Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Moscow on March 20
This article has been updated March 20, 12:00 p.m. CST
-Analysis-
Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping were growing closer. China’s goal? To revamp the current world order, significantly weaken the West and its leaders, and to become the world-dominating figurehead over and above the United States.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.Russia’s war in Ukraine has become an essential element of this plan to destabilize the global situation.
When the West began imposing stringent sanctions on Russia, China instead chose to economically support Putin and left its markets open to accept raw materials from Russia. But don’t think this means China is Putin’s lapdog. Quite the contrary: Beijing has never helped Moscow to its own detriment, not wishing to fall under the punitive measures of the U.S. and Europe.
The fundamental dynamic has not changed ahead of Xi Jinping's arrival on Monday for his first visit to Moscow since the war began. Beyond the photo ops and pleasant words that Xi and Putin are sure to share, the Russian-Chinese alliance continues to be looked at skeptically amongst the elite in both Beijing and Moscow.
China was not expecting Russia’s plans to occupy Ukraine in a matter of days to fail and as a result, China’s aim to destabilize the West alongside its Russian partner failed.
Add to this the various alliances in the West emerging against Beijing and fears for China’s economy on home turf is beginning to grow.
So, why is Beijing still in league with Moscow? And what are the consequences of Chinese cooperation with Russia after one year of Russia’s war?
One of the turning points in the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR was Beijing’s pivot against Moscow towards Washington (recall ping-pong diplomacy and U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972).
Now, though, China’s desire to become the main player on the world stage forces it to not just desire America’s weakening and its own control of Asia, but completely rehash the political and economic playing field.
Russia’s aggression in recent months is playing into Xi Jinping’s hands.
To do this, Beijing had to concede an alliance with Moscow. The reason is rather pragmatic: to acquire guarantees that Russia would not participate in the strategic encirclement of China alongside the Americans, that its northern borders would be safe. So, eight years ago, Xi Jinping began to develop a strong “friendship” with Vladimir Putin and since then, Russia has become China’s junior, dependent partner.
Russia’s aggression in recent months is playing into Xi Jinping’s hands. With US eyes and resources firmly fixed on Ukraine, China hopes to grow and develop out of sight. Seeking to create an alternative economic system to the Western one, China attempts to weaken the dollar by only transferring payments with certain countries in Chinese Yuan.
At the same time, the Putin regime fully supports the Chinese vision of a new economic center in Beijing, support which has been bolstered since Feb. 24. Now, sanctioned Russian banks that are no longer able to use the Euro or Dollar for international payments can use the Yuan. The gaps left by Western corporations who exited the Russian market are being filled by niche Chinese companies.
Furthermore, Moscow has become a vast resource annex for China, selling to Beijing at significant discounts. China has been able to obtain valuable military technologies and weapons from Russia including missile attack warning systems, engines for helicopters and airplanes, air defense systems as well as countless other components that aid the Chinese Air Force and Navy.
In 2021, 21% of Russian military exports went to China (in turn, 81% of Beijing’s military imports are Russian).
Moscow has also provided Beijing with access to space technology. For example, the manned Chinese spacecraft “Shenzhou” is in fact a copy of the Soviet-Russian “Soiuz”. Moreover, in June 2021, Russia and China agreed on the construction of a bilateral research station on the moon, as well as on joint exploration of deep space, something which caused Washington grave concern, fearing the militarization of space.
Xi Jinping diplomatically and economically supports Moscow because he understands that the strategic defeat of Russia in Ukraine and Putin’s displacement would be a threat to his ambitions, both in terms of acquiring Taiwan and more generally as a primary political leader in Asia.
Beijing spreads Russian propaganda in its own media, emphasizing the West as antagonist, and takes a neutral or pro-Russian stance in UN votes. In turn, Russia supports China informationally, especially on issues regarding Taiwan.
At the same time, Beijing has tried to avoid Western sanctions by not sending (at least openly) weapons or sensitive products to Russia. It knows that its largest economic partner (40% of all Chinese trade) is the West itself. Secondary sanctions against China would severely damage any future economic designs, which helps to explain why China has continued to publicly refute reports that it is sending weapons to Moscow.
Today, Beijing is under huge pressure from Washington to back down in the Indo-Pacific region. The U.S. is constantly increasing Taiwan’s defense capabilities (in 2022 alone, the US sold more than $2 billion worth of military equipment to Taiwan, and plans to provide the island with an additional $12 billion in the coming years).
The US is also continually forming anti-Chinese alliances in the region, such as Japan. In turn, China’s military and political partner in the region has become Russia. British political commentator and author Owen Matthews writes that during his pre-invasion visit to China on Feb. 4, Putin won Xi’s consent to an NATO Article 5 level deal, agreeing that their countries would come to each other’s aid militarily, with Xi insisting on the prescient proviso “in the case of foreign invasion”.
If Beijing annexes Taiwan, Moscow will be fully on China’s side. For Xi Jinping, this is an incredibly important fact.
Vladimir Putin Xi Jinping before the start of their bilateral meeting just weeks before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin Pool / Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire
Cooperation with Russia is situationally advantageous for China, but it sees Russia as nothing more than a weakened and temporary junior partner.
Not only is Beijing unsure if Moscow is really an effective partner in global and regional confrontation with America, Russia’s image as a serious military-political player has entirely disintegrated after almost a year of failed full-scale war against Ukraine. If China can instead find ways of cooling confrontation with the US in the near future, what need does China have for Russia?
China has no desire to modernize Russia out of its own pocket.
Moreover, economic relations between Russia and China remain asymmetric. China, the second largest economy in the world, has no desire to take big financial risks with smaller, rocky economies and limits its investments in the Russian market at less than $10 billion per year, a figure that has only decreased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with fear of high-risk, low returns.
In comparison, China’s yearly investment in the US reaches just shy of $40 billion.
China, it would seem, has no desire to modernize Russia out of its own pocket. On the contrary: Beijing wants to buy cheap resources and technologies from Russia.
If anything, once Washington ceases to be the biggest threat and irritant for Russia and China, cooperation between them will go astray. The two “partners” are natural competitors and are wary of each other’s critical strengthening. In the case of Chinese-Russian relations, it appears to be a case of convenience, rather than any deep-set friendship.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.
