Opinion | How China can end US rivalry and realise its vision of a shared future for humanity, as the world struggles with the pandemic

I cannot imagine richer nutrients for the novel coronavirus to reproduce and spread, to flourish globally, than the United States and China continuing to descend into unabashed and undisguised rivalry, with escalating accusations each against the other. Nourish the virus with US-China competition. Or starve the virus with US-China cooperation.

Never has such cooperation been needed more urgently – to battle and contain the pandemic and to sustain and bolster the world economy. Containing the global pandemic, like bolstering the global economy, depends on US-China collaboration. If climate change is the world’s most intractable chronic problem, then Covid-19 is the world’s most severe acute problem.

My two favourite countries have a choice: either work together to fight the pandemic, developing drugs and vaccines to kill and stop Covid-19, or suffer an out-of-control global pandemic and a chain-reaction cratering of the global economy. Truly, nations will fight the virus and collectively win, or fight each other and collectively lose.

Although China has well-earned respect for curbing its outbreak, there is room for critique, correction and improvement. President Xi Jinping stresses drawing lessons from the outbreak to improve the country's systems for major epidemic control, prevention and public health emergency management.

Apropos of the pandemic, Xi’s repeated call to build “a community with a shared future for all humanity” is a grand vision with multiple applications. For seven years, it has driven foreign policy, especially the Belt and Road Initiative, helping to rectify global imbalances.

While fighting disease or controlling pandemics have always been a “shared future” benefit, it was always tucked within lists of other benefits, such as climate control, preventing terrorism, interdicting drugs and the like. Few ever imagined that a pandemic could become so grave so fast. But as the pandemic has burst into planetary consciousness, it demonstrates viscerally the global criticality of “shared future” thinking.