I've noticed China is promoting the medical response teams they've sent to those countries on WeChat. I don't want to be so cynical that I reduce Chinese goodwill to a propaganda move, but it definitely is good PR.
If somebody helps me out of the potentially deadly hole, I do not give a flying feck about the motives. And that somebody can have all the good PR s/he wants from me as a token of appreciation.
The CPC are the ones who dug the deadly hole in the first place. It's great that one of their billionaire members has some money to spare to help people out, but let's not forget they are directly responsible for this pandemic.
Yeah right, they had willfully concocted the virus and diligently sprayed it all around on their streets.
It is very convenient blaming your adversaries/competitors for your own f..ups. We could've easily shut the borders at first sign and be protected and safe. Have somebody to blame for that hole?
Plenty of other governments have made mistakes in dealing with this outbreak, but that does not absolve the CPC from responsibility.
The CPC knew about this virus for over a month before they took any action to contain it. In fact, they arrested people who were sounding the alarm. Xi is claimed to have been steering the ship for weeks before any lockdowns were put into place in Hubei province. The CPC own this global crisis. If it was not for their epic mismanagement, there would not be a pandemic.
"The CPC knew about this virus for over a month before they took any action to contain it"
You are trying to blame politicos for being who they are. Other governments behaved exactly the same. They knew very well what is coming and still kept flow of goods and people. They are just as guilty in ignoring pandemic.
Sure they did not arrest their people for "spreading panic". But that is human rights issue and is totally separate from the subject. Nobody's saying that China is the beacon of freedoms.
But sure it feels much better when one can ignore their own screw ups and pin the blame on somebody else.
Perhaps it's not clear, but i live in China and experience the result of these "politicos being who they are" first hand. This virus could and should have been stopped before it got out of Hubei. The CPC have no excuse for their ineptitude when they already went through a comparable outbreak in 2003 with SARS.
We have evidence that acting earlier was an option, because the party chief of Qianjiang (a city in Hubei) unilaterally decided to do just that. He went against the prevailing wisdom from Beijing and quarantined all coronavirus patients in that city back on January 17 - ten days after Xi Jinping claims he was on top of things and over a week before the party ordered other cities in Hubei (including the epicenter of Wuhan) to lockdown. Qianjiang is now the only city in Hubei that has lifted their lockdown, and infections have been an order of magnitude less than other cities in the province.
And that's only one case that Caixin was allowed to report on. If we had a free press here maybe we'd hear more about the abject failure of party leadership to follow the advice of specialists, but unfortunately we do not.
However, that is beside the point. The point is, this outbreak was grossly mismanaged by the CPC, and now the entire world is suffering. No matter how many lavish gifts wealthy party members bestow upon the rest of the world, it's important that we do not forget how this crisis started and who was responsible for it. Otherwise, how will we learn to avoid the next one?