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1 Politics and the Plague

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary and President of China Xi Jinping made the most of the moment. Speaking via videoconference at the opening ceremony of the United Nations World Health Assembly (WHA) on May 18, 2020 (Figure 1.1), he offered $2 billion over two years to help with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus had first come to international attention in China and was now sweeping through the rest of the world. China itself had largely contained the spread. Everyday life was rapidly returning to normal, and Xi was prepared to assist other countries more in need. He pledged that when China was ready with a vaccine, the country would make it “a global public good.” And in a nod to the mounting calls from over 120 countries for an international investigation into the origins of the virus – a demand China had until then resisted – Xi declared his support for a “comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19.”¹ It was a deft move designed to ensure that China would not be singled out in an international investigation and that any report would include Beijing’s impressive success in containing the virus. It was also a personal diplomatic coup for the embattled Xi: the speech brought back memories of his January 2017 triumphs in Davos, where he touted Chinese leadership on globalization and free trade, and Geneva, where he pledged to defend the Paris Agreement on climate change. And his rhetorical magnanimity positioned China once again in stark contrast to the United States, whose president at the time, Donald Trump, had questioned the viability of the World Trade Organization, withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, and announced, just one month before Xi’s WHA speech, that the United States would withhold all its funding from the World Health Organization (WHO).

      If Xi Jinping’s pledge before the WHA had represented the sum total of China’s foreign policy over the course of the pandemic, the rest of the world could have walked away from the speech confident that it had found the global leader it needed for the 21st century. But China’s pandemic diplomacy is not only a story about a newly emerged global power shouldering responsibility for responding to a humanitarian crisis. It is also the canary in the coal mine – a warning of the potential challenge that China’s ambition and growing global influence portend for the current international system and the institutions, values, and norms that have underpinned it for more than 75 years.

      Figure 1.1 Xi Jinping speaks at the 73rd World Health Assembly on May 18, 2020

      Source: Xinhua/Alamy

Xi’s ambition, as his words and deeds over the past decade suggest, is to reorder the world order. His call for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” envisions a China that has regained centrality on the global stage: it has reclaimed contested territory, assumed a position of preeminence in the Asia Pacific, ensured that other countries have aligned their political, economic, and security interests with its own, provided the world’s technological infrastructure for the 21st century, and embedded its norms, values, and standards in international laws and institutions. The path to achieving this vision is a difficult one. It requires challenging both the position of the United States as the world’s dominant power and the international understandings and institutions that have been in place since the end of World War II.

      To achieve his ambition, Xi has transformed how China does business on the global stage. He has developed a strategy that reflects his domestic governance model: a highly centralized Party-state system that takes as its central priority preservation of its own power at home and realization of its sovereignty ambitions abroad. It is a system that grants Xi a unique capability to mobilize and deploy political, economic, and military resources – both public and private – across multiple domains: reinforcing his strategic priorities within China, in other countries, and in global governance institutions. He also seeks to control the content and flow of information – both within China and among international actors – to align them with Beijing’s values and priorities. In addition, the CCP penetrates societies and economies abroad to shape international actors’ political and economic choices in much the same way as it does with domestic actors. Moreover, Xi leverages the economic opportunities offered by China’s vast market both to induce and to coerce others to adopt his policy preferences. Finally, Xi’s model is underpinned by the hard power capability of an increasingly formidable Chinese military.

      Will China succeed? Xi and many other top Chinese officials express confidence that the answer is yes. They argue that their efforts are already bearing fruit, aided by the inexorable trends of globalization and technological change, as well as the decline of the United States. As former senior Chinese official He Yafei has suggested, “Pax Americana is no more.”² The dominant narrative in China is that the shift in the balance of power is already well underway, and the outcome is inevitable.

Yet there are signals that such confidence may be misplaced. Even as Xi’s strategy achieves gains in the near term, it simultaneously creates conditions that constrain its success over the longer term. The greater the degree of CCP control or economic coercion that Xi exerts, the less credibility and attraction many of his initiatives hold for others and the more challenging additional gains become. Actors in the international community possesses agency that is not available to Chinese citizens. As the discussion of China and the pandemic later on in this chapter reveals, for example, the same elements of state mobilization, penetration, and coercion that achieved success within China played out very differently on

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