Last month, six Chinese medical professionals stepped off an Air Serbia jet in Belgrade to a red-carpet welcome from President Aleksandar Vucic and an array of cabinet ministers. After elbow-bump greetings, Vucic kissed Serbia’s flag, then China’s.
In Serbia, one of Beijing’s closest European allies, and a handful of other friendly countries, China is providing on-the-ground guidance to help battle the coronavirus that has swept around the world.
The outreach is part of a wider push by Beijing to assert global leadership in battling COVID-19 after facing criticism from Washington and elsewhere that it fumbled its early response to the outbreak, believed to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
These efforts by Beijing come as western governments, already wary of China’s rising influence around the world, including through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, are struggling with their own mounting coronavirus death tolls.
They are part of a long-running effort by China to strike a benevolent posture abroad to offset worries about its growing economic and military might, while presenting alternatives – such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank it set up in 2016 – to Western dominance of global institutions.
“There is no doubt that China will use the COVID-19 outbreak to further what China views as acting in its own national interest,” said Gordon Houlden, a former Canadian diplomat and the director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute.
“That will include pushing its own governance model, in this case its methodology of epidemiology,” he said.
That methodology is based on the aggressive and comprehensive approach China took to combat the virus, including the lockdown of Wuhan, and the know-how it has built as the first country to suffer an outbreak of the disease.
China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, at a press conference on Thursday, said the aim of sending medical teams was to share China’s experiences combatting the virus, not to export its governance model abroad.
In addition to Serbia, Beijing has sent medical teams to Cambodia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Pakistan, Venezuela and Italy, the only G7 nation to join the Belt and Road Initiative and which has been devastated by the coronavirus. Last week, a 12-member Chinese medical team arrived in the Philippines to aid in the fight against the virus.
The outreach is on top of the donation or sale of supplies to some 90 countries, including rivals such as the United States, as well as numerous videoconferences with countries and international organisations to share its know-how, according to the China International Development Cooperation Agency.
“We hope that other countries will not repeat China’s tragedies,” Peng Zhiqiang, a specialist from the Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and head of the Chinese team in Serbia, said by phone from Belgrade.
