Western governments are sorely underestimating how dependent they are on China

Editorial: On some measures, the country is now the world’s largest economy and can also be fairly ranked as a military superpower

Trump has been quick to point the finger at Beijing for the coronavirus crisis (Getty)

As the formal but ill-defined prime ministerial stand-in, Dominic Raab has sometimes appeared hesitant to take the kind of decisions that only prime ministers can and should take, such as extending the lockdown. However, this week, Mr Raab asserted something with real clarity that the world as a whole is only slowly coming to terms with: that there can be no return to “business as usual” with China when the coronavirus pandemic passes.

Perhaps China is sensing this too. The surprise revision of the latest death toll for Wuhan, whence the virus came, only lends weight to the suspicion that China has been massaging its coronavirus statistics for some time. Indeed, it is widely accepted that China underplayed the Covid-19 outbreak for too long, misleading the World Health Organisation and others about the ease of human-to-human transmission. Some of the doctors who attempted to warn the world have since died of Covid-19.

Regardless of how such early misunderstandings (to put it politely) about the disease arose, they have enraged Donald Trump, and cost the world dear. Questions are rightly being asked about the reliability of Chinese official data – and more fundamentally about why China and other countries still permit sometimes unsanitary wildlife markets, which have long proved to be incubators for zoonotic diseases.

It is an incomprehensible level of complacency in a country where the power of the state is absolute. If nothing is done to close these live wildlife markets, then another, more deadly virus could easily emerge again. Given the cost in human life and to the world’s economies of these pandemics, including in China itself, perhaps Beijing will now reassess not only its approach to its too-frequent public health emergencies, but also its wider place in the world.

Ever since Deng Xiaoping​ made the strategic decision four decades ago for China to rejoin the world economy, it has found it increasingly difficult to know its own strength. On some measures, it is now the world’s largest economy and can also be fairly ranked as a military superpower. The Belt and Road Initiative has extended Chinese economic interests and diplomatic influence from Papua New Guinea to Italy. Many of the world’s most powerful new technologies and the raw materials behind them are effectively controlled by China – most notably battery-powered electric cars. The controversial role being played by Huawei in building Britain’s 5G network shows the sensitivities and suspicions that are growing up.

China’s sheer size and economic power are a strength, but they have long disquieted rivals. America’s yawning trade deficits with China, still the principal global economic imbalance, contributed to the financial crash in 2008, and the subsequent Great Recession. China’s rapid industrialisation has exacerbated the climate emergency. The wider world is appalled by the oppression of a million Uighur Muslims, of democracy protesters in Hong Kong, of Tibet and the bullying of Taiwan (a de facto independent state that had the temerity to question Beijing’s attempts to control the spread of Covid-19). A bigger military and a more assertive foreign policy have alarmed its closest neighbours.

China, thus far, has not always lived up to the status in the world it now enjoys. A country deeply scarred by its long and unhappy experience of cruel occupation and division at the hands of European powers and Japan is now united and as powerful as ever in its very long history.

It has nothing to prove, and should now try to engage more constructively with its western friends and partners. China is sometimes regarded as a security threat to the west, but it has no major territorial ambitions outside its own back yard, and its industrial prowess has been a gift to western consumers, who enjoy their Chinese-made clothes and iPhones, and the value they offer.

China’s export success is not only built on cynical currency manipulation or unfair trading practices as the White House says. China is also a high productivity, lower-cost base for every multinational corporation. Western governments and companies now fret about just-in-time supply chains stretching back to China, and its dominance in the production of PPE, ventilators and other vital equipment. Yet no other country on Earth has the capacity to meet this challenge. The west cannot do without China, even if it wished to. Both sides have their grievances, but all are amenable to normal diplomatic agreement and cooperation through existing forums such as the G20. As China’s economy has crashed and it too has lost so many lives as we get through this crisis, Beijing and Washington may come to realise that they have more in common than that which divides them.