How China Set Its Response to COVID-19 From Crisis to Opportunity: The response to COVID-19 contrasts with the CCP’s reaction to previous health crises, when the approach was to downplay the extent of the virus.

Since the new coronavirus started circulating in China’s Hubei province, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been committed to showing great efficiency in dealing with the health crisis. At the international level, it strove to project an image of China as a responsible power and to restore its reputation at a time when the rest of the world was blaming it for causing the pandemic. Indeed, to prove its readiness and goodwill, China stepped in to send aid to countries in distress, which were unprepared to cope with the pandemic. Nationally, the CCP soon took strict measures to contain the virus, which actually led to a decrease in the number of infections during the first wave.