The battle in Ukraine doesn’t seem to end soon, but an agreement is shaping in Chinese policy circles that one country continues to emerge victorious from the turmoil says China.
After an uncertain primary reaction to Russia’s invasion, China has put the building blocks of a strategy to safeguard itself from the worst economic and diplomatic outcomes it could face and to get benefited from geopolitical shifts once the situation gets clear.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has not spoken a word against President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but he has also begun to turn away China from the war. His government has criticized the international sanctions imposed on Russia but, so far at least, has implied that Chinese firms may permit with them, to safeguard China’s economic interests in the West.
Xi talked to European leaders last week with vague proposes assistance in mediating a settlement, even as other Chinese officials intensified Russian disinformation campaigns implies to deny the United States and NATO. Officials in Washington alleged, without providing evidence, that after the invasion Russia inquired China for economic and military assistance, which a Chinese official criticized on Monday as disinformation.
In the end, China’s leadership has estimated that it must try to surge above what it assumes a battle between two tired powers and be recognized as a pillar of stability in an increasingly turbulent world.
“This implies that as long as we don’t engage terminal strategic blunders, China’s modernization will not be cut short, and on the opposite, China will have actually enormous capacity and will to play a more significant role in assembling a new international law,” Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has urged senior officials, wrote after the attack in a widely circulated article.
However, China’s strategy lies in a belief that the United States is weakened from sudden foreign adventures, comprising, from Beijing’s standpoint, persuading Putin into the Ukraine conflict.
In this perspective, which in recent days has been reflected in public statements and quasi-official inquiries, Russia’s invasion has pulled American power and attention toward Europe, making it possible that President Joe Biden, like his current predecessors, will try but decline to put more focus on China and the broader Asia-Pacific nation.
“All the problems and all the balancing and all the guilt that we’re talking about, those are short-term,” announced Yun Sun, the chief of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, who has researched Beijing’s actions in the lead-up to the war. “In the long run, Russia is taking off to be the pariah of the international community, and Russia will have no one to twirl to but China.”
China’s path forward is by no means actual. Drawing too close to Russia would chance to entrench resentment toward China in Europe and beyond, a chance that concerns Xi’s government, for all its fuss.
And if Germany, France and other supporters accumulate their defences as promised, the United States could eventually be freed up to shift more of its military resources toward disputing China. Biden has pledged to rally an “alliance of democracies,” while American military leaders announce they will not let Ukraine confuse them from China.
China’s original stumbles after Russia’s invasion have also put up concern about Xi’s ability to drive the war’s aftershocks.
He has continually warned Chinese officials that the world is arriving at an era of upheaval “the likes of which have not been glimpsed for a century.” Yet those officials occurred to be ill-prepared for the revolution of Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
