This chapter describes and explains China’s official donations of COVID-19 vaccines to countries of the Global South during the first six months of 2021. The first section contrasts media narratives and China’s official framing of its vaccine donations, before arguing that these rhetorical debates are not very productive in understanding the actual distribution of Chinese vaccine donations. The second section maps these donations empirically and analyses the factors shaping the choices of the Chinese government about where to deliver vaccines during the initial overseas rollout, including ‘moving the anti-pandemic barrier forward’ by mitigating the risk of imported infections, promoting regional stability, and strengthening established ties with neighbours. This section also highlights some similarities between Chinese vaccine donations and its established aid practices. The third and final section illustrates these dynamics through the case studies of Myanmar and Pakistan.

Narratives on Chinese vaccine supplies

China’s economic engagement with the Global South has long been viewed with suspicion. In particular, the so-called ‘debt trap diplomacy’ narrative posits that China lures countries into debt in order to take control of their strategic assets (Chellaney, 2017). This narrative has been widely debunked by academic analyses (Brautigam, 2020; Singh, 2021), but remains influential among policymakers in North America and Europe.

China has similarly been accused of using vaccine donations as a tool of geopolitics. In February 2021, the New York Times described coronavirus vaccines as ‘a new currency for international diplomacy’ (Mashal and Yee, 2021), and the notion that a strategic programme of ‘vaccine diplomacy’ in competition with the West has driven Chinese vaccine distribution is pervasive. At its most extreme end this viewpoint situates vaccines at the centre of a competition for a ‘new world order’ between China on the one hand and the US and its allies on the other (Greenwald and Margolis, 2020; Tang, 2021). For example, in April 2021 an article in the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine argued that ‘vaccines will shape the new geopolitical order’, and contended that ‘Russia and China have begun supplying vaccines in exchange for favourable foreignpolicy concessions’ (Frankel Pratt and Levin, 2021).