Opinion: A plague on both your houses

President Xi might tout China's Covid ‘success', but trust is in short supply, not least on carbon neutrality pledges

"My wife and I wish you a speedy recovery," Chinese president Xi Jinping wrote in a message to US president Donald Trump after he and his wife were diagnosed with Covid-19. But few of China's vocal online netizens share their president's concern. They followed Trump's unedifying election debate with challenger Joe Biden days previously — with the two-year anniversary of the US-China trade war looming — and his positive test result drew mainly scorn. "It's hard to imagine that a world hegemonic power can't even protect its own president," one wrote.

Beijing's success in combating Covid contrasts with Washington's performance, and has put a spring in Xi's step. China's economy is on course to expand this year, prime minister Li Keqiang says — the only major economy likely to do so. Chinese holidaymakers' inability to travel abroad during October's Golden Week public holiday caused a boom in domestic tourism that gels neatly with Xi's call to boost national consumption of goods and services. Chinese airline bookings rose by 200pc — making it one of the few markets where jet fuel demand is growing.

Two years ago, many Chinese perceived Xi's call for a "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" as hubristic and one of the causes of the trade war. Now, at home, his star is in the ascendant while Trump trails in US polls. "The people are the real heroes," the president proclaims. But it is not all going Xi's way. A more assertive foreign policy has stoked fears about China's territorial ambitions. And tensions are mounting over Taiwan, which Xi says "must and will be" reunited with China.

That has encouraged the US to repurpose "the Quad" — a grouping of Pacific democracies Japan, Australia, India and the US — as "a force for good in the region", US secretary of state Mike Pompeo says, and a counterweight to the "exploitation, corruption, and coercion" of Beijing. Even if it works as Pompeo envisages, a regional grouping such as the Quad would have limited relevance amid global challenges — from man-made climate change, to public health and arms control. And other Quad members are sceptical about Pompeo's "Asian Nato", when Trump's administration has typically dismissed alliances.

Beijing is aware that a President Biden would offer little in terms of rapprochement towards China, even if he could — many of Trump's policies will be hard to undo. But China's confidence at its ability to weather these storms has grown. An emboldened Xi now eyes the first-among-equals space once occupied by the US — pledging at the UN last month, to much fanfare, that Chinese CO2 emissions will peak before 2030. But Xi offered few details of how a country that plans to add 94GW of coal-fired power generation this year, adjusts renewable obligations to measure performance rather than guide investment, and continues to sign new long-term, oil-backed loans, will achieve this.

China's carbon neutrality pledge, like its other international initiatives, will likely be met with suspicion. Beijing's initial Covid cover-up and aggressive posturing have undermined its attempts at "face-mask diplomacy" — wooing potential allies with medical supplies. "If the liberal order is in crisis, there is little sign of a new world order emerging in its place," says Bobo Lo, non-resident fellow at Australian think-tank the Lowy Institute. And over 75pc of respondents to a survey by US think-tank Pew Research Centre say they have little or no confidence in Xi to do the right thing in world affairs — a score in which he was trumped only by Trump.