COVID-19 Vaccine Diplomacy - Case Study China

This bachelor’s thesis focuses on vaccine diplomacy, with an emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines the theoretical framework and setting of global health, health diplomacy and vaccine diplomacy, looking at their actors, forms and themes. It explores the practice of vaccine diplomacy throughout its history and during the COVID-19 pandemic, for which it concentrates on the behaviour of the World Health Organization, the United States, Russia and India. However, the greatest emphasis is on the People's Republic of China; the case study analyses what the shape of Chinese vaccine diplomacy was like during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the cases of the Philippines, Guyana and other South American countries, and Zimbabwe to examine its objectives and subsequent outcomes. China's vaccine diplomacy was intended to strengthen its already established economic and other relations with its partners and to positively impress and extract concessions from states that were not among its allies. Subsequently, the thesis addresses whether and how states' vaccine diplomacy has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, based on previous findings. It finds out that the relevance of vaccine diplomacy within states' foreign policies is highly dependent on the existence of crises and relevant threats and changes over time. But the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a growth in the aggressiveness of states in pursuing non-medical goals for their vaccine diplomacy that are unrelated to improving global health. The thesis also discovers the rise in popularity of bilateral channels that states can use in their vaccine diplomacy, in addition to multilateral platforms.