The Chinese president is visiting Russia today. He goes to see his great friend Putin, more and more clearly an ally… but perhaps also his future vassal. According to Beijing’s assessment, “there is no more important bilateral relationship in the world”.
The big question behind this visit, in the dramatic context of 2023: how far will China’s support for Russia, in its war on Ukraine and the West, go?
Peking’s sympathies are obvious here: while claiming to play impartial and responsible observers, the Chinese media daily take up Russian theses on “NATO as a warmonger”.
They do not name the aggressor and the attacked (became vague “protagonists”), say without detail that it is necessary to negotiate (the supposed peace plan in 12 points), sharply denounce the Western sanctions. And this, while “deploring” the destruction… whose author is never named.
Could this support, which does not say its name, go as far as arms deliveries, which would give the conflict a global dimension, while increasing Russia’s chances in its spoliation of Ukraine? Even though in Bakhmout, the Russian detachments are today showing certain signs of exhaustion?
It’s possible, because China undoubtedly has an interest in seeing a weakened Russia – which it could vassalize, and whose resources are attractive for this thirsty power. But not a defeated Russia.
However, increased support, which has become explicitly military, would exacerbate the contradiction and the fallacy of Beijing’s “neutral and peaceful” posture.
In addition, there would be economic consequences (rupture or serious reduction of trade links with Europe). China, despite the frenzied anti-Westernism it shares with Moscow, does not want a world that has become economically chaotic.
(This is also one of the main reasons that also hold Beijing back from acting in Taiwan — the economy versus the strategic imperative.)
Yet, for a year now, it has been clear that China is helping Russia. Beijing has absorbed much of Russia’s hydrocarbon exports, mitigating the impact of sanctions. According to the State Department (Antony Blinken, February 19), the Chinese are considering the possibility of sending arms and ammunition to Moscow, which
Beijing denies.
If ever China crossed this line, it would surely be in a discreet way… unlike Westerners who support, visor raised, the struggle for sovereignty and democracy embodied by the resistant Ukraine.
How exactly? The list of cross-visits between leaders of the countries of the anti-Western axis, over the past six weeks, gives an idea of this.
Raisi, the Iranian president, spent three long days in Beijing on February 14, 15 and 16. Lukashenko, the Belarusian, also in Beijing, on 1er March. Lukashenko again, on March 13, this time in Tehran. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, at the Kremlin on March 15. And today, Xi Jinping in Moscow.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Chinese companies have sold guns, drone parts and equipment to Russian entities. We already know that Iranian drones are attacking civilians in Ukraine. And that, in this production chain, there are Chinese parts upstream.
Xi and Putin will no doubt discuss plans to circumvent sanctions, to support these production and distribution circuits. According to the ISW, Xi and
Lukashenko have signed 16 agreements to ship Chinese products through Belarus.
Russian imperialism expressed in the military invasion of a neighbor, led by a man now wanted by the International Criminal Court, is allied with Chinese neo-totalitarianism led by a despot with an unlimited mandate, and a beleaguered theocratic regime who bludgeons young people and women.
A new axis is set up. But it is not united by a coherent vision or by an ideology, as in the days of the cold war. Anti-Western resentment and power to harm are more important ingredients than a hypothetical common plan to build an alternative “new world”.
This is the geopolitical reality of the world in 2023.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]