With virus cases dropping…China moves to challange America as a world leader….

Now, the global failures in confronting the pandemic from Europe to the United States have given the Chinese leadership a platform to prove its model works — and potentially gain some lasting geopolitical currency.

As it has done in the past, the Chinese state is using its extensive tools and deep pockets to build partnerships around the world, relying on trade, investments and, in this case, an advantageous position as the world’s largest maker of medicines and protective masks. The largess is going a long way to help temper popular anger over its initial mishandling of the outbreak that is now wreaking havoc on every continent bar Antarctica.

“I don’t know and now I don’t care,” Michele Geraci, a former under secretary in the Italian economic development ministry, said in an interview when asked if the assistance reflected China’s geopolitical ambitions as much as humanitarian concerns.

He said the urgent issue was to provide aid to save lives, something that Italy’s allies in the European Union had been unable or unwilling to do.

“If somebody is worried China is doing too much, the gap is open to other countries,” he said. “This is what other countries should do.”

China has long aspired to assert a more prominent role in the United Nations and other international organizations while projecting its political, economic and military influence in more and more parts of the world — at times in direct competition with the United States.

“China is now trying to repair its severely damaged international image due to its mishandling of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January,” Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, wrote in an email.

“Donating medical supplies shows China is a responsible and generous world power,” he added. “It is also touting its success in containing the coronavirus outbreak to suggest its one-party regime is superior to the bumbling democracies in the West, in particular the U.S.”….

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Li Xingqian, the director of international trade at the commerce ministry in Beijing, said in a recent briefing that the government had not issued any rule to stop exports, but simply needed to meet strong domestic demand for masks and other protective equipment.

For countries on the receiving end of China’s largess, questions about the country’s motives have largely taken a back seat. That has been especially clear in Iraq, a country that has been a focus of American foreign policy for decades.

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