Corporate DispatchPro MATTHEW BUGEJA
China, COVID19, and the future The novel coronavirus has impacted the overwhelmingly vast majority of countries and territories on the planet, with only a handful of countries so far saying that they are free from the pandemic. The country which has been most heavily affected by the COVID19 outbreak, from a geopolitical standpoint, is arguably China. It was the country in which COVID19 seems to have originated, although, as yet, the global scientific community is still unsure as to how it made the jump from bats into human beings. That is something we will find at some point in the months ahead. But for now, allow us to focus our gaze on China, the geopolitical and economic behemoth itself. Beijing’s power has been on the rise in the past decade or so, and arguably its role has grown even more prominent since the election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016. With the United States seemingly taking a step back from global leadership, China, along with the European Union, have sought to fill the void - the EU due to necessity, and China rather enthusiastically. It had previously sought to expand its influence through economic ties with the One Belt, One Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, a Chineseled multilateral institution based in China, offering assistance to a number of countries that institutions, such as the World Bank, saw as not being in a position to meet their criteria for economic assistance. This has seen China’s influence grow considerably. Then, sometime in early to mid-December 2019, the novel coronavirus made the jump to human beings, and proved to have all of the characteristics of a highly contagious virus. It spread through not only symptomatic patients, but also asymptomatic 71
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