China recovering, offering others aid
It takes leadership role, pledges humanitarian help to fight virus around globe
BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, pledged to send more medical experts to Italy this week, on the same day Beijing sent 2,000 rapid diagnostic tests to the Philippines. Serbia’s president pleaded for assistance not from the country’s neighbors in Europe, which restricted the export of needed medical equipment, but from China.
“European solidarity does not exist,” the Serbian leader, Aleksandar Vucic, said when he announced a state of emergency in televised remarks. “That was a fairy tale on paper. I believe in my brother and friend Xi Jinping, and I believe in Chinese help.”
Only a few weeks ago, China was overwhelmed by the coronavirus epidemic that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, accepting donations of masks and other medical supplies from nearly 80 nations and 10 international organizations.
Now, with new daily cases at home dwindling into the single digits, China is mounting a diplomatic offensive to help, as the rest of the world struggles to get the virus under control. From Japan to Iraq, Spain to Peru, it has provided or pledged humanitarian assistance in the form of donations or medical expertise — an aid blitz that is giving China the chance to reposition itself not as the authoritarian incubator of a pandemic but as a responsible global leader at a moment of worldwide crisis.
“This could be the first major global crisis in decades without meaningful U.S. leadership and with significant Chinese leadership,” said Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
He noted that only a few years ago the United States led the fight against Ebola.
The outbreak that started in Wuhan, which has infected nearly 200,000 people and killed nearly 8,000 worldwide, has been a staggering setback for Xi’s leadership, fanning discontent at home and questions abroad about the efficacy of the Communist state.
Now, the global failures in confronting the pandemic from Europe to the United States have given the Chinese leadership a platform to prove its model works — and potentially gain some lasting geopolitical currency.
As it has done in the past, the Chinese state is using its extensive tools and deep pockets to build partnerships around the world, relying on trade, investments and, in this case, an advantageous position as the world’s largest maker of medicines and protective masks. The largess is going a long way to help temper popular anger over its initial mishandling of the outbreak that is now wreaking havoc on every continent except Antarctica.
“I don’t know and now I don’t care,” Michele Geraci, a former undersecretary in the Italian economic development ministry, said in an interview when asked if the assistance reflected China’s geopolitical ambitions as much as humanitarian concerns.
He said the urgent issue was to provide aid to save lives, something that Italy’s allies in the European Union had been unable or unwilling to do.
China has long aspired to assert a more prominent role in the United Nations and other international organizations while projecting its political, economic and military influence in more and more parts of the world — at times in direct competition with the United States.
“China is now trying to repair its severely damaged international image due to its mishandling of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January,” Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, wrote in an email.
“Donating medical supplies shows China is a responsible and generous world power,” he added.
On Wednesday, China said it would provide 2 million surgical masks, 200,000 advanced masks and 50,000 testing kits to Europe. “We’re grateful for China’s support,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a tweet. “We need each other’s support in times of need.”
One of China’s leading entrepreneurs, Jack Ma, offered to donate 500,000 tests and 1 million masks to the United States, where hospitals are facing shortages despite having weeks of notice to prepare. In February, the United States flew in 17 tons of supplies to Wuhan aboard four flights that evacuated Americans from the city.
“This is no longer a challenge that a country can solve on its own, but it requires all of us to work together,” Ma’s foundation said in a statement that listed donations to dozens of countries, including all 54 nations in Africa.
The statement went on to cite Ma’s use on Weibo, a social media platform, of a familiar phrase in the American political lexicon: “United we stand, divided we fall.”
China’s critics dismiss the assistance as hollow gestures, even cynical ones.
Many in Italy, for example, pointed out that China was selling masks, respirators and other medical equipment, not donating them, and claimed that some of the materials were meant for Chinese citizens in the country.
Others have warned that China was using its dominant role in the production of respirators and masks to reward friendly nations. China made half of the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has greatly expanded production nearly 12-fold since then, although it has kept more of the supply for itself.