COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most current global political topics. It is a health crisis of global proportions that has significant consequences for the world economy, international political relations, and the overall way of life so far. The research presented in the paper analyses the activities in the public diplomacy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The People's Republic of China has served as an example in researching the effectiveness of public diplomacy actions and the necessity of developing public diplomacy in contemporary international relations. The research aimed to investigate and describe the effect of public diplomacy of the People's Republic of China during 2020, by exploring the goals, the way of conducting activities in public diplomacy and the achieved results. We tested the hypotheses by conducting a case study. The case study method was chosen as an exploratory and descriptive research method by which we intended to gain a deeper insight into the researched phenomenon. The case study was conducted by secondary data analysis from media, scientific and publicly available official sources. With the first hypothesis, we wanted to witness that public diplomacy as part of the foreign policy and diplomatic strategy of the individual country contributes to the realisation of set state goals. The results of our research on the example of the People's Republic of China indicate the great potential of public diplomacy in the modern globalised and mediatised world, as well as the need to synergistically connect numerous public diplomatic tools to obtain a certain result. Our second hypothesis questioned that the public diplomatic and political action of the PRC at the time of the COVID-19 epidemic was an example of the successful use of modern diplomatic techniques and especially public diplomacy. Our results suggest that this hypothesis can only be partially accepted. On the one hand, the People's Republic of China demonstrated the power of using traditional and new media in public diplomacy and the power of public diplomacy realised through humanitarian, economic and scientific engagement. However, on the other hand, it failed to make full use of the experience gained in the crisis caused by SARS. The process we investigated and described in this case study is still ongoing and it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions about it. However, our research covers one year and provides insight into the public diplomacy of the People's Republic of China in the crisis until the beginning of widespread use of the vaccine against COVID-19, which marks the arrival of a new phase of the pandemic.