In February last year, as COVID-19 was sweeping through the Chinese city of Wuhan, there were sympathetic overtures from India’s diplomatic channels in Beijing.
Key points:
- Chinese state media has regularly published stories critiquing India’s vaccine rollout, an ASPI report says
- Indian netizens have pushed narratives that China “exported the virus” and India is “killing the virus”
- An expert says India is projecting itself as a democratic alternative to China
India’s ambassador to China, Vikram Misri, said the people of Wuhan had “a very special place in the hearts of the Indian people” and offered to help “in any way possible through this crisis”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote to China’s President Xi Jinping expressing his solidarity with the Chinese people and on February 29 he sent an Indian Air Force C-17 to Wuhan with 15 tonnes of medical supplies.
But a lot can change in a year. Case numbers exploded in India in 2020 and China saw its new cases drop sharply.
The mood of camaraderie has since given way to rivalry, with both nations leveraging their vaccine rollouts to solidify their leadership in Asia and across the world.
At a time when richer countries are amassing supplies of COVID-19 vaccines — something the World Health Organization says is putting the world “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” — poorer countries are desperately trying to secure their own.
Experts say China and India have eyed an opportunity and have committed to sending millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccinations abroad in the hope of securing some political goodwill in return.
India vying to be the ‘pharmacy of the world’
With India’s credibility dented by its failure to contain the virus, and China’s reputation tarnished by the widely held belief the virus originated there amid a cover-up, both are keen to deflect blame and shore up their standing in the world.
China will be relying on two domestically developed vaccine candidates while India is manufacturing and distributing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Pradeep Taneja, a senior lecturer in Asian politics at the University of Melbourne, said both nations were pulling as many diplomatic levers as they could through “vaccine diplomacy”.
Meanwhile, India — the largest producer of vaccines on the planet — has declared itself ready to be “the pharmacy of the world”, a phrase commonly used by Indian politicians and commentators.
Loading
India’s Serum Institute is producing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and hopes to be manufacturing 1 billion doses a year by the end of 2021.
It has already given doses to Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives as part of its “Vaccine Maitri” or “Vaccine Friendship” initiative.
India’s Foreign Secretary this week said Vaccine Maitri was “a practical demonstration of our belief and our approach”.
Meanwhile, China has two vaccines approved for use at home, one from the state-owned Sinopharm and the other from Sinovac Biotech.
Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and Laos have granted emergency authorisation for the Sinovac candidate, but questions about its efficacy persist.
China has insisted its vaccine rollout overseas is not politically motivated.
This week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that “by participating in international cooperation on vaccines, China seeks to make vaccines a global public good”.
He also said China was exporting vaccines to 27 countries — the vast majority of them developing ones — and providing vaccine aid to 53 nations in need.
However, experts say both sides have been engaged in carefully orchestrated media campaigns to spruik their diplomatic efforts in distributing vaccines to neighbours.
“So when vaccines arrive … the ambassador of India or ambassador of China is there to receive the vaccines,” Mr Taneja said.
“Diplomats are posting videos and pictures of the vaccines being received.”
But there has also been a trend of media and netizens amplifying negative narratives around competing vaccine candidates.
Vaccine misinformation rife as both sides spruik their rollout
A report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has highlighted the battle being waged online and in each nation’s respective media.
ASPI analyst Ariel Bogle said Chinese state media had regularly published stories critiquing India’s vaccine rollout.
“The Global Times published 20 stories about India and its vaccines in January — many of these were negative, calling into question the safety and efficacy of India’s vaccines,” said Ms Bogle, who was formerly the ABC’s technology reporter.
Meanwhile, Indian netizens have been pushing narratives that China “exported the virus” and India is “killing the virus” through inoculation — a sentiment echoed by some Indian politicians and media outlets, according to the report.
Loading
“We saw a lot of comments on, say, the Global Times Facebook page … of Indian citizens taking it upon themselves to challenge the narrative being put forward by China.”
In fact, ASPI’s analysis showed that of the 3,200 Global Times Twitter posts in January, those that mentioned the words “India” and “vaccine” had higher levels of engagement.
Many were “quote” posts where pro-Indian accounts rebuffed criticism of India’s vaccines and rollout.
There were also examples of both pro-India and Chinese state accounts sharing misinformation regarding Western vaccines such as the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate.
“[The posts were] not making a complete counterfactual [claim] about Pfizer, but rather amplifying stories that made the Pfizer vaccine look bad without providing the complete context for their audience,” Ms Bogle said.
Countries look beyond traditional alliances
The strategic rivalry is most pronounced in nations where both China and India are actively vying for influence.
Nepal — which is wedged geographically between the two — has been at the centre of this geopolitical manoeuvring, with both sides supplying vaccines.
According to Ms Bogle, an unverified quote from Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, that his country “preferred” Indian vaccines over China’s, was shared across Indian media.
“Versions of the post also appeared on Instagram, where a sample of six posts received more than 65,000 interactions, according to monitoring platform CrowdTangle,” she said.
Elsewhere, leaders have also explored options outside of traditional alliances.
Mr Taneja said Cambodia is considered to be China’s closest ally in South-East Asia, but Prime Minister Hun Sen personally rang his Indian counterpart to ask for vaccine assistance.
While Beijing has promised Cambodia 1 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine — hundreds of thousands of doses have already been delivered — the request to India “meant [Cambodia was] not confident that their demand would be met by China alone,” he said.
India could also be looking to muscle out its other regional rival, Pakistan, by using vaccine diplomacy.
Half a million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in Afghanistan earlier this month, a country where India and Pakistan vie for influence.
Only one nation ‘can satisfy the demands of citizens in every country’
China’s vaccine rollout abroad has hit a few hurdles. There have been delays in vaccine delivery to Turkey and Brazil, and continued secrecy around trial results has fuelled scepticism.
But in Africa, China has a much wider diplomatic network than India and is distributing vaccines more rapidly.
French President Emmanuel Macron warned this week that if more vaccines from Western countries did not arrive for another six to 12 months, some African nations may face “justified pressure from their people” to buy doses from China or Russia.
“And the strength of the West will be a concept, and not a reality,” he said.
India is instead relying on its vast manufacturing power for its soft-power push.
Australia’s High Commissioner to New Delhi, Barry O’Farrell, declared in December “there’s only one nation that has the manufacturing capacity” to supply every country in the world, “and that’s India”.
“India does have the capacity … in terms of producing these vaccines, but the diplomatic capacity is stretched to the limit, because India has one of the smallest foreign services [for a country its size],” Mr Taneja said.
Mr Taneja said nonetheless, this was one area India might be able to challenge rival China.
“India is playing to its strength … it’s projecting itself as a different model to China, a democracy that is prepared to help its neighbours and help other developing countries to deal with this pandemic.”
The ABC has approached the Chinese Foreign Ministry for comment.
