As of February 29, China’s daily output of protective face masks had increased 12-fold from the start of the month to 116 million units, the National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the export of masks was not banned and that their sale would be in line with market principles.

“Face masks have become the world’s most strategic commodity, coveted by most governments,” said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington.

“The world urgently needs China to augment mask exports before the virus explodes in the US. Its experience in dealing with the outbreak, combined with its manufacturing capacity will give it a huge advantage on the international stage,” he said.

The WHO earlier described Beijing’s response to the outbreak as “perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history”.

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Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, took a more balanced view of Beijing’s handling of the outbreak.

“With the WHO focusing on technical matters and being as diplomatic as possible to China, the Chinese government will have much scope to perpetuate its propaganda line,” he said.

“[But] Many people, both in China and beyond will see through it and see that the Chinese government’s failures in its early stage was very problematic, and its draconian measures unacceptable,” he said, referring to government cover-up and the controversial lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province that forced millions of people into isolation and resulted in a high fatality rate in the epicentre.

“However, most will probably buy into the Chinese narrative, particularly as the spread of the virus declines in China while it continues rising elsewhere,” Tsang said.

Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, said Beijing’s handling of the outbreak could be a useful reference point for other countries.

“China’s experience highlights the importance of transparency and the need to take decisive action. It also shows the importance of treating severe cases in time and preventing hospital-acquired infections,” he said.

“That said, China’s success in stabilising the situation is unique and hardly replicable in other countries. Indeed, thus far we haven’t seen any country copy China.”

To that end, the propaganda department of the party’s Central Committee has published a book – titled Da Guo Zhan “Yi”, or Big Country Fights an Epidemic, Xinhua reported last week, adding that versions in English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic are set to be released soon.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said that while the book might be well received within China that would not be the case everywhere.

“China did well in controlling the disease, but it paid the price in [people’s] lives,” he said. “And political systems vary. People are different. While Chinese are used to doing what the authorities say, people in other countries value personal rights and freedom.”

Sourabh Gupta, a policy specialist at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, said Beijing had to find the right balance in the way it presented itself to other nations.

“Beijing wants to be seen as a responsible stakeholder, contributing to the public health welfare of the international community and of developing and poor countries in particular,” he said.

“At the same time, it must be alert to the potential accusation that it is engaging in ‘disaster opportunism’, as in piggybacking on the misery of communities overseas to project an air of benevolence and munificence.”