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China’s Pandemic Power Play | Journal of Democracy
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China’s Pandemic Power Play | Journal of Democracy [journalofdemocracy.org]:
Silk Road, Silken Bonds
The “community of shared future” is intimately associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. The “community” is the envisioned goal; the BRI is the way to knit the community together.21 This is not to say, however, that the BRI is primarily a physical-infrastructure project. Rather, it is a multidimensional strategy that advances China’s notion of itself as an uncontested leading power. Since Xi Jinping launched the BRI in 2013, questions have abounded regarding its economic and financial sustainability. In the wake of the pandemic, will Beijing be able to afford the vast loans and investments in infrastructure projects in developing countries? For the last three years, Beijing has already started to shift the BRI’s emphasis toward its “softer” and less costly components. During the current crisis, the focus naturally switched to the Health Silk Road.
In October 2015, the PRC health ministry introduced a plan for “Belt and Road health cooperation” whose professed goals included boosting China’s influence in global health matters. Since then, China has carried out a multipronged effort to draw foreign parties into cooperating more closely in areas as diverse as health security, medical research, and the promotion of traditional Chinese medicine. Written understandings now exist between Beijing and such prominent multilateral health organizations as the WHO, UNAIDS, the Global Fund, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. In parallel with declarations of intent, Beijing has been acquiring pharmaceutical companies and starting projects with foreign health centers and businesses. Universities outside China have committed themselves to sharing health-related research and data with Chinese counterparts. This activity under the Belt and Road rubric has given Beijing a flexible network that it can use to promote its interests and spread its views, and all without having to commit enormous sums of money.
Even if the objectives of the Health Silk Road are well defined on paper, the plan is still at an early stage. The covid pandemic has given it an occasion for expansion, both in the developing world and in Western countries where Chinese officials urge cooperation on vaccines and antiviral medications.
As the Beijing-led alternative global-health platform slowly emerges, China is reaping the benefits of its rising influence within existing international [End Page 34]institutions, specifically the WHO. The Chinese leadership sought to improve its standing within the WHO in reaction to the organization’s harsh criticism of Beijing’s handling of the 2003 SARS crisis. Staffers from the PRC are not present in large numbers within the WHO’s workforce, however, and the PRC government’s financial contributions are low compared to those of other countries.22 According to French Sinologist Valérie Niquet, Beijing’s outsized influence should be understood against the backdrop of China’s increased political weight in African countries, especially Ethiopia.23
In May 2017, former Ethiopian government official Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was elected to a five-year term as the WHO’s director-general, thanks to the support of the PRC and all 55 of the African Union member states. Born in what is now Eritrea, Tedros is a former cadre of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which in the 1970s and 1980s was a self-described Marxist-Leninist movement that engaged in a struggle for control of the Ethiopian government. The TPLF drew support during those decades from the PRC (as well as the PRC’s small ally at the time, Albania). In 1991, the civil war ended with the TPLF and its allies victorious, and Tedros later became Ethiopia’s health minister (2005–12) and foreign minister (2013–17). Tedros’s cabinet posts brought him repeatedly into close engagements with Beijing. While foreign minister, he spoke highly of Ethiopia’s relationship with the PRC. As head of the WHO, he has led the way to “stronger and more strategic WHO-China collaborations.” In 2017, he praised China’s health reforms as “a model for other countries in how to make our world fairer, healthier and safer. We can all learn something from China.”24
On 14 January 2020, the WHO put out a tweet relaying the official Chinese position that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”25 Visiting Beijing at the end of that month, Tedros declared his admiration for the Chinese government, which he praised for having “shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic.” He added that “President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability.”26
Through its director and several of its representatives, the WHO has proven a mouthpiece for Beijing, echoing Chinese propaganda by lavishly praising the CCP’s efficiency and the advantages supposedly conferred by its system.27 The WHO has also been a useful pawn supporting Beijing’s efforts to exclude Taiwan from international institutions. When asked in a 28 March 2020 remote video interview with Radio Television Hong Kong if the WHO should reconsider Taiwan’s exclusion from membership, WHO assistant director-general Bruce Aylward dodged the question, then dismissed another question about Taiwan’s coronavirus response, on the ground that he had “already talked about China.”28 A few days later, Tedros refused to answer a Japanese reporter’s question about Taiwan, [End Page 35]leaving the response to Michael Ryan, the head of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, who praised the PRC authorities for their early disclosure of information regarding the epidemic.29
The WHO ought to be the logical mechanism to turn to for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic, but its apparent increased politicization at the hands of Beijing does not bode well for a future impartial survey. Yet it remains Xi Jinping’s preferred supervisory body for a “comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19 after it is brought under control,” as he declared in a May 18 speech to the World Health Assembly (WHA).
More broadly, the content of Xi’s WHA speech is emblematic of China’s continual efforts to cast itself as a great, altruistic, responsible power and the leader in particular of the Global South. It repositions China as the leader of global efforts to address the covid crisis, interweaving the familiar discursive themes listed earlier with concrete measures that are meant mainly to woo the developing world. Xi announced the spending of US$2 billion over two years to help with coronavirus response as well as “economic and social development in affected countries, especially developing countries.” He vowed that the PRC would build and host a “global humanitarian response depot and hub” to ensure the smooth flow of vital disease-fighting supplies, and promised to found a medical-cooperation mechanism specifically for Africa. To cap his pledges, he said that the PRC would look into solutions for debtor countries and treat any PRC-developed covid-19 vaccine as a “global public good.”30
In sum, far from recalibrating its strategic goals in light of the pandemic, the CCP leadership remains set on seeing China take center stage in world affairs. Beijing is hoping that over the long run it can use the crisis to more deeply engrain its influence abroad. Yet the regime remains gravely worried about the pandemic’s aftermath, not because of the harm that the disease has done to the Chinese people and the world—the regime denies any responsibility for that—but because the damage that the crisis has wrought may threaten to put cracks in the armor of infallibility that the CCP has so tenaciously fabricated. Despite its fears of a postpandemic backlash, therefore, the CCP has chosen not to recognize its errors or make amends. Instead, it prefers to carry on its efforts to manipulate outside perceptions.
The way Beijing is waging this campaign says some things about the nature of its power: Even though the CCP regime tries to persuade others of its peaceful benevolence, it can quickly revert to coercion and intimidation when its core interests—to say nothing of its survival in power—are at stake. Beijing’s race for pole position is not just happening in the ethereal realm of discourse, however. The current crisis has helped to lay bare the consequences of China’s stealthy efforts to increase its influence within international institutions. Unfolding before [End Page 36]our very eyes is not merely a battle of narratives but a demonstration of Realpolitik by a regime that is a master of it, in which every possible domain, including global health, has become a front along which Beijing seeks to advance its place in the world. [End Page 37]
