China plans global expansionism through Health Silk Road amid COVID-19 pandemic

New Delhi: China is exploiting the pandemic scenario to speed up its efforts of expansionism by launching a collection of tasks. One of essentially the most debated and impressive tasks within the line is China’s Health Silk Road, whereby, the Communist nation is making using expertise to put the idea of its international growth.

Riding on the wagon of 5G expertise, China now plans to create a ‘Health Silk Road’, on traces of the BRI, taking the Chinese expertise worldwide to regulate the well being sector within the host nations. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has supplied an enormous alternative for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to use the rising tech to additional its attain and strengthen its management. 

The CCP now plans to regulate the healthcare sector within the BRI area via its complete plan of utilizing Chinese medical applied sciences, AI, medical gear, well being stacks, information facilities, and so forth. 

A more in-depth have a look at the proceedings of the ‘Two Sessions’ i.e., the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress and third session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in May 2020 – a time when the onslaught started to succeed in the height, provides an thought how the CCP deliberate to capitalise on expertise and launch its plans of growth via well being expertise. 

Live TV

The proceedings of the session stated, “major moves will focus on developing next-generation information networks, expanding 5G applications, building more charging facilities, and promoting wider use of new energy vehicles.” Further, throughout the stated National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang pressured the necessity to speed up “developing next-generation information networks and expand 5G applications.” The CCP then got here up with a USD 1.four trillion expenditure plan with 5G as the inspiration. 

Pushing the narrative worldwide to launch its formidable plans within the healthcare sector, CCP propaganda equipment flooded the communication and media networks of the world with content material highlighting China’s environment friendly dealing of the pandemic via its healthcare expertise.

People’s Daily live-streamed building of the Huoshenshan hospitals in Wuhan and tried to indicate the world the orchestrated makes an attempt of setting-up 5G base stations, functioning of 5G enabled medical session platforms, sanitization via 5G managed drones, and what not? The CCP authorities, since then, is magnifying its narrative throughout the globe ina focused and complete method via its propaganda channels and international missions.

Companies with hyperlinks to the CCP and the PLA got here up with their PR campaigns together with Alibaba and Huawei, displaying their ‘generous’ efforts to donate healthcare merchandise to nations the world over. China, via its diplomats additionally resorted to ‘healthcare’ diplomacy by donating healthcare provides throughout the preliminary days of the pandemic unfold. 

Further, fishy Chinese surveillance corporations like Dahua and Hikvision dealing with the allegations of surveillance and information thefts, used the chance to unfold worldwide via their healthcare merchandise.

In reality, China devised the technique of the Health Silk Road in 2017 by coming into into an MoU settlement with the World Health Organization (WHO) throughout the Belt and Road Forum for Health Cooperation in Beijing. China argued that the main goal of the initiative was to arrange an infrastructure to verify illness outbreaks, stop epidemics, and obtain a common well being infra via analysis in healthcare. 

During the occasion, the controversial DG of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus applauded China for the initiative and talked like a cadre of the CCP. However, the undertaking couldn’t transfer additional. China sensed a chance within the pandemic and as soon as once more threw itself to additional its new undertaking of growth via healthcare.

Earlier, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission got here up with an formidable plan to ascertain ‘health cooperation networks’ as part of the Belt and Road Initiative to additional Chinese ambitions to regulate healthcare administration throughout the BRI international locations. The MoU with WHO was step one in direction of this.

Going all-out, China has focused international locations from the creating nations of Africa to developed ones like Italy. Recently, China was in a position to persuade Italy – a rustic that faces the warmth of Chinese affect operations, to a larger extent to induce Chinese applied sciences. Besides, it’s utilizing the WHO to the fullest to increase its Health Silk Road undertaking.

When the Trump administration determined to freeze funds for the WHO in April 2020, China shortly donated USD 2 billion to assist the organisation and additional strengthen its management.

The democratic and liberal international locations the world over ought to come collectively to verify the Chinese growth to regulate the well being sector of the world by leveraging the pandemic. The main want is to deal with the Chinese disinformation marketing campaign to make sure deniability and dodge allegations of spreading the covid pandemic worldwide. 

These international locations ought to maintain pressurising China over the pandemic and maintain in search of a world investigation into this, together with the allegations of artificially creating the virus in a lab.

China has been essentially the most infamous nation indulged in stealing delicate information of residents of international international locations, attacking their privateness – the intrinsic components of their proper to lie! The international locations that imported Chinese well being gear, particularly these produced by surveillance corporations ought to make a joint inquiry over potential theft of the well being information, together with the
hypersensitive information. 

They also needs to make an inquiry over the well being merchandise donated by China or Chinese corporations as ‘goodwill’ or ‘diplomatic’ gestures. 5G applied sciences of Huawei and ZTE are dealing with worldwide backlash and international locations just like the UK, Germany, US, Australia, and a number of other others have both proven them the door or are planning to totally remove them. This international motion must be intensified and it must be ensured that these corporations are restricted to a handful of countries, if not completely eradicated from the world over.

Most importantly, all these international locations shall ban the entry of China or Chinese applied sciences of their international locations henceforth, blocking all of the entry factors of Chinese expansionist ambitions via healthcare. Finally, democratic powers want to come back collectively and collaborate to develop a robust chain of healthcare provides and medical gear.

They also needs to take into consideration launching analysis tasks on rising applied sciences in healthcare. A well being consortium of hospitals, establishments, universities, and analysis facilities on utilising AI and well being stack to battle pandemics may very well be considered. This shall not solely scale back dependence over China, however shall additionally assist the world to enhance one another to
strengthen the healthcare of respective international locations.

China plans to make use of the pandemic to its leverage to dominate the post-pandemic world. Controlling the healthcare sector and delicate information of people the world over can additional assist it to accentuate its affect operations and surveil residents worldwide from Beijing. 

The problem will not be solely to stop the BRI and Health Silk Road, somewhat, however the world additionally wants to guard the privateness and human rights of their residents by barring China’s entry into the healthcare sector. Collaboration between the liberal democracies is the important thing. It shall not solely assist to restrict China however to organize the world to battle extra effectively with potential international well being crises.