“It is not a question of denazification and safeguarding Russian national security, but of a country with an authoritarian tradition that follows the law of the jungle and the logic of the jungle, threatening and destroying freedom and peace”. Vladimir Putin’s war is told in this way not by a White House official but by scholar Su Xiaoling on the same Chinese site who a few days ago published an article in which Hu Wei, vice president of a research institute associated with the State Council, criticized Russia directly and China’s ambiguous position indirectly. The joint document signed by Putin and Xi Jinping on 4 February last ruled that there is an “unlimited” friendship between Moscow and Beijing. But now the (alleged) alliance is perhaps discovering that it has borders. The Chinese ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, said, identifying these limits “in the principles of the United Nations Charter”. Words arrived in conjunction with other interesting signals: Janet Yellen’s no to sanctions in Beijing and the blocking of two projects in Russia by the Chinese state giant Sinopec.
This does not mean that China is ready to give up Moscow. On the contrary. Anti-NATO and anti-US propaganda is the lowest common denominator of the Chinese government and media narrative. The provincial administrations have also imposed study groups in universities with the aim of justifying the “special operation” on Ukrainian soil. Because it is precisely on this, the rhetoric, that the Sinorussian alignment is realized. When it comes to the test of the field, bilateral asymmetries and perhaps insoluble contradictions of Chinese interests emerge. The other two sides of this broken triangle know this and try to pull Beijing out of the traditional (and comfortable) gray area. The US does this, asking it to take a clear position, under penalty of ending up in the whirlwind of sanctions. But Russia also seems to do so. Last week, the Kremlin sent ten military ships into the Tsugaru Strait, which separates the two main islands of the Japanese archipelago. After that he broke off the peace negotiations on the Kuril Islands. A way to punish Tokyo’s hostility, but perhaps also the attempt to ignite a hotbed of crisis closer to Xi, whose march towards the 20th Party Congress and the coveted third term is distracted by what the new helmsman most hates: a stormy sea.
And the waves are likely to get even higher after Joe Biden’s speech from Warsaw. His words about Putin and the “great battle between democracy and autocracy” raised the alarm in Zhongnanhai because they evoke the biggest bugbear of the Chinese leadership: regime change. In Beijing, where people think about the long term more than anywhere else, they know that Washington sees the war in Ukraine as a distraction from the real game: the one in Asia-Pacific. If Biden goes to the ideological wall against the wall, Xi can afford even less a Putin collapse so as not to stimulate insidious equations. It is no coincidence that the Global Times immediately used Biden’s release as proof of the “cold war dreams” made in the USA.
As long as it can, Beijing will try to define itself neutral on the conflict in a complex game of diplomatic balancing act that has two contortionist appointments in the lineup in the coming days: first a meeting between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the Russian counterpart Sergej Lavrov and immediately after the participation in the EU-China summit.