Weeks after Beijing was criticized by people inside China and around the world for a sluggish response to the outbreak of a new coronavirus, China’s government is trying to recast itself as a global health leader.
China’s early response to the outbreak remains shrouded in mystery, with an unclear timetable about what officials knew and when they knew it.
At the beginning of the year, as the coronavirus spread in the city of Wuhan, authorities downplayed the risk and provided little information. Lunar New Year festivities initially went forward, before Beijing dramatically reversed course as the outbreak grew. Now, Beijing is accusing others of the same thing.
The state-run news media has resumed its cheery coverage of China’s response, hailing it as a model for the world, suggesting that countries like the United States and others are acting sluggishly to contain the spread.
"Righteous, the world should thank China!" read a recent headline from Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
The opinion piece by Xinhua said the West, in particular the United States, “owes China a coronavirus apology” because it argued that the rest of world would have been embroiled in a far worse contagion had it not been for China’s response. That response included proactive prevention and control measures that have begun to slow the spread of the coronavirus that has sickened 80,565 people and killed 3,015 in China alone.
As part of its messaging effort, Beijing’s foreign ministry says it has tapped its diplomats around the world to tout China’s accomplishments through more than 400 media interviews and 300 articles.
For more than 20 years China has tried to project itself as a responsible global power, an effort threatened by the initial coronavirus response.
“China lost stature internationally as a result of its initial downplaying of the coronavirus in the first weeks of the year," said Steve Young, the former Director of the American Institute in Taiwan and Consul General in Hong Kong.
Young said China was widely criticized in particular for how it punished one of the first doctors to raise alarms over the outbreak, Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan physician who later died from the coronavirus.
Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing and a critic of the government, said the authorities initial subdued response left a lasting impression as the outbreak raced beyond Wuhan.
“It is hard for anyone to believe that China has played the role of a leader in the so-called coronavirus prevention in the world,” he said.
Beijing’s reputational damage in the United States is obvious, where the outbreak has pushed opinions of China to record lows. The latest Gallup poll, conducted Feb. 3-16, found Americans' favorable rating of China at the same level as those recorded after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when just 34% of Americans held a favorable view of the country.
Joseph Cheng, a retired political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, said the Chinese leadership is very concerned with its image because it appreciates the significance of soft power. One measure of that sensitivity was China's recent action in ordering three reporters to leave China after the newspaper published an opinion piece describing China as the "sick man of Asia."
"The leadership now wants to influence international public opinion," he said, referring to China's recent efforts to burnish its credentials as a responsible power by sharing expertise and equipment with countries seeing a surge in cases.
China now emphasizes it has shared its treatment plan with many countries.
“Specifically, we have established close technical-level communication mechanisms with organizations such as the World Health Organization, the European Union, the AU, the CARICOM, and ASEAN, and countries with high outbreaks or fragile health systems such as Korea and Iran,” Zhao Lijiang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, told a press briefing Friday.
More than two months after Chinese health authorities first reported people becoming sick with a new pathogen, Beijing is now challenging the assumption that the virus originated in Wuhan, where it was traced to a market that was illegally selling wildlife.
“Confirmed cases of #COVID19 were first found in China, but its origin is not necessarily in China,” Zhao said this week. “Where the virus originates is inconclusive.”
Zhao referred to a statement by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the most prominent epidemiologist handling this outbreak and the 2002-03 SARS outbreak, who claimed last month that "though the virus was first discovered in China, it may not have originated" there.