BIGGEST LOSERS:

Mr Xi is often styled the most powerful Chinese leader since chairman Mao. Instead, the early response to the pandemic spoke to the brittleness of his power. The fate of many Chinese emperors through the centuries shows their authority to have been absolute until the moment of their fall.

Beyond Asia, coronavirus has also crystallised a shift that has left Beijing almost friendless in the west. There is no need to swallow the myriad conspiracy theories promoted by US President Donald Trump's supporters to consider that China's first response to the virus was concealment. Its subsequent threatening diplomacy, aimed at absolving the regime of all responsibility, serves only to reinforce talk of a cover-up. Australia, at the head of calls for an international inquiry, accuses China of "economic coercion".

The suspicions run with the grain. Predatory investment and trade policies and military operations in the South China Sea have transformed European attitudes. In the words of one senior EU diplomat, the starting point for European policy towards China was, until quite recently, an eagerness to engage. Now it begins with pushing back.

No more so than in Britain. David Cameron's government lauded a new "golden era" in Sino-British relations. Now, Boris Johnson faces a backlash within his ruling Conservative party against China's investment in communications and energy infrastructure.

Mr Xi's ally Vladimir Putin is a still bigger loser. The revanchist Russian president had marked out 2020 to solidify his own position and Russia's great power status. A plan to extend his presidency for another dozen years beyond 2024 would win ringing endorsement in a national plebiscite. Moscow would host a summit of world leaders. Coronavirus has forced the cancellation of both events.

A failed price war with Saudi Arabia has seen a collapse in the oil price to levels far below the $40 a barrel assumed by the Russian government in setting its annual budget. The result, as the Kremlin admits, is an economic crisis worse than that of 2009. Russia's military entanglements in Syria and Ukraine now look very expensive.

All the while, China's supposedly equal alliance with Moscow looks more like strategic encirclement. The Belt and Road Initiative has underscored Beijing's claim on central Asia. Mr Xi's long-term ambition to make China the pre-eminent Eurasian power would supplant Russia in Europe. How long, one wonders, will Mr Putin be content to be so obviously the junior partner in such a relationship of unequals? He cannot expect any help from his admiring imitator Mr Orban. Hungary is a shrinking state, advancing under Mr Orban's leadership towards inexorable demographic decline.

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