Opinion: China and the world: Beyond the scourge of Coronavirus – By CHARLES ONUNAIJU
IT has been nearly seven years since Beijing launched the most far-reaching and comprehensive global development framework, the “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2013, which the World Bank acknowledged as “China-led effort to improve connectivity and regional cooperation on a trans-continental scale through large scale investments”.
But the massive infrastructure connectivity already up and running in many regions of the world and also a work in progress would be the practical expression of the construction of a community of shared future for mankind which on March 11, 2017, was included in a UN security council resolution and in September of the same year, its underlying principle of achieving shared growth through discussion and collaboration was incorporated in the UN General Assembly resolution on global governance. Some estimates suggest that over $900 billion of financing in grants and concessional loans for Belt and Road projects have been or about to be spent in more than 160 countries with three-fifths of the world population.
According to The Economist magazine, “in real terms, that dwarfs the Marshall Plan ($130 billion in today’s money) that America advanced to revive Europe’s war-ravaged economies”. China’s contribution to global economic growth from 2013-2018 on average was 28.1 percent, ranking first place in the world and largest trading partner for more than 120 countries in the world. According to a report issued last July from the Mckinsey Global Institute, from market perspective depending on China’s engagement with the world in the coming years, economic value of between $22 trillion to $37 trillion could be added or subtracted from global economy by 2040. In the Mckinsey report which analysed 186 countries, China was found to be largest export destination for 33 countries and the largest source of imports for 65. In addition to its huge presence in trade, China has also grown over the years to become a major player in global investment flows.
From 2015 to 2017, it was the world largest source of outbound foreign direct investment and second-largest recipient of inbound investment, according to the Mckinsey report. At the centre of further unlocking trade and enabling the strategic connectivity through which it could be mutually and beneficially engaged by the world, the World Bank has acknowledged that the Belt and Road Initiative would reduce time and cost of international trade and boast cumulative global output, considerably contributing to shared prosperity and human prospects, despite the existing vicissitudes of the contemporary international system.
Africa has particularly charted a brilliant course with the engagement of the China opportunities which is filling the gap of the continent’s vacuum in building a network of critical infrastructures that are opening key prospect of regional economies of scale and optimising the comparative advantages of the respective national economies in the region. There is no other international partnership with post-colonial states in Africa that has brought tangible results and outcomes as Africa-China cooperation whose concrete institutional expression has been the phenomenal Forum on China-Africa cooperation, FOCAC, founded in 2000.
With China’s enigmatic engagement with the world and the prospects it portends, how would the international community react to the outbreak of the coronavirus last December, but which grabbed international headlines from January. A monstrous, villainous virus that first hit Wuhan, capital city of China’s Hubei province, did not just threaten China but the entire global prospects not because Beijing is in the frontline of it, but even for the ethical values of our common humanity most robustly demonstrated in 2018 when Thailand teenage football players and their coach were entrapped in a horrific flooded cave.
The outbreak of the novel disease raised concern across the world but the global health governing body, the World Health Organisation urged caution and restraint in reaction, and also giving the Chinese authorities a clean bill of health in transparency and competence in managing and containing the spread of the virus after declaring Covid-19 epidemic “a public health emergency of international concern”. The World Health Organisation further added that “the only way we will defeat this outbreak is for all countries to work together in a spirit of solidarity and cooperation. We are all in this together and we can only stop it together. This is the time for facts, not fear.
This is the time for science, not rumours. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma.” In two straight years, China has organised two world import expo to bring the opportunities of China’s huge market to the world, along with other batteries of reform measures to open wider and deeper the Chinese market. A novel virus is actually not needed to pull down Chinese economy for others to add jobs or other opportunities to their economies.
As Chinese ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Zhou Pingjian said recently at a dialogue forum organised by Abuja-based Think Tank, that “it is understandable that some countries have taken necessary and appropriate preventive measures”, but added: “We disapprove of measures out of proportion”, because “as World Health Organisation insists, there is no pandemic yet and there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade”. He assured that “guided by vision of a community with a shared future for mankind, China is fulfilling its responsibility for life and health of its own people and for global public health” and that her “effective response has averted the further spread of the virus in the world”.
According to the envoy, his country is “a resilient nation that has emerged stronger from numerous trials and tribulations”, that “with its people united as one under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, CPC, with China’s institutional strength in mobilising resources for major undertaking and with strong material and technological capacities and with rich experience, China has the confidence, capacity and determination to not only win a full victory against the epidemic but also meet its economic and social development goals”.
Suffice it to summarise here that given to the fact that the theoretical foundation of the Communist Party of China is to constantly engage contradictions and contradictions are not linear categories of happy endings, the country’s governance outlook is primed to anticipate emergencies with huge national reservoir of human and material contingencies, always in place to deal and contain the excesses before it disrupts the social order and threaten stability.
Therefore, outbreak of the coronavirus is not outside the realm of emergencies anticipated by China’s system of eternal vigilance. Onunaiju is Research Director, Centre for China Studies, Utako, Abuja. Vanguard
