Xi Jinping hopes that his ‘Health Silk Road' can justify his refusal for a WHO-led probe into the pandemic

There is no doubt that China has been stained by its mishandling of the Wuhan contagion and the world had to pay a huge price for its wilful suppression of facts that led to the pandemic of our lifetime. And though it has been trying to buy back goodwill by supplying vaccines and medical kits to the needy and affected countries, its rigidity against the global probe into the origins of the virus is proving counter-productive. Porosity has to work both ways but China is adamant about the denial of its role in the spread of COVID-19, claiming it was as much a victim as everyone else. The problem is that the more it tries to disown its part in exacerbating matters, the more the trust deficit piles up against its “Health Silk Route”, a diplomatic initiative to heal the world and, thus, silence the critics. Now even the World Health Organisation, which came under fire for buying into China’s story in the initial days of the outbreak, is “very disappointed” with it. That’s because China has still not cleared the entry of a team of international experts tasked with investigating the origins of the virus. But China sees the mission as part of yet another global shaming effort and this stand-offish approach is certainly not doing anything to obviate its complicity in hiding the scale of the pandemic.

Its seemingly altruistic effort to offer test kits earlier and the vaccine now has clearly backfired. With the First World and even its allies like Turkey rejecting the faulty test kits, it had hoped to dump its vaccines on lesser developed countries. But with domestic scepticism over them and little or no information available about their safety or efficacy vis-à-vis Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, even its neighbours are wary of picking them up. Besides, the conditional nature of the deals has put even ASEAN nations on the back foot, with China demanding that they withdraw support to a demand for a global probe into the origins of the virus. So, some of these nations have ended up sealing deals with the Western pharma majors. Suspected of hegemonistic designs by nations it had debt-trapped, they are even going cold on its much-touted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), seemingly a strategic cooperation but practically an economic slavery of sorts. So China is betting big on healthcare dependence, not only to deflect the negativity against it but to boost the market for its science and bio-tech sectors. Its desperation can be gauged from the fact that its controlled media is publishing images of normal life with concerts, parties and celebrations to show how it has tamed the pandemic. But reports of cluster outbreaks demolish such planted narratives. Despite the unease of nations, China is continuing to accelerate its production line of vaccines and supplying millions of doses in lesser time than the other pharma majors so that even countries not keen on sourcing from it are bound to do so. It has already signed deals with Malaysia and the Philippines, hoping that it would prevent them from talking against Beijing’s expansionist ambitions. China is cleverly using its vaccine as a bait to push its agenda. In fact, its “health first” is just an umbrella approach to spread wings across the greatest constituency it can mine for its use, the public health systems of various nations. A Hong Kong-based brokerage firm has estimated that if China can capture just 15 per cent of the market in the middle and low-income countries, it would net around $2.8 billion in vaccine sales and command the global health economy. In fact, China’s vaccine push could help it revive its infrastructure invasion in other nations, which has clearly been hit by the pandemic. It’s believed that it has already got E-commerce giant Alibaba to build warehouses in Ethiopia and Dubai that will serve as vaccine distribution hubs for Africa and the Middle East. And that it is already building vaccine production facilities in countries like Brazil, Morocco and Indonesia which have participated in trials, too. But the question is will it be able to negotiate its image through such deals while being allergic to global scrutiny? For the world has seen through much of China’s designs and is unlikely to be taken in by President Xi Jinping’s new agenda of building a “community of common health”.