This week, Massachusetts-based Moderna Inc. reported promising preliminary results for the vaccine it is developing. It's one of eight vaccines under development that have been approved for clinical trials, according to the World Health Organization.To get more China breaking news, you can visit shine news official website.

Half of those vaccines are being developed in China, where the outbreak first emerged.The Chinese government has fast-tracked promising projects and has poured money and resources into the effort to find a vaccine. Experts say the ruling Communist Party recognizes that much more is at stake than public health.

One of the biggest concerns is the economy, says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations."There's a strong incentive to reopen the economy, right, to have business back to normal," he says.

The party's legitimacy has long depended on a strong economy. Before the pandemic, the government was targeting 6% growth in the gross domestic product this year. In the first quarter, the economy shrank by nearly 7%.

A homegrown inoculation would serve another purpose for the government, observers say: deflecting heat. Beijing has been beset by criticism for its early handling of the outbreak and has faced a growing chorus of calls from other governments for an investigation into the origins of the disease, which first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told the WHO's annual meeting on Monday that China had acted with "openness, transparency and responsibility" and said China supported the idea of a "comprehensive review" of the global response.Zuoyue Wang, a history professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, says a Chinese-made vaccine could help undercut some of the criticism.

"If a Chinese scientist could come up with a workable vaccine, I think it will help to defuse that kind of blaming or call for, you know, even reparation," he says. "There is pressure, enormous pressure, I think, for Chinese scientists to come up with an efficient or workable vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic."