The Chinese sphinx in the face of Russian war
Putin relies on Chinese support to save Moscow's economy from Western sanctions against the invasion of Ukraine. China and Russia united by opposition to the US and the West. However, theirs remains a tactical partnership, not a strategic alliance.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China has prudently remained cryptic by not openly siding with Vladimir Putin, despite the warm embraces of the Russian president with Xi Jinping just before the conflict, on the occasion of the Beijing Olympics. Today Putin himself affirms that he does not feel excluded from the world economy because of sanctions, trusting in Chinese help, to which he intends to sell gas and oil that Westerners want to refuse. Will Asia be the future of Russia?
One of the most important Russian specialists on Central Asia and China, Temur Umarov, has tried to explain to Meduza.ru how things stand between Moscow and Beijing, and if Russians really have to stop studying English to learn Mandarin. Recalling Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov's visit to China at the beginning of April, which was formally dedicated to the issue of Afghanistan and the recognition of the Taliban, Umarov notes that just then negotiations between the two countries on the future of the alliance began in earnest.
Knowing that he could not obtain an explicit support, Lavrov has tried to show in the relationship with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi that both are interested in the settlement of global issues first of all in Asia, and in any case they consider the United States the common opponent in every field: the real culprit of the world unrest. In this sense "Russia and China want to show that only they are able to make the world more just and more democratic".
While not condemning the "Ukrainian Nazis", Uvarov stresses that "the Foreign Ministry in Beijing and several high officials have repeatedly said that the U.S. is the cause of all problems, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, along with their NATO allies, and however China supports the interests of the Russians in the field of European security, even if it respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine".
The principle of territorial integrity is indeed one of the classic arguments of Chinese foreign policy, referring especially to the Taiwan issue, and to recognize the separation of a territory on the basis of a local referendum, as happened in Crimea and is looming in Donbass, would be for Beijing an unacceptable contradiction. Equally important for the Chinese is its opposition to any foreign interference in a country's internal affairs, so "if China justified what Russia is doing in Ukraine, this would automatically legitimize attempts by various countries to challenge its internal policy in Xinjiang with the Uighurs, in Tibet or in Hong-Kong," Umarov argues.
No one is really meddling in China's internal affairs, but more than threats are symbols, and China cannot even admit the right to enunciate ethnic-religious or social rules in international contexts that touch upon its internal issues. This is true for all countries, because "even Russia knew very well that Ukraine would never join NATO, and that the Atlantic Alliance had no interest in Kiev's entry, but nobody wanted to make this point explicit, putting it in black and white, because it was a symbolic issue", comments the Russian orientalist.
Just as symbolically, more than on the basis of real economic or military agreements, China needs Russian support in its confrontation with the US, since it does not have many other international supporters in this competition between the two superpowers of the East and the West. If it lost this support, China itself would feel much more isolated, even if Moscow and Beijing do not explicitly call themselves "allies," recalling the hostilities and mistrusts of the Soviet period. Just as China remains neutral on Ukraine, Russia does not intervene with respect to disputes in Indochina or in territorial issues between China and India. Putin has recently called China a "strategic partner," but so far the relationship between the two is rather tactical, and the real strategy has yet to be worked out in the near future.
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24/06/2022 12:42
06/04/2021 10:32
