Why we should all be fearful of China's ambitions

CHINA has defeated coronavirus despite claims that Western health systems are more advanced, boasts the state broadcaster. The secret, it claims, is in the country’s name: C for Care, H for Help. I for Immediacy, N for New Technologies and A for All together.

- Marco Giannangeli

An extraordinary two-minute video pushed out by Chinese embassies is the latest move in a soft power campaign aiming to curb mounting criticism against the regime’s behaviour during the crisis.

The irony of claiming “immediacy” is, of course, completely lost on Beijing, which stands accused of turning a health emergency into a global pandemic by deliberately misleading the World Health Organization over the virus’s capacity for human-human transmission in those first, crucial weeks in December and January.

Recent accusations by French officials that China prevented experts from overseeing safety at its first high-security laboratory in Wuhan, now said to have been where the pathogen originated, simply expose it further.

But those who take this propaganda as a sign that China is running scared over threats to its position as the nexus of the global economy are misreading its leader, Xi Jinping. Rather it is seeking to take what advantage it can from the crisis that many in the West hold it responsible for.

Certainly, Beijing knows that the appearance of legitimacy on the world stage is vital to the success of its Belt and Road initiative, which has already seen it wrap its economic tentacles around more than 70 nations in Europe, Asia and Africa.

It has made much of the aid given to the US and Europe, despite hoarding free vital equipment from countries such as the Czech Republic in early January only to sell it back now. And then there’s the fact that thousands of Chinese-made masks and ventilators have been returned because they weren’t fit for purpose.