A Belt, a Road, a Trade War, and a Pandemic: Exploring Global Relations and Governance

Abstract

At the time of the preparation of this April 2020 issue (Volume 6, Number 1) of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal, the world is deep in the grip of a horrific novel conronavirus (nCoV) pneumonia pandemic which the World Health Organization has officially named “COVID-19” that in a global massacre has taken away more than 370 thousand innocent lives around the world by the end of May 2020 and permanently damaged the health of millions more among the rest of the more than 6 million people infected by the virus by then, with no sign of slowing down in infection rates and fatalities. After the initial large-scale macabre outbreak in the city of Wuhan in the Hebei province of the People’s Republic of China in late 2019, the deadly disease soon spread throughout the world to all continents due to the exponentially increased international human mobility greatly aided by the convenience of modern means of transport unseen during the time of the last China-originated related deadly disease, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) of 2002-2004 (the 2019’s Wuhan new virus strain has been officially named the “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2)). More significantly for China-watchers in the academic domain of domestic and international political economy, besides being a global public health crisis, the speedy and deadly spread of the pandemic has quickly taken on a political dimension, as attention is increasingly being directed towards China’s political governance model as a factor in the global spread of the deadly vector, and how the pandemic and its mounting death toll across countries are affecting China’s international image and influence that it has been ambitiously building not least through President Xi Jinping’s signature “One Belt, One Road”, later renamed “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Keywords: Belt and Road Initiative, trade war, global relations and governance, China, Wuhan, novel coronavirus pneumonia, pandemic, COVID-19, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China’s political governance model