Will China’s support for nations fighting Covid-19 improve its global image?
- Beijing was widely criticised for mishandling the Sars outbreak, so why is it still being condemned for helping nations tackle the coronavirus pandemic?
- One analyst says US officials are attacking China to shift attention away from the pressures they are under at home
At that time, Beijing paid a huge price – in human lives and global standing – to contain the pneumonia-like disease.
Beijing’s mishandling of the Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) crisis – including initially covering it up and misleading the public about the spread of a virus that killed hundreds of people around the world between November 2002 and July 2003 – was widely seen as its worst international embarrassment since the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
However, despite the criticism, China, which was then the world’s sixth-largest economy, quickly got back on its feet, and was embraced by Western businesses and investors who raced to build factories in the world’s most populous country.
Just days after China’s rare admission of the mistakes it had made in handling Sars – and the firing of the nation’s health minister and mayor of Beijing – Jean-Pierre Raffarin, then French prime minister, visited the Chinese capital and met then Chinese president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao.
Weeks later, in one of the most high-profile engagements with Western powers, Hu joined the leaders of the Group of Eight – the eight most industrialised powers that Beijing used to view as the world’s “rich men’s club” – for a special meeting in the French town of Evian-les-Bains, where he also held separate meetings with then French president Jacques Chirac and then US President George W. Bush.