Vietnam, the fastest developing country in the Southeast Asia region, is now looking to kick China out of the region. And it has started by puncturing a deep hole in Beijing’s “vaccine diplomacy” in the region. There was ample scepticism about the effectiveness and cost of Chinese vaccines in Southeast Asia, but some countries in the region went ahead with their procurement because of global supply issues.

However, Vietnam is now looking to curb China’s vaccine supplies in the region. The Southeast Asian nation of nearly 100 million people has recorded less than 4,000 Coronavirus cases and just 35 deaths. Its performance has been remarkable. Now, with the latest wave of COVID-19 outbreak hitting Southeast Asia, Vietnam has once again decided to lead by example. In order to counter the Chinese vaccine diplomacy, Vietnam is developing four of its own vaccines.

Hanoi was only one of the few regimes in the region that rejected Chinese vaccines altogether. It understood that not only were China’s vaccines ineffective and riddled with supply delays but they were also bound to serve as instruments of the Chinese strategy to ramp up its influence in the region. This is, of course, unacceptable for an ambitious Hanoi.

Two of Vietnam’s four vaccines are being developed by State-owned companies but the frontrunner- Nanogen has made deep progress. It is running clinical trials at the Vietnam Military Medical University in Hanoi and harbours the aspiration of going global with its vaccine- Nanocovax.

Nanogen research and development director Dr Do Minh Si told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the vaccine would be developed for emergency use soon. He also claimed that the company has the ability to produce 120 million doses in a year. In fact, he also wants to increase its production capacity and discussions are underway with Indian and Korean production plants.

A Vietnamese company is, of course, not looking to produce over 120 million vaccines only for its own population. Vietnam itself has the Coronavirus outbreak in control with a robust containment strategy that allowed the Southeast nation to avoid any major COVID-19 surge without slowing down its economic growth. So, the production is quite clearly targeted at neighbouring countries.

While Vietnam avoided a major outbreak, other Southeast Asian countries have an increasing caseload. Thailand, for instance, has a caseload bearing 90,000. Cambodia too has recorded as many as 20,000 COVID-19 cases. The Philippines and Indonesia are, however, the worst affected with the case tally running into millions.

As such, Vietnam understands that China’s “vaccine diplomacy” has not really curbed the Pandemic in Southeast Asia. This gives Hanoi ample vacuum to fill in.

Countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia opted for Chinese vaccines despite concerns about their unreliable efficacy data. Yet, these countries could not get rid of the scepticism surrounding Chinese vaccines. Sinopharm- a Chinese vaccine, for example, has not been approved in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte took a shot of the unapproved vaccine by mistake but then asked China to take back 1,000 donated Sinopharm vaccines.

Read More: China is trying its best to wrest Laos from Vietnam, but Vietnam is too clever an opponent

Duterte said, “Don’t follow my footsteps.” He added, “It’s dangerous because there are no studies, it might not be good for the body. Just let me be the sole person to receive it.”

And then, efficacy is not the only issue. China has simply failed to manufacture enough vaccines for inoculation in the Southeast Asia region. Countries that ordered Chinese vaccines found out how Chinese vaccine shipments arrived with undue delay and the consignments too were smaller in size.

Over the past six weeks, a new wave of COVID-19 cases has struck the region and the caseloads in many countries like Thailand and Cambodia have risen sharply. The region has to step up vaccination in order to avoid more damage to life and the economy. As such, Chinese vaccines cannot meet the uphill task that Southeast Asia faces. And now, Vietnam is promising to take charge of the situation by ending Beijing’s “vaccine diplomacy” in the region.

China’s population is projected to reach 1.41 billion in 2020, up a smidgeon from the previous year, highlighting how the world’s most populous country will have to confront its demographic problems earlier than expected. The figure—which was up from the official statistics for 2019 of 1.40 billion—showed that China’s population had only increased by 72 million since the 2010 census.

China is still predicted to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy, but some analysts warn that if the number of jobs keeps falling, it might not be able to maintain that position. China, unlike the US, does not rely on immigration to help replenish its workforce.

In 2016, China made it legal for all couples to have two children, but the expected baby boom did not materialise. Many families believe they actually cannot afford a second child because of the one-child policy, which has helped to build a mindset of concentrating all of a couple’s attention on one child.

Ning Jizhe, the head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a press conference following the release that there were 12 million births last year, down 18 per cent from 14.65 million the year before, a development that is likely to increase pressure on Beijing to relax remaining birth restrictions. After a spike in 2016, the first year after China ended its three-decade-old one-child policy, births fell for the fourth year in a row.

Meanwhile, the number of elderly Chinese people continues to rise. According to the data, the percentage of Chinese aged 60 and up increased dramatically from 13.3 per cent in 2010 to 18.7 per cent in 2015. In 2020, the proportion of Chinese aged 15 to 59 was 63.35 per cent, down from 70.1 per cent in 2010. The pandemic’s effect on the population count was unclear. Though China rapidly contained the spread of infections within its borders, demographers believe that fears about coronaviruses led to the suppression of births.

The population situation in China has rapidly risen to the top of Beijing’s economic concerns. For years, the pattern of reducing the number of young people to replace a rising number of retirees has been obvious but resolving it has been widely rejected as politicians concentrate on raising debt, waging a trade war with the United States, and gaining control of a once-freewheeling private sector.

Beijing cannot disregard the demographic threat to long-term growth any longer. The central government has been forced to ask state-owned firms as well as wealthier and younger provinces in the south to fund pool pensions due to a pension shortage in the northeast of the Rust Belt nation.

According to Yi Fuxian, a US-based researcher and longtime critic of US population policies, births are likely to fall even further in the coming years as the one-child policy has resulted in a decrease in the number of pregnant women. China is a country in Asia. “What is disastrous for the Chinese economy behind the data is a fundamental demographic shift,” Yi said.

The situation has become so critical that China has had to manipulate its birth data. According to the most recent census, the population of children aged 0 to 14 increased by 13.8 per cent since the previous survey in 2010. The rise shows that China’s decision in 2016 to end its one-child policy and encourage couples to have two children “has yielded positive results,” according to the bureau.

This argument, however, was met with scepticism. Since a high in 2016, fewer babies have been born. According to the census, China had 12 million births in 2020, the lowest number in 59 years. The number of newborns is also down 18 per cent year over year, the steepest drop since the 1949 revolution that led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

The leadership of the Communist Party seems to want to demonstrate that the current two-child policy is successful in China. Otherwise, it risks facing mounting pressure to end its long-running family planning programme, particularly given the country’s pressing need to address its ageing population.

The population’s ageing is projected to put a strain on the country’s savings. And, at a time when China is turning to consumption as a source of development, older people who are concerned about pension payments – and who have only one child to support them in their old age – are likely to be hesitant to spend.

Automation is one factor that executives have long said would help offset the decline in the working-age population, which has been decreasing since 2012, according to official statistics. Economists, on the other hand, have expressed reservations about this approach. Researchers at China’s central bank published an article in March calling for a much more forceful response to the country’s dire demographic prospects. “We must recognise that advancements in education and technology will not be enough to compensate for population decline,” he said.

Wang Peian, then deputy director of China’s Family Planning Commission, called family planning a “fundamental state policy” that China is supposed to join for a long time after China declared it would remove the one-child policy in 2015. Wang refuted the notion that China faces a population shortage two years later. “Not today, not in a hundred years,” he said at a press conference, forecasting between 17 million and 19 million births per year between now and 2020. Instead, after peaking at 17.86 million in 2016, births have been declining every year since.

China has long relied on its massive population — the world’s largest — as a primary source of economic development. The economy and geopolitics will change as a result of how it and officials around the world cope with shifting demographics. Low birth rates have an effect on labour supply and market demand, can reduce entrepreneurship and innovation, and can contribute to monetary policy changes and a reduction in economic capabilities.

The Trump administration was a nightmare for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, given he was relentless and practised a sustained pressure foreign policy vis a vis China. On the other hand, the Biden administration’s flawed foreign policy with respect to China has come as a blessing for the CCP. The Trump administration, as part of its constant pressure tactic, had started a process of publishing a list of companies with People’s Liberation Army links, however, it seems Joe Biden has stopped the process.

The Pentagon’s failure to release an annual list of Chinese companies with military links has raised fears that the Biden administration would be unable to implement a Trump-era executive order prohibiting investments in these firms. According to two people familiar with the situation, the Department of Defense missed the deadline to publish a legally mandated list of Chinese military companies on May 13. The report is critical of President Joe Biden, who must decide if Americans should invest in companies like these. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 orders the Pentagon to conduct a search for Chinese military companies.

Congress orders the Pentagon to recognise Chinese military companies via a publicly available list under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021. The report was due on April 15th this year. According to the Financial Times, the Pentagon will send the report before October. In July, Donald Trump designated China’s two telecom giants Huawei and ZTE as “national security threats”. And he did not look back. With his last few days still left in office, Donald Trump was unrelenting on his mission to weaken the Chinese telecommunication giant, Huawei and had revoked the licenses of major US firms to sell equipment to it. And with that had slammed the last nail on the coffin of the already reeling CCP’s Huawei.

Read more: Trump’s final blow to China – Huawei is banned in the US forever

After that, Trump worked tirelessly to deliver steady and effective blows to rid the United States of Chinese influence. Even in his last couple of days in the office, he still went after Huawei as he certainly believed that it is a major national security threat. Trump’s last action to ban the sale of semiconductor products hit Huawei hard. China does not have a world-class semiconductor facility, unlike the US.

Before that, the Trump administration also passed a law. “The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act” bars securities of foreign companies from being listed on any US exchange if they have failed to comply with the US Public Accounting Oversight Board’s audits for three years in a row. The act would also require public companies to disclose whether they are owned or controlled by a foreign government. The passage of the said Act was necessitated after Chinese firms refused to share their audit books with American regulators saying they fell under the ambit of ‘national secrets’.

Read more: US Congress passes Act which will now delist Chinese companies from American stock exchanges

The American Securities Association, which represents regional Main Street financial services companies, also urged the Pentagon “to quickly fulfil its legislative mandate and report to Congress.” “Last quarter, Wall Street diverted $3.4 billion of new American investor money to the Chinese Communist Party, underwriting its engine of environmental destruction, gross human rights abuses against its own people, and military buildup,” Chris Iacovella, CEO of the ASA, said in an email.

The problem arises because “the Department of Defense has assumed a fact-finding role, knowing full well the facts may not be publicly available, as governments do not generally publicize their military affiliations,” according to Nazak Nikakhtar, partner at law firm Wiley Rein LLP and former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce. And by the looks of it, the assumption of role under the Biden administration seems to be made to stop actions on the Chinese companies.