China Briefing | Coronavirus: a contrarian view on why not all hope is lost for US-China ties

Fiery exchanges and a blame game over Covid-19 have some fretting about a full-on Cold War – or, worse, a hot one in the South China Sea

But with shared challenges looming – not least of them the prospect of a leadership crisis in North Korea – this may be a case of ‘fight, don’t break’

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A hoarding in Times Square, New York, thanks front-line workers involved in the fight against the coronavirus. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 9:15am, 2 May 2020Updated: 9:15am, 2 May 2020

At a time when pundits debate how the coronavirus pandemic will reshape not only peoples’ lives around the world but also the international order, and try to make sense of mounting uncertainties, there seems to be one great certainty they agree on: That US-China relations are going from bad to worse. The world’s two largest economies have been at each other’s throats constantly ever since the pandemic started.

Despite the doom and gloom, however, it is too early to paint the intertwined and increasingly complicated bilateral ties in black and white from now onwards. I would like to offer a contrarian view that there is more than meets the eye as Beijing and Washington manoeuvre for a post-virus world.

For the moment, media reports and commentaries have painted a stark picture.

Instead of seizing the opportunity to join hands to lead the campaign against a virus that has killed over 200,000 people and battered economies, Washington and Beijing have engaged in a dangerous game of blaming each other for their own early lapses and late responses in tackling the outbreak.

Washington appears to have gained an upper hand in the blame game. US President Donald Trump may have stopped calling the coronavirus the “China virus” or the “Chinese virus”, after he was criticised for stigmatising and encouraging racist and xenophobic attacks on Asian Americans, among other things, but senior officials including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other China hawks have been given a free rein in their relentless attacks on China – accusing Beijing of lying and spreading disinformation – and in withholding funding for the World Health Organisation which Washington has blasted for siding with China.

The US state of Missouri has filed a lawsuit against the Chinese government, alleging it had covered up and done little to stop the spread of the virus, and the state of Mississippi has said it will follow suit. Meanwhile in the US congress, members are reportedly working on several hundred pieces of legislation targeting China.