As the Russian army continued to intensify its offensive against Ukraine on 19and War Day, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan met Monday in Rome with Yang Jiechi, director of China’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Chinese Communist Party’s top official on diplomacy. A face-to-face conducted in complete discretion, but whose scope remains decisive in the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Decryption.
Block strategic supports
No statement was made by the parties following this meeting held in a hotel in the Italian capital. But according to an American politician, quoted by the Reuters agency, Jake Sullivan would have warned Yang Jiechi there against the isolation that China could suffer if it decided to support Moscow in its aggression of Ukraine.
Fears are high that Beijing will supply arms to Russia, but also help it to absorb the effects of the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin by the West, as a sign of retaliation.
“We will make sure that neither China nor anyone else compensates Russia for its losses,” Sullivan said on NBC on Sunday. I’m not going to lay out in public the different ways of doing this, but we will communicate them privately to China, as we have done before and will continue to do. »
On Monday, however, the US State Department informed its European and Asian allies that Beijing would now be open to the request for military support that Moscow has made in recent days to accelerate its takeover of Ukraine, according to the FinancialTimes. In the process, a senior White House official described as “deeply worrying” the position “of alignment of China with Russia” in the face of the war in Ukraine, at the end of this high-level meeting in Rome which ultimately failed to lower the tension.
The economic sanctions imposed on Russia also threaten the country with defaulting on its public debt, a first since 1998.
“It’s a unique situation,” Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), said Monday. “Unless the US treasury allows some of Russia’s $300 billion in frozen assets to be released to pay for less than $20 billion in foreign holdings of Russian Eurobonds, we are likely to see a default.”
Yet, in anticipation of its attack on Ukraine, Moscow has reduced its central bank’s dollar reserves to increase those in yuan, rubles and gold. More than 13% of these reserves — or about $77 billion — are now held in China’s national currency. A reality that disturbs Washington, which for several days has been trying to make China understand that if Beijing decided to side with Moscow on the Ukrainian question, this could have consequences on trade flows, on development new technologies, in addition to exposing the Middle Empire to secondary sanctions.
Last week, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that any attempt to defy US sanctions could deprive China of the US equipment and software it needs to manufacture its products.
Getting China out of its ambiguity
While refraining from condemning the Russian invasion, in a vote held in early March by the United Nations General Assembly, China subsequently expressed its “unwavering support” of the sovereignty of Ukraine. Beijing also called for peace and even offered to help end the war through diplomacy.
According to Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a non-governmental think tank based in Beijing, it is now time for China to break out of this ambivalent logic in order to help Russia find a way out of this conflict.
“The United States and its allies may be reluctant to have China play a role in this crisis, given that they view Beijing as a strategic rival,” he wrote in an op-ed published Sunday in the pages of the New York Times. It’s silly and short-sighted. The immediate dangers of conflict far outweigh any competitive considerations. Ukraine itself sees the potential for a China-led conflict resolution.”
Beijing is caught in this conflict between contradictory winds. On the one hand, his state media expose the ongoing war to the Chinese on a daily basis using the same rhetoric as that of the master of the Kremlin. They speak of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, reject the use of the word “invasion” and even relay the conspiracy theories deployed by Russia to justify the aggression.
On the other hand, China is taking a high risk in letting Ukraine become impoverished and destroyed. It is indeed one of its trading partners, but also a key component of its New Silk Road, this ambitious infrastructure program which seeks to facilitate the transport of goods from China to Europe, by through several countries in the region.
What is more, even if Beijing is much closer to Moscow on the diplomatic level, the economy of the Middle Kingdom is, for its part, much more linked to the United States and the European Union. As proof, in 2021, trade between China and these two regions reached 1485 billion dollars, or… 10 times more than the 147 billion dollars in transactions with Russia. Figures that Jake Sullivan may have remembered Yang Jiechi in Rome on Monday.
With Agence France-Presse