Chinese Diplomacy in Southeast Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“On 13 January 2020, a 61-year-old woman in Thailand was confirmed as carrying the mysterious but fearsome respiratory virus known to be circulating in China’s central Hubei province and striking down even the fit and healthy. The woman, a tourist from Wuhan, is unlucky enough to be recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the first case of COVID-19 outside China.

By March, the virus was spreading rapidly through Southeast Asia, as it was globally, and the WHO declared a pandemic.

Like the rest of the world, Southeast Asia has endured three primary waves of the pandemic. In 2020, the region was successful in keeping the worst of COVID at bay, albeit at enormous economic cost. In mid-2021, a deadly Delta wave struck, overwhelming the defences of nearly all of the region’s countries, killing tens of thousands, and threatening economic recovery. In the early months of 2022, the Omicron variant began spreading rapidly. Infections rose sharply, but not so the death rate – a much hoped for partial “decoupling” created by Omicron’s lower lethality and growing vaccine coverage. Increasingly, Southeast Asia is learning to live with COVID.

The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 should be seen in the context of a much longer period of increased Chinese attention to, and investment in, its relationships in Southeast Asia.

China seeks to build influence in Southeast Asia through its “peripheral diplomacy,” which seeks a stable and unthreatening near abroad, economic opportunity and – ultimately – a Beijing-centric regional order in which China is pre-eminent and the region’s countries defer to its interests and authority.”

Richard Maude and Dominique Fraser write for Asia Sociey.

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