China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged the world in remarks Sunday to “champion” global governance and globalization in light of the ongoing Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
“Globalization, multilateralism and global governance should be championed and optimized in the post COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic world,” Chinese state media quoted Wang as saying, speaking to reporters in an extended session. In a rare admission, Wang also said that globalization creates some problems, including “unbalanced” development on a worldwide scale. He offered a novel solution for these issues.
“We need to mitigate the unbalanced regional developmental issues and inequality created by globalization, but the issue of globalization needs to be solved with globalization,” Wang reportedly said. “The most important lesson that can be learned from the [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic is that people’s lives and health are closely connected with each other’s and that all countries are in the same global village.”
Wang’s remarks are part of a greater campaign on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to diminish the power of state governments and expand the scope of international governing venues, particularly those it controls in bodies like the United Nations. Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has made multiple remarks in the past two months urging the world to develop global public health hubs – and establish them in China – and supporting maintaining centralized Chinese control of global supply chains.
Xi has mentioned expanding global governance regularly during public remarks in recent memory.
“Whether it is domestic governance or global governance, we must have people’s sense of fulfillment as the objective and continue to provide confidence and expectations of stability for the people,” Xi said after meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutérres in April 2018. “We need to keep pushing for and improving global governance to deal with this challenge.”
At that year’s BRICS summit – an economic coalition uniting China with Brazil, India, South Africa, and Russia – Xi announced “the next decade will see a profound reshaping of the global governance system.”
More recently, Xi has promised to expand China’s control of global supply chains and its pharmaceutical production capacity, nominally in an attempt to help the world fight the pandemic it created. At the World Health Assembly last week, Xi announced that China would develop a vaccine against the Chinese coronavirus and offer it for free, effectively dissuading the world’s pharmaceutical companies from conducting competing research.
Xi also announced that China would build a “global humanitarian response depot and hub” in China that would hoard medical supplies to more efficiently distribute them worldwide in the event of another pandemic.
