China moves to take advantage of Covid-19 in South Asia

China has moved to take advantage of the Covid-19 crisis to spread its tentacles in the neighbourhood of India—promising South Asian nations access to the vaccines to fight the virus and pledging to expand infrastructure projects under its controversial Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) in the region.

Apart from its ‘iron brother’ Pakistan, China has, of late, also moved to secure support from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal to restart works on the BRI infrastructure projects, which remained stalled during the past few months due to the shutdowns imposed to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.

Though it has drawn flak for using the BRI projects as instruments of its debt-trap diplomacy, China again started projecting its controversial cross-continental connectivity initiative as a key to speed up the post-Covid-19 economic recovery, including in the neighbourhood of India.

China’s vice foreign minister Luo Zhaohui had a video conference with his counterparts in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan last Thursday to build “political consensus on jointly fighting Covid-19, enhancing cooperation on containing coronavirus and restoring economic development and movement of people, and achieved positive results”.

The video-conference was a follow-up to a similar virtual meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had with his Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepalese and Sri Lankan counterparts in July.

With the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engaged in a stand-off along the disputed boundary between the two nations in eastern Ladakh since early May, New Delhi suspects Beijing’s outreach to Dhaka, Colombo and Kathmandu for providing support to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and to rebuild the economy after the crisis is in fact part of its move to woo India’s neighbours into the orbits of influence of China.

Beijing is ready to step up cooperation with the other four parties (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal) in testing, diagnostics, treatment and medicine, and continue to provide them with the assistance of containment supplies, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese government. The communist country has also pledged that whenever a Covid-19 vaccine would be developed and put to use in China, it would be made available to the rest of the world as “a global public good”.

China is also ready to consider providing vaccines to developing countries positively, including the four nations in the neighbourhood of India, according to the statement issued by New Delhi.

India also reached out to its neighbours to pre-empt China from using the Covid-19 crisis to spread its tentacles in the region.

Apart from supplying medicines, masks, gloves and Personal Protection Equipment for healthcare professionals in the nations in South Asia and beyond, New Delhi of late also organized training programmes on clinical trials of vaccines for nearly 90 experts from eight neighbouring countries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to using India’s vaccine production and delivery capacity to help all humanity in fighting Covid-19 crisis.

India also pledged to help interested countries in enhancing cold chain and storage capacities for the delivery of vaccines.