On 13 January 2021, at Indonesia’s Presidential Palace in the capital city of Jakarta, the country’s President Joko Widodo received his first dose of the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Media, including Chinese state news network CGTN, were invited to broadcast the event, which took place against the backdrop of a large red and white banner reading ‘safe and halal vaccine’ in Indonesian (CGTN, 2021c). Widodo was the first Indonesian to be vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, closely followed by the country’s health and military chiefs, in an effort to demonstrate the safety of the vaccine to fellow citizens.

At the time of Widodo’s first dose, official data – which are widely understood to be a substantial underestimate – suggested that more than 24,000 Indonesians had already died of COVID-19 (Xinhua, 2021d). Over the following six months, Indonesia would become China’s largest customer for COVID-19 vaccines, purchasing over 50 million doses up to the end of June 2021.

Dur ing the initial months of the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, China emerged as the key supplier to countries of the Global South. Doses produced by Western manufacturers, on the other hand, were largely bought up by wealthy states in North America and Europe, which had seen severe health impacts from the pandemic, and made little effort to conceal their ‘vaccine nationalism’ despite warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO) of its pitfalls (Eaton, 2021).

China’s status as the principal supplier of vaccines to the Global South sparked concerns among media, commentators and some policymakers that China was ‘beating’ the United States and other Western players in ‘vaccine diplomacy’ (Smith, 2021). Relatedly, suspicion arose that – as one article in the British broadsheet The Times put it – China aimed to use its vaccines to ‘establish [a] new world order’ (Tang, 2021).

On the other hand, Chinese officials worked hard to frame the country’s vaccines as a ‘global public good’. At a virtual event to launch the 73rd World Health Assembly in May 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic was subsiding in China but raging around most of the rest of the world, President Xi Jinping (2020) proclaimed: ‘COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good.