Border dispute casts shadow over China’s offers of Covid help for India

As coronavirus rages across India, its neighbour China has made repeated offers of help. Some are asking whether this could be an occasion to ease the tense relations between the world’s two most populous countries following last year’s border skirmishes.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said this week that Beijing was “ready to provide support and assistance to the Indian people at any time according to the needs of India”. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Delhi said it would “encourage and instruct Chinese companies to actively cooperate”.

On Sunday the Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka tweeted: “800 oxygen concentrators have been airlifted today from #HongKong to #Delhi; 10,000 more in a week.” A related hashtag on China’s social media site Weibo had been viewed more than 23m times as of Wednesday.

Beijing has been watching the developments closely in part because of India’s proximity. In the last few days, medical experts on state media have been explaining to the public why China should be concerned.

Some analysts, however, see the crisis as an opportunity. “China’s statement shows that it does not link the border issue closely with overall relations with India, and that China expects bilateral relations can be improved,” Dr Li Hongmei, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the South China Morning Post.

China’s nationalist tabloid Global Times, meanwhile, seized on the US’s short-lived export ban on vaccine materials to attack Washington’s “selfishness”. “The US’s indifferent response ignited a wave of anti-US sentiment on social media in and out of India,” the paper wrote. “The US is not a world leader as it claims but a selfish, irresponsible and unreliable country that plays geopolitics to serve its own interests.”

This interpretation was echoed by some critics in India. A former minister, Milind Deora, tweeted on Saturday that the US’s initial reluctance to help India was “undermining the strategic Indo-US partnership”. The tweet was accompanied by a quote from John F