China’s Year of Pandemic Diplomacy

On December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported that 27 cases of pneumonia had been caused by an unknown virus. It was the first official acknowledgement of the new coronavirus, which would eventually be named SARS-CoV-2 – the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic that spread across the globe in 2020.

From the beginning, China has struggled mightily to combat the negative association of being the pandemic’s origin. To that end, it recently rolled out a media campaign trying to disprove that COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan. Beyond that, however, Beijing attempted early on to shore up its image by providing aid and expertise to countries amid their own COVID-19 outbreaks. China’s COVID-19 diplomacy highlights the image the Chinese government wants to project of China as a benevolent global power, one that keeps a special eye out for its fellow developing nations.

The pandemic truly exploded in China in January 2020. But thanks to decisive (and draconian) lockdown procedures, albeit after weeks of obfuscation, the outbreak was largely under control within a matter of months. Reflecting that shift, by March China pivoted from a COVID-19 aid recipient to a donor – providing, in the words of Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng, “a typical example of ‘plot reversal’ and shift of crisis into opportunity.”

As early as late February China announced donations to Japan and South Korea, which were then battling their own outbreaks. On March 20, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced that China would provide assistance to “82 countries, [the] WHO and the African Union, including testing reagents, masks and protective suits.”

“China had sent 29 medical expert teams to 27 countries and offered assistance to 150 countries and four international organizations as of May 31,” according to a June white paper on China’s fight against COVID-19 issued by the Chinese government. Beijing also provided $50 million in two batches as additional support to the World Health Organization (WHO). On May 18, at the virtual session of the World Health Assembly, Xi Jinping promised China would shell out an additional $2 billion in 2020 and 2021 to support the global fight against COVID-19.

However, there is no concrete data on China’s COVID-19 aid, whether it was monetary or in-kind donations, or exactly which countries and organizations it was received by. That’s part of a larger issue with Chinese government transparency when it comes to foreign aid, something researchers have long bemoaned. Further confusing matters, Chinese officials have a tendency to count Chinese exports of personal protective equipment (PPE) – as in, other countries buying PPE from Chinese producers – as acts of benevolence. The June white paper thus included exports of “70.6 billion masks, 340 million protective suits, 115 million pairs of goggles, 96,700 ventilators, 225 million test kits, and 40.29 million infrared thermometers” in the same section as its summary of China’s actual COVID-19 aid. The conflation of those two makes it more difficult to ascertain whether specific shipments from China, often promoted by local Chinese embassies, were true donations or purchased goods.

Regardless, China’s COVID-19 diplomacy led to photograph after photograph of boxes stamped with Chinese flags being gratefully received by local authorities, from Myanmar to Venezuela to Italy to Equatorial Guinea. And China intentionally amplified those reports on Twitter, according to a study by Alicia Chen and Vanessa Molter for Stanford University, even while downplaying its earlier role as an aid recipient. Both the donations and efforts to promote them peaked in the spring, which may explain why no updated statistics have been released since the June white paper.

Notably, however, Chinese donations were not limited to government-to-government efforts. Aid was also organized by local Chinese diaspora groups and offered by Chinese businesses operating overseas. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and China’s richest man, alone organized private donations of medical supplies to over 150 countries. Huawei, China’s controversial telecom firm, also donated protective equipment to countries around the world – but was forced to scale back its efforts in Europe after being accused of using the pandemic to massage its battered reputation.

Of particular note, China’s self-appointed role as champion of the developing world translated into repeated pledges of support. “We need to step up support for developing countries. This means continued help to developing countries through anti-epidemic experience sharing, material and technological support, and medicine and vaccine cooperation, as well as providing greater humanitarian assistance to the most vulnerable communities,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in remarks to a special UNGA session on COVID-19 on December 4 (the emphasis is in the original). That focus was especially noted and appreciated at a time when much of the developed world was struggling with the virus and had less energy to spare for charity.

More generally, China used its COVID-19 aid as proof of its multilateral bone fides. “China will work with all parties to send out strong signals of upholding multilateralism and solidarity against the virus,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters on December 3. COVID-19 diplomacy was used to try and hammer home the new government slogan for China’s fight against the virus: “putting people and their lives above everything else” in the pandemic response. While largely for domestic consumption, the mantra also extends to China’s wish to be seen as a responsible and benevolent global actor focused on promoting a “community of shared future for mankind.”

However, there’s another message embedded in China’s COVID-19 diplomacy: a reminder that being friends with China has benefits. For example, donations were made via member-exclusive mechanisms like the Silk Road Fund. Italy, which joined the Belt and Road Initiative to great fanfare in 2019, received “20,000 N95 masks and 20,000 testing reagents” from the Silk Road Fund in March 2020, something its fellow G-7 members were not eligible for. Meanwhile, the 15 countries that maintain ties with Taiwan have not been able to receive aid from China – losing out on not only government-to-government donations but even those from the Chinese private sector. Ironically, despite the heavy emphasis on multilateral cooperation, most of China’s aid is offered bilaterally, the better to target its recipients.

Even China’s receipt of aid had more than a touch of geopolitics. In their study for Stanford, Chen and Molter found that Chinese official social media discourse largely ignored donations from countries like Canada, which has rocky ties with China, while making more mention of “generous” and “selfless” aid from Japan, which is pursuing a much-touted warming with Beijing.

The embedded political messaging did not go unnoticed. China’s image in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Canada took a huge beating in 2020 in part because of the “mask diplomacy” China was conducting. In addition to the geopolitical maneuvering, there were a few embarrassing episodes where PPE was rejected in countries like Kenya and Spain due to quality issues. And Chinese media efforts to suggest that the virus first emerged in Italy, the United States, or elsewhere went down poorly in those countries.

However, that doesn’t mean China’s COVID-19 aid was a failure overall. Beijing, as noted above, takes special pride in its role as a self-appointed protector of the developing world, and here its overtures generally find a more receptive audience. For example, as Deborah Brautigam noted in an interview with The Diplomat, there’s no official survey data on African countries, China, and COVID-19 but anecdotally there is approval of China’s handling of the pandemic and offers of aid.

By December 2020, a year after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China’s COVID-19 aid qualified as the country’s biggest such operation: “China has carried out global humanitarian actions that were the biggest in the PRC's history, and shouldered our responsibility as the world's biggest provider of medical supplies,” Hua declared on December 4.

The biggest question now is whether COVID-19 will represent an aberration or a new normal in China’s approach to global aid, where it still remains fair behind top donors like the United States and the European Union. As Jacob Kurtzer, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out in a recent analysis, “It remains unclear whether this increase represents a temporary spike or a transformational shift in the Chinese approach.”