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Medical supplies from China will be unloaded at Cairo International Airport, May 2020
Photo: Wu Huiwo / XinHua / dpa
"All my personal hopes are directed towards China and its president," the Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić hurled at the EU states in March of last year, because "European solidarity does not exist." The reason for his public outburst was the ban on the export of masks and other medical goods from the European Union at the start of the pandemic.
To the author
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Jens Jeske / imago images
Omid Nouripour,
born in 1975, grew up in Iran and now lives in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin.
Since September 2006 he has been a member of Alliance 90 / The Greens in the Bundestag.
Nouripour, a representative of the Realo wing of the Greens, is the group's foreign policy spokesman.
What followed was a Chinese "mask diplomacy" that continues to this day.
Airplanes from China landed around the world and delivered masks that were effective in the media.
Sometimes you had the feeling that there were more cameras in front of the aircraft when it landed than there were usable masks in the hold.
Beijing's impression was always the same: The Chinese Communist Party is saving the world.
It was not discussed that the masks were sold at a high price, that buyer states were sometimes unilaterally obliged to keep silent about the prices, that in some cases the bills arrived unannounced and only after this PR show by registered mail at the embassies of the respective recipient states in Beijing .
Not even about the fact that the Chinese aid deliveries to Serbia were paid for by the European Union in solidarity with Europe.
At times one had the feeling that there were more cameras with them when the Chinese planes landed than there were usable masks in the hold.
Beijing continues to play the world's savior in the pandemic to this day for a number of reasons.
On the one hand, it is about distracting from the failure of your own system when the pandemic broke out.
If China's autocracy had a touch of error culture, the outbreak of the new virus in Wuhan would not have been concealed for many weeks, despite warnings from doctors in the region.
Probably the crucial time that was missing in the end to contain the virus in time.
But the People's Congress in Hubei Province, where Wuhan City is located, should have admitted bad news and mistakes in January 2020.
But that is exactly what the CP is least able to do.
The fact that China is now, more than 14 months after the virus outbreak, is letting an international investigation team into the country - but not even to the key facilities in Wuhan - only looks like a fig leaf the size of a square millimeter.
The second and most important reason was the fear of the stability of one's own system.
Since March last year, the main news in China to its own people has been that the CP is managing the pandemic better than the rest of the world.
In the Chinese state propaganda, new infections are traced back to imported pork knuckles from Germany or pork heads from the USA.
This overemphasis on one's own glamor can only be explained by the Chinese state party's lack of a culture of error.
If your own failure can no longer be concealed, then you point to the supposedly even greater failure of others.
Whether the latter is actually the case cannot be reliably verified at the moment, because the Chinese leadership does not allow independent reporting from the Chinese provinces.
The fact that Beijing has now officially declared the CP's systemic rivalry with the liberal democracies can also be explained against this background.
The third reason is classic geostrategy.
The much-cited excessive influence of China on the World Health Organization is one of many instruments with which the CP is trying to become the leading power.
This goes hand in hand with a mixture of involvement in international organizations, an investment policy that simply ignores "annoying" ecological, social or human rights standards, and an anti-Western rhetoric that resonates with the trauma of developing countries from the colonial era.
It is not for nothing that the world's second largest economy continues to insist on being a »developing country«.
That catches on in the current situation because the rich countries hardly give the impression that they even take note of the situation of the poorest.
The situation is highly dramatic: In the two extreme violence-ridden states Afghanistan and Mexico, far more people have died of corona and the consequences of the pandemic for the economy and the health system than of firearms or explosives in the last ten months.
In Yemen at the end of 2020 there were just a three-digit number of test kits.
And not only is the pandemic raging across the entire African continent, but also a merciless recession.
Numerous states are excluded from the financial market, so they can hardly refinance themselves.
And in this almost hopeless situation, 14 percent of the world's population in the richest countries have reserved 52 percent of the world's vaccine doses.
The much-cited excessive influence of China on the World Health Organization is one of many instruments with which the CP is trying to become the leading power.
China now promises to vaccinate all the world's poor.
It is worth taking a closer look at the actions of the People's Republic: The quality of Chinese vaccines is highly controversial.
At the beginning it was said that the effectiveness rate was over 84 percent - almost ten percent less than the Biontech vaccine - a new study from Brazil now speaks of an effectiveness of only 50.4 percent.
With that, Beijing's slogan should actually be: "We're saving half the world".
To be fair, however, it must be said that even that would be more help than the West is currently doing.
And this is exactly where the need for action for Europeans begins.
If we as democracies do not want to permanently lose our influence in the world, we must not just look at ourselves.
The reputation of the EU in the world as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be decided in the next few months - perhaps setting the course for the next few decades.
Will the relatively wealthy European countries help so that sufficient and affordable vaccines are available for everyone as part of the UN vaccination initiative Covax?
Will new US President Joe Biden's announcement that he will join Covax help the world's poor?
Will Germany finally give up its refusal to suspend vaccine licenses?
Was it serious when all the democratic parties applauded the UN Secretary General when he called for "affordable vaccine for everyone" in the plenary session of the German Bundestag a few weeks ago?
This is not just a question of morality or one of containing the pandemic in a globalized world.
It's also a question of tough geostrategy.
After all, the systemic rivalry with China is the most important international conflict of the 21st century.
If we want to survive as democracies, we have to stand by those who need us in this most difficult crisis since the Second World War.
Otherwise others will do the same - with serious consequences for democracy worldwide.
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