China Is Flailing in a Post-Coronavirus World

Beijing’s propagandists believe the coronavirus pandemic will bring about the end of U.S. hegemony, “the American Century” as they call it.

They are right in one narrow sense. The disease, which has reached almost every country and crippled societies across continents, has the feel of an epoch-ending event. What is likely to end, however, is not U.S. leadership. It’s Beijing’s audacious grab for global dominance.

The trend of elite thinking at the moment is that China has already shoved America aside. “This is the first great crisis of the post-American world,” tweeted Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, on April 1.

That’s music to the ears of Xi Jinping, China’s ambitious leader. He has been busy capitalizing on the crisis, trying to use the pandemic, which his country started, to extend Chinese influence. For instance, Xi, in a mid-March phone call with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti, rolled out his “Health Silk Road” initiative to show his regime’s responsibility as a global citizen.

There’s a limit to how far China can make gains, however. For one thing, Beijing’s typically selfish behavior has caused uproars elsewhere. One uproar resulted when China sold Conti’s Italy medical protective gear that Italians had earlier donated to Beijing a few weeks earlier.

China’s main problem, however, is not irate Italians; it is that the disease has finished off the post-Cold War period, a time of peace, prosperity, and globalization.

That period was unusually beneficial for the Chinese state. In a globalizing world, Americans and others poured money and technology into China at unprecedented quantities because, it was thought, politics no longer mattered.

Many elites still believe more globalization is the answer to the coronavirus epidemic. “Wealth comes from communication, collaboration, and competition,” writes Matthew Rooney, managing director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. “Security comes from cooperation that limits the scope for conflict.”

All this may be true, but China has been undermining cooperation—and globalization—in two principal ways. First, it has been acting maliciously during the epidemic. Chinese leaders from about the second week in December knew or had to know that the coronavirus was transmissible person-to-person. They not only concealed this fact for weeks—grossly irresponsible by itself—but also tried to mislead the world into thinking the pathogen was not contagious in this fashion. At the same time, Chinese leaders pressured countries not to impose restrictions on arrivals from their country. President Donald Trump, at his April 18 press briefing, wondered whether Beijing “deliberately” allowed the virus to spread beyond China.

RTWT.