Beijing calls Moscow to account for its new relationship with Trump
Russian observers say change of guard in Washington has meant China is no longer able to benefit from the conflict in Ukraine, but has been reduced to the role of onlooker.
The antagonisMoscow (AsiaNews) - The surprising positions taken by the new American administration raise the question of the new balance between the USA, China and Russia, a much discussed topic also in the Russian media at home and abroad.
On 27 February, Lin Jian, a representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, observed that ‘relations between China and Russia will continue to develop steadily, despite changes in the international situation’.
These statements came the day after the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared in an interview with Fox News that Donald Trump intended to modify relations with China, to ‘prevent any form of dependence’ on it.
On 28 February, the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Sergei Shoigu, immediately travelled to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping and senior Chinese foreign policy officials to ensure that Moscow adheres to China's positions on all regional and international issues. He himself emphasised that ‘the meeting was arranged at very short notice’, basically admitting that he had been ‘summoned’ by the Chinese leadership.
Merkhat Sharipzhanov, a commentator for Radio Svoboda, wonders if the Chinese leadership believes that ‘there is an attempt by Washington to provoke a schism in Russian-Chinese relations’, and to what extent the impromptu summit is due to the irritation of Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wan Yi.
Another worrying sign for Beijing was the vote at the UN on 26th February, when the USA refused to approve the resolution condemning Russia's aggression, assigning Europe the responsibility for security in Ukraine, leading various European leaders to declare the need to become independent from the USA in order to look after the whole of the European Union.
This sudden ‘chaos in the enemy's camp’, according to Sharipzhanov, ‘should be considered by China as a positive factor’, with Moscow's diplomatic successes in resolving the conflict in Ukraine, something that the leadership in Beijing had been hoping for since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
In reality, in this way ‘China loses the opportunity to calmly observe the conflict's exhaustion, remaining on the sidelines’, considering the war in Ukraine a ‘test of the West's resilience’.
Many observers have expressed the opinion that the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine makes China the only real beneficiary of the whole situation, and that Beijing only supports Moscow with words, while offering some (very cautious) support in circumventing sanctions and in the production of armaments.
The war weakens Russia and allows China to expand its influence over Siberia, the Far East and all of Central Asia, and makes the West less capable of defending Taiwan from Beijing's ambitions.
Now the U-turn by the Trump administration radically changes the situation, allowing Moscow to come out of international isolation, thanks to Washington's support. With the possible end of the Ukrainian conflict, comments Sharipzhanov, ’ the descendants of the great Confucius lose the chance to remain sitting on the branch, like the wise monkey waiting for the end of the fight between the two tigers, in which one of the two destroys the other in a deadly embrace, but remains so weakened that the monkey only has to jump on it to achieve full victory’.
China has not forgotten a similar circumstance that brought ideological enemies closer together: in 1971 Henry Kissinger arrived in Beijing to prepare for Richard Nixon's visit the following year, which allowed China to come out of the closet on the international markets and begin the phase of its grandiose economic development, a circumstance that is also being recalled these days by Marco Rubio.
Kissinger himself later admitted that the turning towards China played an important role in weakening the USSR, and many are wondering if today the opposite effect might not occur, encouraging Moscow to hit back at China.
.png)
23/08/2021 09:25
16/10/2017 18:06
