Conley Tyler, M; Liu, T; Mirchandani, M; Suri, S; Warjri, LB
(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020-06-01)
Over recent weeks, the US and China have used increasingly strong rhetoric around the COVID-19 pandemic. The relationship between the US and China was already bad before the crisis, and distrust and animosity have only grown with the war on words over who is responsible for the global pandemic. This had real-life consequences in late March when a meeting of the G7 failed to agree on a joint statement following the US State Department’s insistence on referring to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan Virus” (1). How have the two countries been constructing the other as the enemy and what effect has this had on diplomacy in the region?