There are valid questions about how China handled coronavirus but advocating hostility won't help

The Covid-19 crisis has sharpened the UK’s China debate, but disengagement will only make such situations more difficult to handle in the future, writes Tim Summers

China was the first country to have to deal with the coronavirus outbreak (AFP/Getty)

In the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis, when the vast majority of cases were in China’s Hubei province, the tenor of Sino-British relations was one of sympathy and cooperation. Medical supplies were dispatched, and scientific collaboration encouraged. Indeed, researchers from MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University were among the first to analyse the virus.

By March, however, as the UK itself faced an escalating crisis, sentiment started to shift. While the government has continued publicly to emphasise the importance of cooperation with China, a more hostile tone entered the public debate. Government sources reportedly expressed frustration with the initial Chinese response and called for a “reckoning” with Beijing.

On 5 April, these calls were escalated as advocacy group, The Henry Jackson Society, called for legal action to demand that China pay US$4 trillion in “compensation”. The “battle that would ensue”, their report concludes, “would be nothing, if not historic”. The report is based on a rough and ready calculation of the fiscal stimulus provided by G7 governments, and the assumption that the blame for the coronavirus pandemic can be placed entirely at Beijing’s door, arguing that the Chinese authorities did not provide “prompt, accurate, and full accounts of emerging infections” to the World Health Organisation (WHO).