There are valid questions about how China handled coronavirus but advocating hostility won't help

The Covid-19 crisis has sharpened the UK’s China debate, but disengagement will only make such situations more difficult to handle in the future, writes Tim Summers

China was the first country to have to deal with the coronavirus outbreak (AFP/Getty)

In the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis, when the vast majority of cases were in China’s Hubei province, the tenor of Sino-British relations was one of sympathy and cooperation. Medical supplies were dispatched, and scientific collaboration encouraged. Indeed, researchers from MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University were among the first to analyse the virus.

By March, however, as the UK itself faced an escalating crisis, sentiment started to shift. While the government has continued publicly to emphasise the importance of cooperation with China, a more hostile tone entered the public debate. Government sources reportedly expressed frustration with the initial Chinese response and called for a “reckoning” with Beijing.

On 5 April, these calls were escalated as advocacy group, The Henry Jackson Society, called for legal action to demand that China pay US$4 trillion in “compensation”. The “battle that would ensue”, their report concludes, “would be nothing, if not historic”. The report is based on a rough and ready calculation of the fiscal stimulus provided by G7 governments, and the assumption that the blame for the coronavirus pandemic can be placed entirely at Beijing’s door, arguing that the Chinese authorities did not provide “prompt, accurate, and full accounts of emerging infections” to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

This week the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) echoed this sentiment and accused China of “propagating disinformation”. It also argued that “China should have played a central role in collecting data on its spread and enabling scientists around the world to develop a fast and effective response”.

Yet, from late December, that is what happened. Initial cases were reported to the WHO on 31 December, and the novel coronavirus strain isolated in China a week later. This not mentioned in the FAC report and ignored in the Henry Jackson Society’s argument.

Debate over the exact sequence of events will continue for years, with plenty of important issues remaining unclear, such as when it first became apparent that the virus was highly transmissible between humans, and why the authorities in Wuhan did not take proactive steps to reduce social interaction earlier in January. These are valid questions.

But the fact there are many more unknowns than knowns is all the more reason for analytical humility. As many governments – democratic or not – have discovered, responding effectively to Covid-19 is far from straightforward. In this context, it is all the more important to keep the politics and hostility from getting out of hand.

The debates in the UK do not come in a vacuum, but amid growing contestation over the UK’s policy towards China. The opportunities offered by China’s economic growth and the willingness of much of its population to engage more actively with the UK in education and culture are increasingly being set against the perceived security risks from a more powerful China. Both the Henry Jackson Society and the FAC have recently called for British naval operations in the South China Sea

Over the last few decades the UK and China have worked together to deal with a range of challenges, such as climate change and international development. Covid-19 is one such challenge.

It has not been the return of geopolitics which has sent the world into turmoil in 2020, but an infectious disease. But the geopolitical mindset – and the interests which it serves – remain tenacious. Advocating disengagement and hostility is not going to help address the current crisis, or the other challenges that face humanity as a whole.