to prevent another one.


- What can we hope for? -

We have to realise we are part of the natural world, we depend on it, and as we destroy it we are actually stealing the future from our children.

Hopefully, because of this unprecedented response, the lockdowns that are going on around the world, more people will wake up and eventually they can start thinking about ways they can live their lives differently.

Everyone can make an impact every single day.

If you think about the consequences of the little choices you make: what you eat, where it came from, did it cause cruelty to animals, is it made from intensive farming -- which mostly it is -- is it cheap because of child slave labour, did it harm the environment in its production, where did it come from, how many miles did it travel, did you think that perhaps you could walk and not take your car.

(Also consider) ways that you could perhaps help alleviate poverty because when people are poor they can't make these ethical choices. They just have to do whatever they can to survive -- they can't question what they buy, they must buy the cheapest, and they are going to cut down the last tree because they are desperate to find land on which they can grow more food.

So what we can do in our individual lives does depend a little bit on who we are, but we all can make a difference, everybody can.

11APR2020

HK$310 million Japanese bank swindle biggest of year so far for Hong Kong police’s online crime specialists

Anti-deception unit manages to intercept about 80 per cent of the involved funds before scammers can transfer it out of city bank accounts

While the number of reported email cases for January and February does not vary greatly from 2019, the amounts involved have more than doubled

Clifford Lo Published: 11 Apr, 2020

Officers from Hong Kong’s Anti-Deception Coordination Centre managed to intercept HK$250 million of the funds stolen from a Japanese bank before it was transferred out of the city. Photo: Shutterstock

The US branch of a Japanese bank has been tricked into transferring HK$310 million (US$40 million) into five Hong Kong bank accounts – one of the city’s biggest email scams of the year.

A force insider said officers from the Anti-Deception Coordination Centre managed to intercept nearly HK$240 million of the money before it was transferred out of the scammer-controlled bank accounts, but the international fraudsters still managed to bag about HK$70 million.

The sting was one of 139 reported cases of commercial email fraud in the first two months of the year. The cases involved nearly HK$700 million, more than double the HK$288 million from January and February 2019’s 113 cases.

Hong Kong police’s anti-deception team halted more than HK$4.45 billion payments tied to online or phone scams between July 2017 and December 2019. Photo: Shutterstock

The Japanese case came to light in January, when the bank made a report to Hong Kong police.

Scammers impersonating one of the bank’s customers had made the money transfer requests, according to one police source.

“Bank staff realised it was a scam when they contacted the genuine client,” the source said. The anti-fraud officers were then tasked with tracking down the money.

Email scammers typically gain access to a company’s sensitive information by embedding a virus inside an email, such as a job application with a résumé attached. Opening the document allows the virus to infect a company’s servers, giving crooks access to information about the business, its top executives and clients.

Scammers then use the information to impersonate their victims and order money transfers.


About 12 months ago, fraudsters impersonating a business partner of a Uruguayan investment firm tricked the company into transferring US$18 million into two bank accounts in Hong Kong.

The firm’s staff later realised it was a scam and reported it to police through a lawyer. City officers were able to freeze the money in the bank accounts before it was siphoned off.

Including the HK$250 million from the year’s largest case, officers from the Anti-Deception Coordination Centre have frozen HK$920 million tied to different deception cases through April 8.

The squad, set up in 2017 to pool police resources for tackling online scams, halted 1,174 payments worth more than HK$4.45 billion to international fraudsters between July 2017 and December 2019. About two-thirds of that amount was intercepted in 2019.

The victims, many of whom lived outside Hong Kong, were defrauded via a range of deceptions, including online romance scams, bogus investment schemes and phone scams. Local police became involved because the money was transferred to bank accounts in the city.

In Hong Kong, the number of deception cases skyrocketed 99 per cent to 2,475 in the first two months of 2020, up from 1,241 in the same period a year ago, according to police.

Obtaining property by deception carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail, while those convicted of money laundering face 14 years behind bars and a HK$5 million fine.

In global war on coronavirus, civil rights become collateral damage

Experts agree that extraordinary measures are needed to tackle the pandemic, but some fear the erosion of hard-won rights will not be reversed afterwards

There is a tendency for among governments to keep extraordinary powers on their books long after the threat they were introduced to tackle has passed

Reuters Published: 11 Apr, 2020

In Armenia, journalists must by law include information from the government in their stories about Covid-19. In the Philippines, the president has told security forces that if anyone violates the lockdown they should “shoot them dead”. In Hungary, the prime minister can rule by decree indefinitely.

Across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas, governments have introduced states of emergency to combat the spread of the new coronavirus, imposing some of the most stringent restrictions on civil liberties since the attacks of September 11, 2001, lawyers and human rights campaigners said.

While such experts agree extraordinary measures are needed to tackle the deadliest pandemic in a century, some are worried about an erosion of core rights, and the risk that sweeping measures will not be rolled back afterwards.

“In many ways, the virus risks replicating the reaction to September 11,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, referring to the welter of security and surveillance legislation imposed around the world after the al-Qaeda attacks on the
United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Smoke billows above New York City after terrorist attack on the 

World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. Photo: AFP

“People were fearful and asked governments to protect them. Many governments took advantage of that to undermine rights in ways that far outlasted the terrorist threat,” he said.

Roth was speaking about legislation in countries including the United States, Britain and
EU states which increased collection of visa and immigrant data and counterterrorism powers.

Some measures imposed in response to a crisis can become normalised, such as longer security queues at airports as a trade-off for feeling safer flying. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, similar trade-offs may become widely acceptable around issues such as surveillance, according to some political and social commentators.

South Korea’s use of mobile phone and other data to track potential carriers of the virus and impose quarantines has been a successful strategy and is a model that could be replicated around the world to guard against pandemics, they say.

Medical staff wearing protective suits take samples from a person 

with suspected coronavirus symptoms in South Korea. Photo: AP

Political consultant Bruno Macaes, a former Portuguese minister, said people’s obsession with privacy had made it harder to combat threats like pandemics, when technology to trace the virus could help.

“I am more and more convinced the greatest battle of our time is against the ‘religion of privacy’. It literally could get us all killed,” he added.

As the virus has spread from China across the world, with more than 1.5 million people infected and 100,000 dead, governments have passed laws and issued executive orders.

The first priority of the measures is to protect public health and limit the spread of the disease.


“It’s quite an extraordinary crisis, and I don’t really have trouble with a government doing sensible if extraordinary things to protect people,” said Clive Stafford-Smith, a leading civil rights lawyer.

The US-headquartered International Centre for Not-For-Profit Law has set up a database to track legislation and how it impinges on civic freedoms and human rights.

By its count, 68 countries have so far made emergency declarations, while nine have introduced measures that affect expression, 11 have ratcheted up surveillance and a total of 72 have imposed restrictions on assembly.

In Hungary for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose party dominates parliament, has been granted the right to rule by decree to fight the epidemic, with no time-limit on those powers and the ability to jail people for up to five years if they spread false information or hinder efforts to quell the virus.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been given the power to

 rule by decree. Photo: DPA

The Hungarian government said the law empowered it to adopt only measures for “preventing, controlling and eliminating” the coronavirus. Spokesman Zolan Kovacs said nobody knew how long the pandemic would persist, but that parliament could revoke the extra powers.

In Cambodia, meanwhile, an emergency law has been drafted to give additional powers to Hun Sen, who has been in office for 35 years and has been condemned by Western countries for a crackdown on opponents, civil rights groups and the media. The law is for three months and can be extended if needed.

The Cambodian government did not respond to a request for comment. Hun Sen defended the law at a news conference this week, saying it was only required so that he could declare a state of emergency, if needed, to stop the virus and saving the economy.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former coup leader who kept power after a disputed election last year, has invoked emergency powers that allow him to return to governing by decree. The powers run to the end of the month, but also can be extended.


“The government is only using emergency power where it is necessary to contain the spread of the coronavirus,” said Thai government spokeswoman Narumon Pinyosinwat.

In the Philippines, the head of police said President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to shoot lockdown violators was a sign of his seriousness rather than indicating people would be shot.

Neither the presidential spokesman nor the cabinet secretary responded to a request for comment.

For Roth and other human rights advocates, the dangers are not only to fundamental freedoms but to public health. They say restrictions on the media could limit the dissemination of information helpful in curbing the virus’s spread, for instance.

India’s Narendra Modi has been accused of trying

 to muzzle the country’s press. Photo: AFP

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, criticised in the media for a lack of preparedness including inadequate protective gear for health workers, has been accused by opponents of trying to muzzle the press by demanding that it get government clearance before publishing coronavirus news, a request rejected by India’s Supreme Court.

The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment, while the Armenian government said it had no immediate comment. Both have said they want to prevent the spread of misinformation, which could hamper efforts to control the outbreak.

Carl Dolan, head of advocacy at the Open Society European Policy Institute, warned about the tendency for some governments to keep extraordinary powers on their books long after the threat they were introduced to tackle has passed.

Dolan proposed a mandatory review of such measures at least every six months, warning otherwise of a risk of “a gradual slide into authoritarianism”.

‘An epidemic of hate’: Asian-American starts anti-racism campaign to counter abuse over coronavirus

TV producer Valerie Chow launched her Be Cool 2 Asians campaign to push back against fellow Americans who blame Asians for the coronavirus pandemic

While planning the video campaign highlighting Asian-Americans’ place in US society and on Covid-19 front lines, she was attacked and told ‘go back to China’

Kavita Daswani Published: 11 Apr, 2020

US TV producer Valerie Chow is behind the Be Cool 2 Asians campaign, designed to eradicate harmful notions that Asians should be blamed for the coronavirus pandemic. While planning the campaign she was attacked walking her dog on a street in Los Angeles and told “go back to China”.

Valerie Chow, a television producer in Los Angeles, had just started planning a series of videos to address Covid-19-related anti-Asian sentiment in the United States when she experienced it first-hand.

“I was out walking my dog when a homeless man started yelling at me, ‘nasty b****, go back to China’, throwing punches and trying to kick my dog,” recalls Chow, who has produced unscripted shows for Netflix and the Food Network.

“I ran back towards my building but he chased me, still screaming. It was like that cliché in every murder scene where the victim’s hand is trembling, and she drops her keys. That was me in that moment.”

The incident further galvanised Chow, who subsequently launched her
Be Cool 2 Asians campaign, designed to eradicate harmful notions that Asians should be blamed for the coronavirus pandemic.

Members of the Asian American Commission hold a press conference on the steps of the Massachusetts State House to condemn racism towards the Asian-American community because of the coronavirus on March 12 in Boston. Photo: Getty Images

“I had been hearing anecdotally that there was a rise in anti-Asian sentiment,” says Chow. “It started with [US President Donald] Trump calling it the China virus, and escalated from there. It’s now an epidemic of hate.”

The campaign currently consists of a video showing that many of those on the front lines of the pandemic are Asian-Americans; according to American business magazine Forbes, 17 per cent of doctors and 10 per cent of nurses in the US are Asian.

The video pulls together footage of health care professionals, firefighters, police officers and grocery store workers introducing themselves, interspersed with disturbing ripped-from-the-headlines posts, such as a doctor in the state of Indiana being refused service because of his race, and a news story stating that 100 racist attacks against Asians are reported every day in the US – with women three times more likely to be victimised.

“The fact that I personally had this experience while living in a culturally diverse bubble in LA really hit home,” says Chow.

“I saw how increasingly dangerous it is for the 21 million Asian-Americans in the US.”

Actress Kelly Hu will appear in an upcoming Be Cool 2 Asians video. Photo: Getty Images

In mid-March, a trio of organisations – the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and San Francisco State University’s Asian-American Studies Department – formed the Stop AAPI Hate reporting centre to support Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the country.

In the space of three weeks it received 1,135 reports of verbal harassment, shunning and physical assault, according to a news release. The incidents are taking place largely in grocery stores, pharmacies and department stores – essentially the only venues people are allowed in while the nation is largely in lockdown mode.

The reporting centre said that women are harassed at twice the rate of men.

“The flood of incidents related to anti-Asian hate – over 1,100 and counting – reflects the hostile environment that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders face during this pandemic,” Dr Russell Jeung, chair and professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, said in a statement.

My social media is flooded daily with stories from Asians telling me about all varieties of conflict. I’m not sure that the 100 a day that are being reported across the country is an accurate numberValerie Chow

“The data helps us respond to specific community needs and make targeted policy recommendations. These include providing mental health resources to bullied youth and ensuring that stores provide safe access for AAPIs to their goods and services.”

The assaults are felt across Asian communities – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai – and mirrors what South Asian and Middle Eastern communities in the US experienced after the September 11 attacks.

Chow says she intends for her Be Cool 2 Asians campaign to hit at a grass-roots level, helping to educate the ignorant.

“Historically, Asians have always been seen as foreigners, and not as Americans,” she says. “There have been Chinese people in America for 400 years. Part of the campaign is to dispel the belief that Asians are foreigners.”

She has teamed up with entertainment colleagues, such as actresses Kelly Hu and Elisabeth Rohm, to front additional videos in the coming weeks.

Actress Elisabeth Rohm will front an upcoming video 

for the Be Cool 2 Asians campaign. Photo: Getty Images
Chow has also partnered with LA chef Michael Hung, who is providing free groceries and meals to local families and children from low-income areas who rely on school lunches, and is helping to mobilise a programme offering free mental health services to health care workers of any ethnicity who are feeling especially stressed right now.

Chow believes the 1,000-plus reports received by the Stop AAPI Hate centre are not representative of actual numbers.

“My social media is flooded daily with stories from Asians telling me about all varieties of conflict,” she says.

“I’m not sure that the 100 a day that are being reported across the country is an accurate number. Asians tend to be more reticent. They find these incidents embarrassing and painful to talk about.

“So if we are hearing it’s 100 a day, the number of unreported cases is astronomically higher.”



Kavita Daswani was born and brought up in Hong Kong and was the fashion editor of the South China Morning Post before relocating to Los Angeles. She continues to contribute features to the publication, and also writes for the Los Angeles Times, The Real Deal, Prestige, Hashtag Legend and Crave magazines. She has also published eight novels.

Coronavirus: how Asian-Americans are fighting back against race hate in Covid-19 era

Asian-Americans are using social media to organise and fight back against racially motivated attacks

Critics say Donald Trump made things worse by calling Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’


Associated Press Published: 5 Apr, 2020





Kyle Navarro was recently unlocking his bicycle when an older

 white man called him a racial slur and spat at him. Photo: AP

Kyle Navarro was kneeling down to unlock his bicycle when he noticed an older white man staring at him. Navarro, who is Filipino, tried to ignore him, but that soon became impossible.

The man walked by, looked back and called Navarro a racial slur. He “spat in my direction, and kept walking,” Navarro said.

Navarro, a school nurse in San Francisco, already had anxiety about racism related to the coronavirus, which emerged in China and has Asian people facing unfounded blame and attacks as it’s spread worldwide. Now, he was outraged

“My first instinct was to yell back at him in anger. But, after taking a breath, I realised that would have put me in danger,” Navarro said.

Instead, he took to Twitter last week to turn the ugly moment into an opportunity for a conversation about racism, generating thousands of sympathetic comments.

Asian-Americans are using social media to organise and fight back against racially motivated attacks during the pandemic, which the FBI predicts will increase as infections grow. A string of racist run-ins in the last two weeks has given rise to hashtags – #WashTheHate, #RacismIsAVirus, #IAmNotCOVID19 – and online forums to report incidents. Critics say President Donald Trump made things worse by calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus”.
For a group with a history of being scapegoated – from Japanese Americans detained during World War II to a Chinese-American man killed by autoworkers angry about Japanese competition in the ‘80s – there’s urgency to drown out both bigotry and apathy.

To that end, the California-based groups Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asia-Pacific Planning and Policy Council set up a hate reporting centre last month. New York’s attorney general also launched a hotline.

“We kind of just knew from history this was going to snowball,” said Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “With the rising stress and anxiety, we knew we’d see a rise in hate incidents.”

Coronavirus prompts surge of hate speech toward Chinese on Twitter
28 Mar 2020


The centre has fielded more than 1,000 reports from across the US, ranging from people spitting to throwing bottles from cars. An FBI report distributed to local law enforcement predicts the attacks will surge and pointed to the stabbing of an Asian-American man and his two children at a Sam’s Club in Texas last month, ABC News reported. According to the report, the 19-year-old suspect said he thought they were “infecting people”. The victims have recovered.

Amid the explosive climate, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang drew backlash for urging fellow Asian-Americans to display more “American-ness”. In a Washington Post editorial Wednesday, he called on them to avoid confrontation and do acts of goodwill like volunteering and helping neighbours.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang drew 

backlash for his comments. File photo: AP

“Being ‘the good Asian’ has not fared well for Asian Americans,” Choi said. “We don’t have to prove our worth and that we belong, that we’re exceptional. And we certainly don’t have to believe that this is something that we should ignore.”

Yang’s spokesman declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Trump has walked back on calling Covid-19 the Chinese virus, saying at a media briefing and on Twitter last week that Asian-Americans should not be blamed “in any way, shape or form”.

Democrats in the US Senate and House worry the damage has been done and have introduced resolutions to condemn anti-Asian racism.

“His followers continue to double-down on that term,” said US congresswoman Judy Chu of California, chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Some of the reports received by the advocacy groups describe harassment that appears to parrot Trump, Choi said.

A White House spokesman declined to comment and referred to Trump’s remarks at the March 23 briefing.

The president’s words also drew some Asian-Americans in entertainment and fashion to the #WashTheHate social media campaign last month. Celia Au, star of the Netflix show Wu Assassins, and others posted videos showing them washing their hands and talking about the effect of racism.

“It comes from the top down at the end of the day,” Au said. “Our top leader is not doing the job, so it’s time for us to step up.”

People turning against Asian-Americans in an uncertain time and sputtering economy echoes the climate in 1982, when Vincent Chin was killed in Detroit as laid-off autoworkers blamed a recession on Japanese competition.

“At that time, I knew I had to watch out and be careful – who I was around, how they looked at me,” said Helen Zia, a Chinese-American author and journalist from Oakland, California, who lived in Detroit at the time. “I think we’re in that stage now.”

Two white autoworkers beat Chin to death with a bat outside a strip club during his stag night simply because they thought he was Japanese. The 27-year-old’s attackers were convicted of manslaughter and got just three years of probation.

Zia said she and others contacted advocacy groups, churches and Chinese-language media about protesting the sentence. Relying only on mail and telephones, they found allies in the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League and launched demonstrations nationwide.

“It was a watershed moment,” Zia said. “We were drowning, and we had to organise to change what we saw going on around us.”

Thanks to social media, younger generations of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders are speaking up during what could be another seminal moment. Choi hopes they will rally non-Asians to see the wave of racist attacks in the Covid-19 era as their issue, too. Groups like the NAACP and Council on American-Islamic Relations have condemned anti-Asian rhetoric.

With attacks escalating, Zia can’t help but fear the pandemic could result in another tragedy like Chin’s death.

“The level of anger … it’s already here,” Zia said. “For Asian Americans, there’s the virus of Covid-19 and there’s the virus of hate. The hate virus is also going to get much worse.”

Coronavirus: as the pandemic spreads in the US, so do racist attacks, and not just against Asians

Asians and Asian-Americans continue to be targets, but recent coronavirus webinars have included abuse and slurs of black participants

The Zoom videoconferencing platform was used, and hacked, in both webinarsCharley Lanyon11 Apr, 2020

The Zoom videoconferencing platform has become ubiquitous as the coronavirus spreads. But it has security flaws, and hackers disrupted two recent US coronavirus-related webinars using the platform with racist slurs. Photo: Reuters

As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads across the United States, reports of racist attacks and abuse have spiked. While many accounts involve the targeting of Asians and Asian-Americans, the phenomenon is not limited to them.

In the past two weeks alone, two separate medical webinars on the coronavirus featuring minority health care workers were disrupted by hackers spewing profanity and racial slurs.

On Wednesday, a coronavirus webinar hosted by the Washington-based Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) was intended to shine a light on racial discrepancies in the response to the outbreak. Instead, participants themselves became the targets of racial vitriol.

“Hate speech of all sorts – however, mostly racist comments – bombarded our chat,” said ABC’s president, Dr Michelle Albert, who moderated the discussion. “Nonetheless, we continued.”

As the frequency and tenor of the racist comments increased, so did the reaction of the audience, which responded by flooding the chat with declarations of support and gratitude and love for the doctors on-screen, swamping the hate speech.

Chinese diaspora fights coronavirus discrimination in the USPeter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Centre who was the first panellist to speak, was among the earliest to notice the racist comments.

“I felt frightened first, then angry,” he said.

One thing Chin-Hong didn’t feel: shocked. The same behaviour had disrupted another medical teleconference just the week before.

Michelle Guy, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of San Francisco, also attended both events Last week, she was attending a UCSF “town hall” for the cardiology division discussing Covid-19 and the Bay Area’s response when she saw that the meeting had been overrun with racist hackers.

“Last week and yesterday were the only two times I personally experienced hate speech on a teleconference platform,” Dr Guy said on Thursday, adding that she had heard from a colleague at another institution that a group of black students were harassed during a teleconference.

“Hearing about it third-person I didn't appreciate how it impacts you. Once it happened to me, I better understood.”

Dr Peter Chin-Hong. Photo: Handout

At the town hall, it began with a few sexually explicit texts. Soon the platform had more than 90 commenters filling the channel with pornographic language.

And these hackers didn’t limit themselves to text.

“The audio, screen and chat were all taken over. You could hear several male voices saying the N-word multiple times. A garbled song came on also repeating the N-word,” Dr Guy said, adding that she also heard a homophobic slur.

“It felt like an ambush and assault. It was overwhelming. I was too emotionally affected to concentrate on learning new information.”

Zoom backlash points to bigger threats in coronavirus-led telecommuting wave
7 Apr 2020


On Wednesday at the ABC webinar, when she saw on the text thread the “N-word repeated over and over” she was wounded but “not surprised”.

“It's demoralising, upsetting, and reprehensible,” she said.



Comedians in New York fight racism with coronavirus-themed show

Perhaps predictably, both teleconferences employed the videoconferencing app Zoom. As the coronavirus has driven people to use Zoom when working from home, many have found that the platform is especially vulnerable to hackers.

Increasingly, anonymous persons have joined tele-meetings without invitation, often interrupting with offensive language or posting pornographic images, behaviour now called Zoombombing. The FBI has issued a warning to people and businesses about privacy issues when using the app.

In Hong Kong, students from 40 secondary schools have called on their teachers to stop using Zoom and switch to a safer platform to conduct lessons because of fears that their data could be compromised.

Singapore schools stop using Zoom app after security breaches
10 Apr 2020


As coronavirus cases have surged in the United States, so have reports of hate crimes and racist rhetoric online, mainly targeting the Asian-American community.

According to an intelligence report compiled by the FBI’s Houston office and distributed to local law enforcement across the country last month: “hate crime incidents against Asian-Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease … endangering Asian-American communities … based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate Covid-19 with China and Asian-American populations.”

At two recent coronavirus-related webinars, hackers broke into the Zoom videoconferencing platform and hurled racist slurs at participants. Photo: DPA

On Thursday, the Network Contagion Research Institute, a New Jersey-based group that tracks hate speech, released findings that the pandemic has led to a significant rise of anti-Asian hate speech online. And stories of verbal and physical attacks on Asian-Americans are increasingly common.

In March, a family of three were stabbed outside a store in Midland, Texas. Last month, a 51-year-old woman was verbally abused and physically assaulted while riding the bus in New York by a fellow passenger riding with her three daughters.

In the midst of this, the coronavirus itself seems to be especially devastating to people of colour, especially African-Americans – the result of entrenched inequalities in health care, and standard of living among minority communities which contribute to their higher mortality rates.

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In Chicago, African-Americans account for more than half of those who have tested positive and 72 per cent of virus-related fatalities, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population there, a trend seen in cities and towns across the country.

Black residents of Louisiana make up about a third of the state’s population but 70 per cent of its Covid-19 fatalities.

Numbers like these are a call to arms for doctors of colour, and all medical workers who serve at-risk communities.

“We are just trying to learn as much information as we can and share it with as many other health care providers as we can to save people's lives,” Dr Guy said. “To have to be subjected to racism and hate speech while we are doing our work, makes me want to cry and scream all at once. These are orchestrated attacks on people of colour.”

On Wednesday, after more than 90 minutes, refusing to end the presentation despite the stream of abuse, Dr Albert drew her seminar to a close with a quote from Maya Angelou: “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.”



Charley Lanyon

Charley will write about anything but has a passion for food. After years living and eating in Asia, he has recently relocated to Los Angeles where he is delighted to report that the dim sum isn’t terrible.

How the greedy ruling elite failed us, by putting profit before pandemic preparedness
The global ruling elite, who ignored expert warnings of a pandemic, are even now proposing stimulus measures to prop up markets, rather than truly help people

Expect any attempts to align supply chains to health care or welfare imperatives to meet fierce resistance from vested financial interests, further holding back economic recovery


Andy Xie Published: 6 Apr, 202

Illustration: Craig Stephens

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, hundreds of thousands may well die, possibly even millions, if the hot weather cannot slow the disease in the southern hemisphere. Governments and people may pin their hopes on effective medicine and/or a vaccine coming come soon, but neither is likely. This catastrophe may well last well into next year and change the world as we know it.

While the virus is a natural phenomenon, the ensuing tragedy should have been preventable. Infectious disease experts have been predicting a pandemic like this as a certainty. Yet, the global ruling elites ignored it.

Instead, they gather at Davos every year to talk about power, money and technology – mostly about its potential for making money. They have not focused on the No 1 responsibility of any ruling class – the safety of the people. 

If health care systems had been prepared for a pandemic like this, there would be 100 times fewer casualties.

Instead of protecting people, they spent trillions of dollars bailing themselves out after creating the 2008 global financial crisis through their greed. Then, they built huge financial bubbles to make themselves richer than ever. If there is justice, these elites should go to jail for their criminal negligence.

The current chorus from these same influential people is about how to keep stimulating the economy with trillions of dollars. Their real purpose is to prop up financial markets, not to help people. When the stimulus cost is tallied, it is likely to surpass US$10 trillion, twice as much as proposed now.

While financial assistance for the unemployed is necessary, help for big businesses is hard to justify. The US government has budgeted US$500 billion to help businesses. For years, many of these businesses have used their profits and borrowed more to buy back stocks. Helping them is a grave injustice. Such policies only make the world less stable.

The trillions of dollars in aid will not return the world to where it was; this is not like restarting a disrupted film. The global economy could fall by over 20 per cent in the second quarter, the biggest drop ever during peacetime. Any recovery during the second half of the year, or beyond, is likely to be anaemic for four reasons.

First, life cannot go back to normal so soon. Social distancing may slow down Covid-19, but will not eliminate it. If people return to their old ways, the virus is likely to come back. Social distancing, even loosened, has a significant impact on the services industry.

The tourism sector, for example, will remain shuttered for the foreseeable future. It employs one in 10 people in the non-agricultural sector. This factor alone will keep the global economy below the 2019 level for at least two years.

Second, this crisis has exposed the fragility and unaccounted extra costs of maintaining a
global supply chain. Electronics and car industries have been severely interrupted. Just-in-time inventory management and the concentration of parts production has left the global economy extremely vulnerable to a black swan event such as Covid-19.

The cost is more than just to the gross domestic product. When the production of health care equipment and medicines is interrupted, lives are lost, unnecessarily.

Coronavirus could cause global food shortages by April as export curbs worsen supply chain problems

Political forces are likely to ensure global companies rearrange their supply chains to reflect national interests, not just profit maximisation. This process of deglobalisation will slow the economy and generate considerable inflationary pressure.

Third, the Covid-19 crisis has  burst financial bubbles built up since 2008. The US stock market, for example, is normalising, which could wipe out US$15 trillion in wealth. As the slowing global economy increases credit risks, the overleveraged shadow banking system may catch fire.

American companies have been borrowing for years to buy back stocks. Some of their bonds are likely to default. This kind of debt crisis will be a significant drag on the global economy.


Lastly, the crisis is forcing governments to reallocate resources to health care systems and other forms of welfare protection. The US spends nearly one-fifth of its GDP on health care but is failing to cope with a pandemic like this because resource allocation has been driven by profit, not the safety of the masses. As vested financial interests resist the reallocation of resources, the economy is likely to be dragged down.

Hong Kong’s property market is a small but extremely egregious example of screwing people over for the benefit of the rich. With people asked to stay at home, the city’s small and subdivided flats with their congested conditions – making it so much easier for a virus to spread – are literally killing people.

People become depressed when confined in small spaces for too long. Hong Kong’s property market is at best a screw-the-poor and rob-the-middle-class plot to benefit the rich and powerful, often in the guise of an everybody-can-get-rich casino. This crisis has exposed it as a bloodsucking conspiracy against the people. Is a revolution avoidable?

In this grim tragedy, the good news is about the scientific race for new equipment, medicine and a vaccine to fight the virus. Human ingenuity tends to become turbocharged under extreme pressure. The discoveries during the second world war have powered the tech economy ever since. The discoveries made during this Covid-19 war may unleash a wave of bioscience advances to benefit mankind for ages to come.


Andy Xie is an independent economist

Dr Andy Xie is a Shanghai-based independent economist specialising in China and Asia, and writes, speaks and consults on global economics and financial markets. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1997 and was managing director and head of the firm’s Asia-Pacific economics team until 2006. Prior to that he spent two years with Macquarie Bank in Singapore, where he was an associate director in corporate finance. He also spent five years as an economist with the World Bank. He was voted one of the 50 most influential persons in finance by Bloomberg magazine in 2013.

The US topped a 2019 pandemic preparedness index. So why wasn’t it ready for Covid-19?

Deciding whether (MONOPOLY) capitalism or socialism (STATE CAPITALISM) is more suited for pandemic management is a false binary. The real issue is whether officials under each system are able to test, trace and contain the virus, and work out how to reopen economies

Andrew Sheng Published:11 Apr, 2020

Refrigeration trucks are lined up near the office of New York’s chief medical examiner to serve as an expanded morgue on April 3, as the city prepared for a growing number of coronavirus deaths. Photo: EPA-EFE

Who could have imagined that the Cold War could morph into a “cool war” and now a Covid-19 war? The Cold War was fought between the United States and the former Soviet Union, ending with the latter’s dissolution. The cool war between the US and China is still going on over trade.

As for the Covid-19 war, it is not about fighting each other, but protecting each country’s citizens against a coronavirus that does not distinguish between borders and political beliefs.

History will judge how, in this public health battle, authoritarian China has reported more than 3,300 deaths, whereas more than 14,000 have died in the democratic US.
There are four hard choices in this crisis: moral, informational, political and economic. A tough moral decision has to be made between lives and livelihoods.

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Most governments have rightly chosen to protect lives by shutting down economies. But with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimating a loss of 2 per cent of gross domestic product for every month of lockdown, economic costs are mounting.

This explains why the US president is all for reopening the economy as soon as possible. With estimates of deaths in the US falling to 60,000 by August, the issue is whether the US can afford to spend trillions to prevent more deaths.

Developing countries certainly can’t afford lockdowns. As it is, many of their citizens lack running water and soap, and can’t wash their hands frequently to stop the spread of coronavirus. The pandemic might push millions more into poverty.

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he second choice is informational: do you believe scientists or politicians? On the one hand, Trump wants a timeline for restarting the economy but, on the other hand, infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci says the timeline is determined by the virus.
So far, the political leaders who heed scientific advisers have done best. The prime ministers of Singapore , Malaysia and New Zealand are to be commended for taking decisive action and enforcing lockdowns.

The third choice is political. Deciding whether capitalism or socialism is better suited for pandemic management is a false binary. The real issue is whether officials under either system are able to test, trace and contain the virus.

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Back in October, the US was ranked as the country most prepared for pandemics in the Global Health Security Index published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security and The Economist Intelligence Unit. Britain was at No 2 and China, No 51.

In late November, before news of coronavirus cases in Wuhan broke, the US National Centre for Medical Intelligence warned of a disease outbreak in China that could pose a serious threat to US forces in Asia.

On January 29, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, alerted the White House that a “full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil” could cost trillions of dollars and the health of millions. So why didn’t the vaunted US system kick in to prevent the spread of Covid-19?

To be fair, all bureaucracies are slow to react to new and uncertain challenges. Mauro Ferrari, the European Union’s top scientist, said he had proposed a special programme in March to combat the virus because “the very best scientists in the world should be provided with resources and opportunities to fight the pandemic, with new drugs, new vaccines, new diagnostic tools, new behavioural dynamic approaches based on science, to replace the oft-improvised intuitions of political leaders”.

However, his proposal “was passed on to different layers of European Commission administration, where I believe it disintegrated upon impact”. Ultimately, he resigned as president of the European Research Council, after failing to persuade the EU bureaucracy to take action.

Unfortunately, a “whole of government” approach is only possible if we are to able to knock sense into obstinate bureaucrats. The parts must work together to save the whole.

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Last but not least, there is the matter of how to reopen the economy,
once the pandemic is brought under a semblance of control. The reality is that there is no one formula, model or theory that can guide us, given that different countries have such different values, resources and institutions.


One thing is certain. The market cannot respond without the backing of the state. Indeed, there is no best practice when it comes to deciding how to reopen an economy. Each country will have to experiment, based on the best data on both public health and the economy.



Free-market ideology has not prepared us for this, because we have good information on the largest corporations, but little up-to-date data on the balance sheets of the households and small businesses that are feeling the brunt of the lockdowns.

Meanwhile, rich countries are dropping “helicopter money”, as if helicopters can put out raging forest fires by randomly spraying water. The successful economies are those that are able to target money to help those who need it most.

To put it another way, economies need to test, trace and target, just as health systems do to tackle the virus. In practical terms, this means applying tools that best fit the conditions on the ground.

In fighting the war against Covid-19, success is relative, but failure is contagious. If we fail as individuals and as a community to make hard choices, more lives and livelihoods will be lost. This is the pandemic box we have opened up.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker and financial regulator, currently distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong. He writes widely on Asian perspectives on global issues, with columns in Project Syndicate, Asia News Network and Caijing/Caixin magazines. His latest book is “Shadow Banking in China”, co-authored with Ng Chow Soon, published by Wiley.

The data on global coronavirus-related trade and job losses is grim, but the worst is yet to come
The ILO estimates 6.7 per cent of working hours, or 195 million full-time jobs, will be lost worldwide in the second quarter of the year. This is why so many governments, including in Hong Kong, have taken radical steps to support workersOpinion
Outside In by David Dodwell Published: 11 Apr, 2020

A man sits alone in the deserted nightlife district of Lan Kwai Fong 

in Hong Kong on April 2. Photo: Dickson Lee

Memories of the pain and harm done by the US-China trade war and six months of street violence across Hong Kong may not have faded, but they have, in the past three months, been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, and the unremitting angst that this invisible enemy has caused in communities worldwide.

So it is not good news that the worst is yet to come, and might not be done with us until well into 2021.

We are only now beginning to sense the scale of the economic harm being inflicted in the fight against the spread of the virus. That is mainly because this harm is still not clearly perceptible and has yet to be fully captured by data. The disastrous domino effect of domestic lockdowns and international self-isolation is now beginning to be seen, but not yet felt.

Two important reports this week have provided us with some sketchy numbers about the future facing us. The first, from the World Trade Organisation, foresees global merchandise trade collapsing this year by between 13 and 32 per cent – in raw numbers, that means a fall of between US$2.4 trillion and US$6 trillion, from US$18.89 trillion in 2019.

Worst impacted will be North America, with exports expected to decline by 17 to 41 per cent, and imports by 14 to 34 per cent. If such forecasts are anywhere near accurate, you can see why Donald Trump is so concerned about deflecting blame ahead of the United States presidential election in November.

The WTO says the crash in services trade, never captured as accurately as merchandise trade, will be even more severe. “These numbers are ugly,” says Roberto Azevedo, WTO director general.

For manufactures, the worst harm will fall on electronics, the automotive and other industries “characterised by complex value chain linkages”. Economies most in harm’s way will be those deeply embedded in long and complex value chains.

These include Mexico, Malaysia and Vietnam, with more than 50 per cent foreign value added in their exports, Singapore (over 40 per cent), South Korea (over 30 per cent) and
China (25 per cent).

The second report, from the International Labour Organisation, provides a sobering glimpse into why so many governments – including our own in Hong Kong – have taken such radical steps to support workers, pre-empt redundancies and avert the thousands of bankruptcies that will almost certainly be upon us soon.

The ILO estimates 6.7 per cent of working hours, or 195 million full-time jobs, will be lost worldwide in the second quarter of this year. Sobering US unemployment data released on Thursday – which show that 17 million Americans have in the past month applied for unemployment benefit for the first time – obviously lends strength to these estimates.

learly, some areas of work have not been affected: teachers, health workers, government employees, police and army officers, and people in power and utility companies will not suffer significantly.

But, for other areas of work, the prognosis is grim: accommodation and food services, real estate, business services, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trades have been slammed worldwide, with no early recovery expected. These sectors account for about 38 per cent of all jobs worldwide – about 1.25 billion.

Look at Hong Kong, and you see good reasons for local alarm. Our economy is built on exactly those sectors facing the grimmest challenges (the ILO says transport is another such sector). Clearly, moves by Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s administration to
throw meaningful lifelines to large parts of the workforce have come not a moment too soon.


The ILO data also provides a glimpse into the coming collapse in consumption. Working hours are expected to fall by 7.2 per cent in Asia in the coming quarter, and this means that the average household in Hong Kong, with a median income of HK$27,000 a month, would have HK$1,944 less to spend.

Since there are 2.51 million households in Hong Kong, this means spending power in the community might fall by about HK$4.8 billion per month, or HK$14.6 billion per quarter.

Apply the same arithmetic to the US, where there are 129 million households earning a median household income of US$4,900 a month, 

(THAT IS DISPROPORTIONATELY HIGH TRY $2500-$3000)

 and you find families losing US $329 per month in spending power – amounting to US$42.5 billion for the US as a whole, and US$127.5 billion for the quarter – not a small chunk out of the Congress-approved US$2 trillion rescue payout agreed two weeks ago.

Extend such arithmetic to the entire world, and one quickly sees why so many leading businesses are in a sweat about a protracted recession.

While the hope is that the world economy might quickly recover from this implosion, evidence suggests that recovery will be slow and that, as we emerge, much will have changed forever.

A restructuring of supply chains, with some being shortened, domesticated and made more resilient, seems inevitable. There might be some decoupling between the US and China – though it will be fascinating to see who then couples with the US, and who with China.

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Out of the coming recession, government indebtedness is set to rise to record levels across the world, with no clear prospect of how debts will be managed back to sustainable levels. Lockdowns have also brought digital delivery of everything to the heart of many economies, with the imminent arrival of 5G platforms set to put this trend on steroids.

But some parts of our future look less clear. Will international tourism – which accounts for one in 10 jobs worldwide – rebound in answer to airlines’ prayers? Will inequalities that have been exposed by the pandemic be tackled, or continue to be airbrushed?

While lockdowns have brought down carbon emissions (by 60 per cent in Europe), can this be sustained, or will global warming accelerate as recovery begins?

Perhaps most important of all, can we summon the statesmanship to work together across the world to bring the pandemic under control, and manage an economic recovery? So far, the odds are poor. In the US, Trump seems set on blaming all around him.

And the European Union looks perilously divided. It is a cliché to say opportunities arise out of every crisis, but at this particular bleak moment, those opportunities seem tough to find. For the good of all of us, we need to find them fast.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

David Dodwell is the executive director of the Hong Kong-APEC Trade Policy Study Group, a trade policy think tank.