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Yesterday President Aleksandr Lukashenko, President of Belarus, arrived in Beijing for a three-day state visit. Lukashenko is, of course, the world leader who allowed Putin to amass Russian troops on Belarus’ border with Ukraine during the lead-up to the Russian invasion on February 24th of last year.
Coming on the heels of the release of the PRC Position on the Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis document by Beijing last Friday some — including both cock-eyed optimists and doomsday prophesiers — will see this as an encouraging sign that Xi Jinping is busy rallying support for his effort to bring hostilities in Ukraine to an end. A deeper look reveals the likelihood of almost the exact opposite to be the case.
For three years of the pandemic, Xi did not travel outside of China’s borders and welcomed almost no foreign leaders to China. The one notable exception to this self-imposed isolation was his summit meeting with Putin in Beijing on February 4, 2022 on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics. This is, of course, the meeting where Xi famously announced a “friendship without limits” with Russia. Less than three weeks later, Russian troops poured into Ukraine. Less well remembered about their joint statement is the fact that, as reported by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times, “the February 4 statement made it clear that the foundation of the Russian-Chinese friendship is shared hostility to American global leadership.”
Since the beginning of February, Xi and his Foreign Ministry have been making up for lost time with a whirlwind of diplomatic engagements internationally. Xi dispatched his senior foreign policy advisor, Wang Yi, to a string of European capitals with a dual agenda. Wang traveled to France and Italy where business constituencies welcomed China’s invitation to revive economic ties following self-inflicted pandemic damage to the Chinese economy. Included in Wang’s itinerary was a red-carpet visit to Hungary hosted by Hungary’s Russia-friendly President, Viktor Orbán. Finally, before heading to Moscow for the capstone of his trip, Wang put in a visit to Munich where NATO member countries were taking part in the annual Munich Security Conference. For this visit, Wang shelved his economic message and tried driving a wedge between the U.S. and its European partners with some of the same anti-U.S. messaging (e.g., need to repudiate the United States’ Cold War mentality) which Xi and Putin had settled on a year earlier and which China has enshrined as Point 2 in its PRC Position on the Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis. Wang was widely derided for striding into that meeting with a tin ear and two left feet. Especially in the wake of the “weather balloon” imbroglio, his message there went over like a lead balloon. Later, in Moscow, Wang and Putin announced with fanfare additional steps to strengthen China-Russia solidarity.
So what about meetings which Xi has hosted back home in Beijing during this February and early March whirlwind? Well, in addition to the centerpiece of the three-day state visit by Lukashenko, there have two other notable high-level visitors; President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran and Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia.
By thy friends, we will know thee. These friendships are clearly not designed to advance a good-faith mediation effort to bring a sovereignity-respecting solution to Ukraine. They are designed to tighten bonds with authoritarian leaders attuned to, and aligned with, the anti-democratic bloc which Xi has been committed to building in his third term.
As argued last week in 1% Words, 99% Work, Xi’s aim with his Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis position paper is not to bring about a just and durable peace in Ukraine, it is to serve his own agenda. That agenda is clearly revealed by China’s behind-the-scenes, multi-pronged effort to support Russia in the conflict.
By blurring the lines of a stark conflict between authoritarian overreach and democratic resistance, Xi’s intervention serves to confuse the world community with the likely effect being rob prolong the conflict. Prolonging the conflict would in turn serve to keep U. S. attention and resources further pinned down in Central Europe and diverted from China and the Taiwan Strait. Exactly what Xi wants.
In my network, there’s a lot of interest in — and considerable disagreement over — the meaningfulness of the PRC statement of principles toward resolving the Ukraine crisis released on Friday. I gave my on-the-spot personal view in the post 1% Words, 99% Work on the day of the statement’s release but, since then, I have been fielding comments and questions from a number of friends and associates.
I am going to share here one of those conversations. The questions were posed to me by another college classmate, in this case a person with a lifetime of deep and wide professional experience in China. I hope that these questions and answers might prompt readers of Assessing China to continue to think about this issue in a curiosity-forward and thoughtful way.
Here is the Q&A exchange:
What factual inaccuracies do you find in it (the official PRC Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis)?
- It’s important to note at the outset that this is a position paper (clarifying the PRC’s own position) rather than a peace proposal (aimed at bringing the two warring sides together). With that in mind, the PRC is perfectly entitled to set out their position in any 12 — or any 120 — points which they chose. However, it is also clear that they are using this position paper in order to position themselves to be seen as a potential mediator between the two warring parties. Whether they pull off that positioning exercise depends both on whether the PRC proves ready, willing and able to play that role and whether key parties to the conflict support them playing that role.
- Factual problems are only one dimension of what can be problematic in a document like this. On the factual inaccuracy front, I will limit myself to the very first point. Since 1945, there has been no definition of sovereignity which squares with Russia’s invasion. To this day, China has backed Putin’s language (a special military operation, not a war or invasion) and its worldview (revanchism and restoration by force of past empire are legit). If you can’t get past the first principle, it’s hard to take the rest of the document seriously. For the rest …
- Point 2: A dig at the U.S. An assertion with no real substance.
- Point 3: The question is how and under whose terms: 21st c. norms of forward-looking sovereignity protecting the rights of citizenry developed over the past 75+ years or the Putin/Xi aggrieved, backward-looking version all in the mind of an individual leader with the power to enforce conformity to his — it’s usually a man — viewpoint
- Point 4: We can all hope for peace talks but neither of the warring party appears ready to consider these. They each hope to establish a position of strength before entering into them. Temporary stalemate.
- Point 5: There’s a lot China could do unilaterally on this point. Words are cheap. The U.S and the West have demonstrably done a lot already. China?
- Points 6, 7, 8 & 9: Who has been the responsible party for these specific problems? Hardly a gray area to my mind. Russian summary execution of captured soldiers and civilians in Bukha and other villages they invaded and occupied. Russian forcible evacuations of children to camps in Russia. Russian sustained artillery assaults on the nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia (not to mention indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure). Russian interdiction of Ukrainian grain exports at ports and railways. What are the comparables from the Ukrainian side? I personally don’t think there are many but, in any case, law always gives special consideration to the responder rather than the initiator, the defender rather than the attacker.
- Point 10: Equivalent to stripping Ukraine of one of the ways which the world community has provided to help them defend themselves.
- Points 11 & 12: We can all agree that these would be desirable
And what’s your view on why U.S hegemony has been good for the world for the last 70 years, despite some of the bad that we did?
- I’ll just offer two points of response
- Providing the world with a longer period of sustained peace — not perfect of course but far better than anything that preceded it — and also more measurable human advancement (educational, health, wealth, human rights) than previously achieved at any point in history
- Providing China with the opportunity, tools and resources to help raise 800 million of their citizens out of poverty
If “U.S. hegemony” is just part of China’s ideology, isn’t “democracy vs. autocracy” part of our ideology?
- I quite agree with you about the “U.S. hegemony” as contrasted with the “autocracy vs democracy” point. There are levels to that though and I focus on the third level:
- Level 1: both terms are established political science terms and describe real things in international behavior
- Level 2: as is their right, both Beijing and Washington choose to amplify the political concept that best suits their purpose
- Level 3: I come down against ceding there is equivalency between the two for two reasons:
- Focus on ‘hegemony’ is rooted in a sense of historical grievance and doesn’t offer the world much unless other players share that grievance and all agree to do something about it. ‘Authoritarianism vs democracy’ draws a clear distinction between two different systems and encourages everyone to think about, and ultimately choose, their preference. Xi is at liberty to assert China offers a superior form of democracy to Western liberal democracy. Not many governments or people around the world seem to buy into that. The U.S. has over 65 formal allies based on shared values rooted in liberal democracy and the post-WWII order. China has one — North Korea — and is working hard at adding Russia and Iran to the list
- There’s no inherent accountability to Xi’s and China’s use of the term hegemon in describing the U.S. Top-down and echoed throughout a propaganda apparatus which can’t be questioned because, as Marxist-Leninist doctrine holds, it definitionally represents what is best for the people. In the Biden Administration’s amplifying of “authoritarianism vs democracy” however, it can be questioned and jettisoned come January 2025 if that is the will of the majority of Americans.
Washington had been urging China since the beginning of Russia’s war to play some role in peace negotiations, and now it has offered to do so, outlining the basic principles. I think that’s a good thing. The U.S. cannot be an honest broker, nor can any country in NATO. Perhaps China could pay a useful role in stopping the fighting.
- I think what the U.S. has been urging China is (1) aspirationally, to encourage China to come down from fence-sitting and use its suasion with Moscow to promote post-WWII norms of sovereignity (versus might makes right) but (2) more importantly not to aid and abet the instigator in this war of choice with sanctions-cushioning actions and (c) definitely, definitely not with sanctions-evading support and supply of lethal munitions. China has chosen to completely reject (1) and (2) and, as for (3), is in advanced negotiation with Russia to set pricing and scale of supply for offensive drones and ammunition, possibly also artillery.
- The U.S. and NATO don’t offer themselves or pretend to be honest brokers. They have clearly taken the side and will continue to take the side of Ukraine since Feb 24, 2022. The fundamental problem is that China is trying to have its cake and eat it too — on the one hand, giving consistent, significant and now increasing levels of support for Russia over the past twelve months while also now posturing with this position paper as a potential honest broker. I share your hopes and think its good that Zelinsky will meet with Xi. I just don’t expect that, in the final analysis, much will come of it for the reasons outlined above.
My concluding comment: I commend this interlocutor for asking thoughtful and useful questions. Many of the exchanges I had were with people who wanted to convince me that their interpretation of the situation was the correct one. One of the common denominators of those perspectives seems rooted in fear … fear of the Ukraine crisis spilling over into nuclear strikes, fear of the U.S. government missing a chance to work with China to resolve the situation, fear of the U.S. finding itself on the wrong side of history as Brazil, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Africa, India and Indonesia gravitate into a Chinese orbit. I personally do not share those fears. In fact, I believe that the surest way of avoiding any of those scenarios becoming even plausible is for us to lose the clear-sightedness and the bedrock values which have guided our reaction to Russia and China since February 24, 2021.
On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has released its 12-point peace proposal. The official English-language version is here. Below is a simplified graphic covering the 12 points.
Here’s my 4-point response:
- There’s no reason to go beyond the first point. If that were to be upheld, there would be no ‘special military operation’ crisis to solve.
- China is not a credible or honest broker to bring about peace. Just look at its year-long pro-Russia messaging campaign — both domestically and internationally — and its well-documented sanctions cushioning and sanctions evasion assistance to Russia (oil purchases, currency support, dual-use supplies (microchips, electronics, etc) and now on the verge of adding artillery, drones and other lethal military hardware to the list). Zelensky is willing to talk to China but only in the hope that China will pressure Putin to back off. Unlikely China will apply that pressure in any way forceful enough for Putin to give it a second thought.
- Words are the easy part. Brokering peace is 99% about engaging in good faith and intensive consulations with both sides and then buckling down to sustained application of leverage and excruciating follow-through. There’s no indication that Beijing is ready to undertake — or even interested in undertaking — this hard part.
- The document primarily serves Xi Jinping’s purposes rather than Kyiv’s and Moscow’s. It gives him a modicum of ballast as he postures as sitting on the fence whereas, in reality, he has a foot firmly down on Moscow’s side and his “frirendship without limits.” Additionally, it serves to score points against the U.S. in line with his new “direct confrontation with the United States” policy while also providing some catnip to non-aligned global players like Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, South Africa, India and Indonesia.
In short, non-credible but a sly and carefully orchestrated move to advance Xi Jinping’s own gameplan.
P.S. Since today is the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I am providing a link here back to the post I made on the eve of that invasion on February 21, 2022. It has unsettling resonances when reconsidered one year later.
Over 10 years, Xi Jinping has methodically amassed power. Beginning with an unprecedented consolidation of military support, Xi then launched his ‘Tigers and Flies’ campaign, sidelining his political rivals along with officials accused of corruption. Over many years he patiently laid the groundwork to elevate Xi Jinping Thought to match the official stature of Mao Zedong Thought, and edge out Deng Xiaoping Thought, in the CCP’s ideological pantheon. He then overturned international commitments regarding Hong Kong, and brought that free-wheeling and Westernized city to heel with the introduction of a new security law. At the last 19th Party Congress in 2017, Xi tossed aside Deng’s “hide-and-abide” (韜光養晦、有所作為) approach to international relations and gave a triumphalist speech, announcing that China had not only arrived on the world stage but that it deserved central position on that stage. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, Xi used sharp-elbow tactics to block scientific investigation into its origins in China and ordered sweeping zero-Covid lockdowns to highlight his government’s ability to take more effective action than was possible for democratic governments in the US and the West. The Winter Olympics were meant to be Xi’s star-turn to demonstrate — more to the Chinese people than to international audiences (many of whom undertook diplomatic boycotts of the Games because of oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other issues) — that he was a flawless and unrivalled champion. He even went so far as to claim that the authoritarian system he presided over represented a superior form of democracy to Western liberal democracy.
Along this path to unrivalled power in China, Xi first jettisoned the system of collective rule by the Standing Committee of the Politburo which Deng had put in place to guard against recurrence of unbridled rule by any one individual, epitomized by the last years of Mao’s rule. Longer term, Xi’s aim in amassing power has been to discard the limit of a president to two five-year terms, another safeguard Deng put in place and which he himself observed.
The announcement of leadership for the next five-year term will happen at the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in Beijing this autumn. At that meeting, Xi is widely expected to be named for a precedent-shattering third term. This will mark a historic high-point for Xi. His systematic consolidation of power has been designed, in part, to create an air of inevitability about this outcome. While his selection is still overwhelmingly likely, a number of significant fissures have appeared in recent weeks which crack this façade of total control.
ZERO-COVID
While undoubtedly successful in limiting the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the first two years of the pandemic, Xi’s Zero-Covid policy has created a raft of problems for China more recently, most notably during the highly-transmissible omicron phase. While incidences of infection, hospitalization and death have been dropping worldwide, they have been surging in China, with the number of confirmed cases more than quadrupling from mid-February to mid-March of this year. Elderly citizens are especially at risk due to their low rates of vaccination and hospitals have already become overwhelmed, due in part to the low number of hospital beds on a per capita basis in China. While it can be argued that the Zero-Covid policy ‘bought time’ for the development of vaccines, Xi’s championing of the locally developed Sinovac vaccine and his refusal to permit the use of more clinically-effective vaccines developed in the West, has blunted that advantage somewhat since the Sinovac vaccine is notably less effective against the omicron variant. The Zero-Covid policy has also meant that there is practically zero immunity in the Chinese population as a result of exposure to the virus as it becomes endemic worldwide. If SARS-COV-2 can be compared to a flame, China’s population is like a vast field of tinder. Finally, the economic and social costs have become glaringly apparent with the lockdown of an entire province, Jilin, in the northeast and the of Shenzhen and Dongguan – China’s two largest manufacturing hubs for information and communications technology (ICT) — in the south.
While Xi will, with considerable justification, continue to claim credit for his “triumph” over the coronavirus, China is by no means out of the pandemic woods and the setbacks of the last month make his strident claims ring more hollow, both internationally and domestically.
REAL ESTATE
In September last year, Chinese real-estate development firms began to feel the severe discomfort of a massive hang-over following years of real-estate speculation partying. The problems were most evident in real-estate giant Evergrande but soon spread to a host of other significant players in the field such as Fantasia, Modern Land, China Property Group and Xinyuan Real Estate Group. At the institutional level, the problems hitting the $5 trillion sector were the result of a unique PRC nexus of aggressive real estate development, lax banking, and local government incentive structures. More simply, the problems resulted from “unrestrained borrowing, expansion as an end-in-itself, and corruption.”
While the PRC Government claimed this week that the real-estate free-fall has been “stabilized,” pricing data from real estate developers across the country continue to show sharp deterioration. Also this week, Evergrande announced a further delay in sharing its plan for restructuring and for paying back bonds and other financial obligations. The government has strong reason to put on a brave face while throwing up a curtain of opacity around the problem. Property-related industries account for more than 30% of China’s economic output. Continued problems in the sector could drag China’s growth below the optimistic, post-pandemic official target of 5% growth, a minimum level which must be maintained in the years ahead for China to escape the ‘middle income trap.’ More immediately, it risks alienating an important swath of the urban public, 80% of whose household wealth is tied up in real estate and who see their property values plummeting. (A particularly aggrieved segment of this population are buyers who have paid up front to the developers, as is common in China, for a property not yet built and for which construction has halted indefinitely while values continue to slide).
While Xi has voiced loud promises to not let the bottom fall out of this sector and to support homeowners currently caught in the fallout, there is little evidence on the ground of these promises translating into reality. Meanwhile, the situation risks alienating the public and sowing dissent among officials.
‘COMMON PROSPERITY’
As measured by the Gini coefficient, China ranked fourth in the world in 2022 for greatest wealth disparity and inequality (after South Africa, Namibia and Sri Lanka). While Deng Xiaoping had announced famously in the late 1980s that “to get rich is glorious” and to “let some get rich first,” the extreme degree of inequality persisting in China four decades later is a source of growing social and political concern. The heady days of 10% growth have long ago disappeared and Chinese who thought they would be boarding on a later rail-car in the national train of prosperity now worry that the train may have departed, stranding them on the platform.
To counter this source of social unease, Xi unveiled with great fanfare in 2021 a policy of ‘Common Prosperity.” Writ large, this policy was meant to cement Xi’s place — side-by-side with Mao and with Deng slightly in the background – in China’s pantheon of modern heroes. In this telling, Mao was the one who roused China to throw off its ‘Sick Man of Asia’ bondage to foreign imperialists and to stand up. Deng contrived a transitional stage of capitalist-style wealth-creation for enough Chinese that China could attain wealth and power (富权). It was left to Xi to complete this project of national rejuvenation, by reinstituting a Marxist “Common Prosperity’ for all Chinese and returning China to the center of the world stage.
Without getting into either the ideological weeds (such as Xi’s ‘Dual Circulation’ strategy) or deep into the tangle of economic measures (e.g., restrictions on overseas listings by Chinese companies, user-data and other controls put on Chinese Big Tech firms, clampdown on student test-prep and video game commercial sectors, etc) which Xi embraced in 2021 to advance his Common Prosperity agenda, the general effect was felt quickly and keenly in the form of abrupt economic slowdown. In the first quarter of this year, the Common Prosperity program has been ‘walked back’ by numerous party officials who have emphasized that it represents a historic project more than an immediate project. Premier Li Keqiang, in his lengthy speech to 3,000 deputies at the opening of the National People’s Congress earlier in the month, mentioned Common Prosperity only one time. For educated Chinese — who have been skillfully parsing official pronouncements closely ever since the Cultural Revolution for clues about where the country is headed — this lack of visibility and endorsement for Xi Jinping’s signature program represents a remarkable degree of push-back for Xi by top-level leaders.
UKRAINE
Chris Buckley’s report in last Friday’s New York Times traces the contours of what is potentially the most damaging crack to appear in Xi’s carefully-crafted, monolithic façade of power and control. The article details the war of words that has erupted on the Chinese internet following the warning delivered by a respected scholar and politically-connected insider, Hu Wei, to the effect that China “risked becoming a pariah if it didn’t denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” As was covered in last week’s post and as continues to play out this week, Chinese officials have contorted themselves by claiming to be neutral and wanting peace while following Putin’s lead in not calling the ‘special military operation’ either a war or an invasion, in not objecting to Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and in amplifying Kremlin disinformation about U.S. bio-military labs in Ukraine.
As argued last week, this has the potential to grow into a strategic blunder for China with significant geopolitical fall-out. It may affect not only Xi’s ambitions to retake Taiwan – the last territorial piece in his China Rejuvenation plan – but to bear long term costs for China as a rising power in the Indo-Pacific region and for its standing in the world at large.
None of this is to suggest that Xi will not get his third term as President this fall. It is only to say that the carefully-cultivated blooms of infallibility and inevitability are now off the XJP rose.
Xi has been in power for less than half of Putin’s tenure (18 years as President and 4 years as the power behind the throne for Medvedev) but there are doubtless people in Zhongnanhai wondering to themselves, post-Putin’s invasion, whether Deng didn’t get it right with his moves to limit the untrammeled exercise of power by an individual leader.
On February 4th, at the conclusion of their day-long summit in Beijing, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping declared that the friendship between Russia and China “has no limits.” That same day, the Beijing Winter Olympics officially began, ending a little more than two weeks later on February 20th. On February 24th, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
There has been extensive analysis of the three major miscalculations Putin has made up to this point: (1) his overestimation of the readiness and effectiveness of his military machine; (2) his underestimation of the resilience and fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people; and (3) the speed and scale with which NATO and EU countries, along with many others, have come together to sanction Russia and to support Ukraine (in all ways short of direct military involvement on, or in the air above, Ukrainian territory). It is too early to tell whether a fourth major miscalculation may have to do with Putin’s misplaced faith in the degree of economic, financial and trade support which China would provide Russia to backfill against these sanctions).
But what about Xi Jinping? What is his calculus for advancing (his interpretation of) China’s interests through this crisis? And what miscalculations has he appeared to have made so far?
Xi’s first miscalculation was immediate and damaging. He is known to have had some discussion with Putin on Feb. 4th about the imminent “special operation” in Ukraine. It is not clear whether Putin lied to him or Xi simply failed to ask the right questions to take Putin’s measure. In either case, Xi Jinping is known to have been caught by surprise and ‘perturbed’ by the scale, duration and ruthlessness of Putin’s “special operation.” As described in my February 4th post “Four Seismic U.S.-China-Russia Shifts,” Putin’s move forced Xi, unexpectedly and very publicly, to choose between his new-found friendship without limits and adherence to China’s mantra-like stated policy of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign nations, as enunciated in 1954 in Zhou Enlai’s Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence (and championed explicitly with regard to Ukraine’s territorial integrity following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014)
Evidence of Xi’s miscalculation of Putin’s intentions in Ukraine became apparent in the initially hesitant and fence-sitting response by the PRC officials during the first two weeks of the crisis. On the one hand, Chinese officials refused to refer to the invasion publicly with any term other than Putin’s Orwellian “special operation” terminology; pivoted reliably to blaming the crisis on NATO rather than Russia aggression; blocked a series of actions from being taken against Russia in the U.N. Security Council; amplified Russian disinformation about the U.S. operating bio-military labs in Ukraine (a play out of the FSK, formerly KGB, playbook which suggests that Putin is contemplating the use of bio- or chemical weapons and is ready to throw sand in the world’s eyes by blaming the U.S. and/or NATO for their eventual use); and has even embedded Chinese journalists with Russian military units on the ground in Ukraine. On the other, China says its the friend of both Ukraine and Russia; talks about the need for the cessation of violence; offers publicly to mediate between the two sides while not actually taking any steps toward a mediation effort); and repeats the mantra of its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as if Putin’s actions in Ukraine were taking place in some parallel universe.
There have been other related miscalculatiions. For instance, the PRC Government has been repeatedly caught off balance by the Biden Administration’s aggressive use of classified U.S. intelligence findings, with his Administration quickly de-classifying key reports and pushing the information out into the public sphere, both domestically and internationally. This began with President Biden’s sharing in real-time with the world the U.S. intelligence community’s pre-invasion assessments that Putin had made the decision to invade. This very public use of previously hush-hush intelligence findings marks a clear break from past White House precedent and has also been aimed at China in recent weeks: first, in divulging the fact that Xi Jinping had prior knowledge of the invasion from his Feb. 4th meeting with Putin and that Xi had, in fact, asked Putin to hold off on initiating that military operation until after the conclusion of the Beijing Winter Olympics; and, second, in disclosing publicly on the eve of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s March 14th meeting with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi the fact that Beijing had received requests from Moscow for military and economic assistance to aid its war effort. These and other revelations have punctured China’s contrived public posture and shown that, behind the peaceful resolution rhetoric and thin veil of neutrality in the conflict, the reality is that China is not sitting on the fence but has indeed been coming down on Russia’s side.
The initial confusion in China’s response and now the growing evidence of China’s support, up to a point, for Russia were probably to be expected : under-the-table support for Putin was inevitable given the top-down nature of Chinese government decision-making and the personal investment which Xi had made in Putin and Russia just weeks earlier. Just as powerfully through, China wants to keep some fig-leaf semblance of its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence policy because its repudiation would roil China’s international relations, among others, with its Belt & Road Initiative partner countries. Equally, it does not want to run afoul of the trip wire of U.S.-led financial and economic sanctions by aiding Russia overtly with military aid, financial relief or with trade in sanctioned commodities like microchips, especially following the stern warning delivered by Secretary Blinken earlier this week.
Over the last week, there are signs that the Beijing leadership is trying to “elevate” its initial indecision and aloofness into what it believes can be a long-term winning strategy for coming out ahead of the West when flames die out and the dust settles from the Ukraine conflagration. The Zhongnanhai thesis is that it is not worldwide supporters of post-WWII liberal democracy that are rallying to support Ukraine as much as it is a “civilizational” struggle between a Russian identity promulgated by Putin and a Western identity and set of values represented primarily by the U.S. and Europe. The thinking goes that, if China stands back from this clash, it can pick up the pieces and emerge stronger than either of the two depleted civilizational antagonists. This accords with Xi Jinping’s decade-long championing of the rejuvenation, and even superiority, of Han identity and the Chinese model. In Xi’s thinking, this policy of studious and disciplined aloofness — limited to cheering on Russia with “dog-whistle” encouragement and forms of back-channel support it can get away with while seizing opportunities to denigrate the West to his domestic audience and to countries in Central Asia, the Pacific, and Africa — has two clear advantages: (1) it avoids any risk for Xi in decisively backing ‘a loser’ in Putin, an outcome already sealed in his international pariah status and increasingly likely on the battlefield even if Kiev is taken and the war shifts to an insurgency; and (2) it gives Xi space to attend to the many immediate challenges facing him in the run-up to the critical Party Congress this fall where he is bidding for a third, controversial term as President. Those challenges include: a sharp fall-off in economic performance (brought on in part by excesses of his own Common Prosperity policy introduced over the past year; rapidly rising Covid case-counts and lock-downs in Shenzhen and Donguan in the south, in Shanghai and in Jilin to the northeast; and the recent hardening of attitudes toward China throughout much of the world as ably analyzed by Elizabeth Economy in The World According to China and in her Jan/Feb 2022 article in Foreign Affairs.
The jury is out but I submit that this policy of official aloofness may well prove to be Xi Jinping’s biggest and longest-lasting miscalculation with regard to Ukraine. Xi may think in ethno-nationalist terms, but much of the world’s response is underpinned by non-Western allies such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore who have benefitted from, and are committed to upholding, the post-WWII order based on national sovereignity and the rule of law. In fact, it is Taiwan which represents and symbolizes the fullest repudiation of Xi’s thesis. Absent some mis-adventure by North Korea (which is a disturbing possibility) or a premature move by Xi to extinguish the symbol Taiwan represents (which I consider very unlikely in the near-term), Xi’s official ‘aloofness’ and sub-rosa support for Putin will be remembered by the world in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. There are times when a person, or a nation, must choose sides. Not choosing sides in such situations is, in fact, a choice that is noticed and remembered. Pretending not to choose sides while actually backing the ‘wrong side’ is morally repugnant. There is not a middle way.
Throughout WWII, the U.S., the Soviet Union and the Kuomintang (KMT) Party of China were formal allies. But in 1949, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forced the KMT to flee to Taiwan. On October 1st 1949, Mao formally announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The strategic triangle shifted as the U.S. lost a putative (and highly authoritarian) KMT ally in China and the Soviet Union gained a Communist comrade-in-arms with the CPP.
The chumminess of this 1958 photo of Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev belies the deep rifts — both ideological and geopolitical — which had been developing in the Sino-Soviet relationship since 1956. Despite efforts to patch over the differences, the divisions continued to grow until Mao announced the split in 1964 followed by a series of formal statements. Monolithic global Communism had ceased to exist.
Fifty years ago today, Air Force One touched down in Beijing bringing President Nixon and the First Lady for their historic meeting with Mao Zedong. The Nixons’ visit to China lasted from February 21-28, 1972. It was then followed by years of rapprochement efforts — including the historic performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1973 — and culminated in the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China under President Carter in 1979. The Soviet Union was left out in the cold.
Today — February 21, 2022 — Russia announced its formal recognition of two breakaway, largely Russian-speaking enclaves in eastern Ukraine. The post-WWII order of sovereignty, rule of law, and cooperation is being challenged. Two weeks earlier, Xi Jinping chose to support Putin’s Ukraine power-play, overturning decades of official “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” policy. The U.S.-China-Russia ground has shifted yet again.
Looking back on these seventy-five years of U.S.-China-Soviet/Russia relations, I expect that I will always pause to reflect on February 21 as each year passes. February 21, 1972 was deeply promising. February 21, 2022 is deeply foreboding. In a professional sense, today’s date will likely be for me somewhat like what I feel personally as other calendar days each year remind me of my mother’s and father’s deaths (and of their lives). Artificial and arbitrary dates on a calendar which nonetheless carry deep and lasting human meaning and consequence.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 