China: leveraging covid-19 as a foreign policy tool
The uneven international response to the COVID-19 pandemic has invited a worldwide political restructuring, amplifying the existing geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China. With both countries jockeying to influence a post COVID-19 world order, the confusion surrounding the outbreak has served as a mechanism for Beijing to expand its influence by moving into voids that a distracted United States leaves unattended. Interestingly, China is now leveraging a crisis that originated within its own borders to more aggressively exert itself in the international arena. Through censorship and disinformation, China has sought to control the narrative, all while repositioning its naval forces in the South China Sea and re-purposing its Belt & Road initiative to expand its soft power influence.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, several reputable institutions prematurely praised China’s response to the outbreak and suggested that the rest of the world follow its example. As the narrative at the time went, the Chinese government rapidly recognized the outbreak, locked down affected areas, and slowed the spread of the virus. The World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, and many in the media pushed this narrative. The World Health Organization found that “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.” The World Economic Forum, in a March 12th article, noted that China’s “. . .unprecedented systematic and proactive risk management. . .has proven to be effective in containing and controlling COVID-19.” Several sources hailed China’s use of its massive surveillance state to identify and contain the virus. Notably absent from this praise was a discussion of the human rights abuses that this surveillance state has enabled. In a remarkable turn on March 19th, China reported zero new domestic cases of Coronavirus, a highly questionable claim in a country of 1.4 billion people that had so recently been the epicenter of the outbreak.
As we now know, the virus spread rapidly across the planet, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and ravaged the world’s economy. American government officials and major media outlets eventually began to question China’s COVID-19 statistics and the efficacy of its containment measures. They were right to do so. China has a long history of disinformation and the world can expect this same pattern of behavior to continue. Accurate reporting from inside mainland China has always been a challenge, but has been especially pronounced since Beijing’s March expulsion of several American press outlets in the midst of the pandemic.
As is their modus operandi, in late December 2019 the Chinese government began censoring discussion of the virus on the internet. They labeled medical professionals who were raising the alarm about COVID-19 “rumor mongerers” and detained them for making false statements. In early January, China’s National Health Commission issued what amounted to a gag order on the publication of information on the virus. On January 14th, the World Health Organization cited Chinese health officials who claimed that there had been no human transmissions of the virus in China to date. It appears that the Chinese medical community may have known that the virus was spreading as early as November 2019 and almost certainly by early December, although China’s media censorship both during and after this period make establishing a definitive timeline difficult. Governments and media outlets will surely continue to dissect the Chinese government’s response to the virus over the coming months and years. What will be equally important is an examination of Chinese government activities in the international arena during the pandemic.
With the world in crisis mode, China has leveraged the situation to promote several of its long-established geopolitical goals, in-part by stoking the fires of disinformation. In mid-March, text messages began appearing on mobile phones throughout the U.S. citing ostensibly well-sourced information that the Trump Administration was planning to imminently lock down the U.S. A version of the message also appeared on multiple social media platforms. Lingering suspicion regarding the veracity and origins of these messages was well-founded. On April 22nd The New York Times reported that Chinese intelligence operatives may have helped spread fake messages containing these claims. While only those responsible definitively know the motives behind the operation, it was very likely part of a Chinese government effort to leverage the crisis to keep the U.S. distracted and breed distrust amongst its populace, damaging the American public’s confidence in its leadership and sewing fear of its own government. While Washington was looking left, China moved right.
Meanwhile, back in its own neighborhood, China has aggressively repositioned its naval forces in the South China Sea and near Taiwan, betting that a distracted U.S. response will be too slow or inadequate to counterbalance Chinese attempts to exert more control over the long disputed waters. Several Southeastern Asian nations have territorial claims to areas of the South China Sea. China, however, claims sovereignty over the waterway and has over time constructed multiple artificial islands and reefs to bolster its sovereignty claims. In April, in the midst of the Coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., the Chinese Navy sent a battle group around Taiwan’s east coast, prompting a concerned response from the U.S. State Department. In a separate incident in April, a Chinese Coastguard ship deliberately rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat near an oil rig in disputed waters.
In the midst of spreading disinformation and doubling down on its military posture in the South China Sea, Beijing has also directly leveraged the crisis to expand its soft power influence throughout the world. In exploiting a crisis of its own making, China has begun to weave a “Health Silk Road” into its signature “Belt and Road” global infrastructure development initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative, which was in place long before Coronavirus appeared, is a strategic push to increase Chinese global influence by providing funding and capacity for infrastructure development around the world. Unsurprisingly, the Coronavirus spread out of China along many of the same routes used in the Belt and Road initiative. China has now incorporated provision of medical supplies into the fringes of that strategy in an accelerated fashion, increasing its own global political influence by exploiting a crisis that originated within its own borders. This tactic is especially pronounced in Italy, which was recently the epicenter of the virus. The Chinese presence in Northern Italy, partly as a result of existing economic relationships, and partly as a result of the Belt and Road Initiative, was very likely a major factor in the transmission of the virus into and throughout the country. Recognizing that Italy’s health care system was overwhelmed and underequipped, China has sought to expand its soft power influence by offering and providing medical equipment and supplies related to Covid-19 to Italy and many other European countries.
The gap between Chinese and American economic and political interests has been expanding for decades and can no longer be ignored or accounted for by mutual economic benefit. COVID-19 has disrupted the delicate dance between China and the U.S., and may result in a new world order in which ties between the U.S. and China become increasingly strained. U.S. businesses have been leveraging cheap Chinese labor and material costs for many years and American reliance on China as a means of production has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. The potential of a future world in which the U.S. and China enter into a modern day cold war will send ripples downstream, and the American government and business community should expect a resulting degree of turbulence in the coming months and years. America may have to realign its foreign manufacturing hubs and return those that are critical to United States infrastructure and security to American soil. Such a realignment of American and Chinese economic interdependence is an opportunity for America to increase its own self-reliance, which will ultimately serve U.S. national security interests. It is an opportunity America should embrace.
