China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine. By Jude Blanchette

Foreign Policy Magazine.

August 13, 2024 — Read time: 11 minutes

In the weeks following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government struck a tone of cautious support for Moscow. Spokespeople for the Chinese government repeatedly stressed that Russia had the right to conduct its affairs as it saw fit, alleged that the word “invasion” was a Western interpretation of events, and suggested that the United States had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin by backing a NATO expansion. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, expressed sympathy for Russia’s “legitimate concerns.”

Yet outside of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, the reaction was more concerned. Although the vast majority of universities and think tanks in China are state funded, the analysts and academics who work there still retain a degree of independence, and their views exert a measure of influence on the government. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, these analysts openly fretted about how the conflict could damage China’s relationship with Europe and the United States, further fracture the global economy, and diminish the wealth and power of Russia, China’s most important partner. “The negative impact of the war on China [will be] huge,” Yan Xuetong, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars, argued in May 2022, warning that a protracted conflict would wreak havoc on the global economy and trigger “heightened tensions” between China and neighbors such as Japan. The West’s “unprecedentedly united” effort to sanction the Russian economy, as the international relations scholar Li Wei put it, surprised Chinese experts. Some, such as Wang Yongli, a former Bank of China vice president, worried that sanctions would threaten the globalization on which the Chinese economy depends.

More than two years into the war, however, such stark public pessimism has dissipated, replaced by cautious optimism. The Russian and Chinese economies, these experts now reckon, have largely avoided crippling harm from Western sanctions. Russia is reconstituting its defense industrial base and has avoided the extreme diplomatic isolation that once seemed a plausible outcome of Putin’s gambit.

Some of these analysts’ conclusions about the war in Ukraine—for instance, that the United States’ domestic consensus in favor of arming Kyiv would falter—have been borne out. But other realities are conspicuously absent from the Chinese public discourse. China has, in fact, incurred costs as a result of Putin’s war and Beijing’s economic and diplomatic support for it. Europe has not completely turned its back on China, but the country’s deepening relationship with Russia has caused a significant deterioration in its relations with many European countries that cannot easily be reversed. And the symmetry between Putin’s lust to seize Ukrainian territory and Beijing’s long-standing appetite to absorb Taiwan has provoked the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific to harden their defenses.

These blind spots matter because in China, the war in Ukraine is serving as both an observatory and a laboratory as the country prepares for heightened geopolitical conflict with the United States. As they analyze events in Ukraine, Chinese scholars seek to assess the United States’ and Europe’s resolve and understand what risks China might be forced to bear in a geopolitical or military crisis. Some experts, such as the leading military strategist Zhou Bo, have concluded that NATO’s hesitancy to make certain major interventions on Ukraine’s behalf proves that, aside from the United States, Taiwan would lack defenders in a future conflict with China. Although these scholars tend to be careful not to discuss the contours of a potential war in the Taiwan Strait too explicitly, many seem to be drawing a straight line from the cracks in the United States’ determination to support Ukraine and its likely will to stomach a possible protracted conflict with Beijing.

WORRY COURT

Chinese experts, particularly those based at elite academic institutions or at think tanks affiliated with the government or military, serve as both interpreters and influencers of official policy. They publish in government-sanctioned journals and media outlets, and although their opinions frequently align with government orthodoxy, many of them also test policy ideas not yet publicly voiced by officials or float new political propositions as trial balloons to gauge official reaction. Even under the regime of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, where public discourse is tightly controlled, some of these experts can still cautiously explore sensitive topics, walking a fine line between intellectual independence and political loyalty.

Chinese experts have not been monolithic on Putin’s war. From the moment Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in 2022, Chinese analysts have offered differing perspectives on the impact the conflict would have on Chinese interests and the proper interpretation of Western efforts to counter the Russian offensive. On the whole, however, their early reactions were shaped by concern that the war would mark a historic post–Cold War turning point. Chinese scholars consistently concluded that Russia’s invasion would drive a major realignment of the international order. This view was trenchantly expressed by a group of scholars at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank known for its high-quality analysis despite its direct affiliation with China’s Ministry of State Security. In February 2023, these scholars argued that the invasion was a “watershed in history” that revealed the existence of a “latent new order” different from the security architecture that dominated for three decades after the end of the Cold War.

Xi has, of course, spoken of the dawn of a “new era” for the global order. He has repeatedly touted the idea that the world is undergoing “profound changes unseen in a century” that will be marked by growing risks but also potential benefits to China, by overturning the United States’ dominance in geopolitics, technology, and the global economy.

Chinese scholars initially concluded that Russia’s invasion would upend the international order.

Many scholars initially feared that Russia’s attack could upset China’s ability to steer itself carefully into this new era. The event punctured their sense that China, more than any country besides the United States, enjoys the capacity to decide the trajectory of the global economy and world events. Moreover, the swift, unexpected assault on Ukraine highlighted the dangers of a sudden, significant rupture in relations between China and the West. U.S.-led sanctions on Russia would hasten “the formation of two sharply opposing camps,” Wang, the former Bank of China vice president, lamented, which would “pose a great threat” to the ongoing process of globalization that fuels China’s economic growth. In June 2022, the foreign policy scholar Chen Dongxiao worried that a prolonged war would “significantly increase the difficulty for Beijing in handling Sino-U.S. relations.”

Chinese analysts were especially startled by the West’s coordinated push to sanction the Russian economy. That effort offered a “vivid demonstration of the tools of economic power” that the United States could muster, Li wrote. Not all Chinese experts agreed on the sanctions’ likely efficacy. Some, such as Huang Jing, argued that the West’s “world war without gunpowder” would fail because sanctions on the energy and financial sectors are notoriously “leaky” and because, he contended, disagreements would emerge between the United States and Europe.

But others concluded that the United States still wields unrivaled power over the international financial system. Zhang Bei, an analyst at the People’s Bank of China, predicted that the United States’ leverage over key payment and settlement mechanisms, including the SWIFT system, which handles interbank messaging, would allow it to threaten Russia’s “national financial security.” The economist Wang Da went further, likening the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT to a nuclear attack. The United States’ capacity to devastate a rival financially would have stark implications for China: in October 2022, one researcher at China’s central bank warned that China must be ready to defend against a U.S. effort “replicating this financial sanction model against China” in the “context of the intensified Sino-U.S. strategic game and the Taiwan Strait conflict.”

As the sanctions began to take hold and the Russian military stumbled, Chinese scholars also worried that Russia’s standing as a valuable strategic partner might be in peril. One of China’s most prominent experts on Russia, Feng Yujun, predicted that “Russia’s influence in the world economy and international political system” would “decline significantly”; another expert, Yuan Xun, predicted that the sanctions would “make it difficult for Russian companies to raise funds, increase the risk of [Russian] stock market crashes, [lead to] a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises potentially facing bankruptcy risks, reduce employment opportunities, increase unemployment rates, and reduce [Russian] citizens’ incomes.”

SUNNY SIDE UP

Today, however, a substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted. The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries. Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”

In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit. The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.” Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.” Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.

As the war drags on, Chinese analysts also believe that the West’s unity is fracturing. As Democrats and Republicans fight “fiercely against each other and as the [U.S. presidential] election approaches, [the] situation is getting more and more unfavorable for Ukraine,” the prominent Eurasian Studies expert Ding Xiaoxing wrote in February. Jin Canrong, a hawkish international relations scholar, predicted that a public “backlash” against support for Ukraine in European countries and the United States would eventually doom Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.

LOSS ADJUSTMENT

Many of these Chinese experts’ analyses are fair, even astute. But missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable before February 2022.

Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly Beijing’s decision to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia, is also exacerbating the rifts in an already fractious U.S.-Chinese relationship. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Beijing that the economic, technological, and diplomatic lifeline China is extending to Moscow works at cross-purposes with its stated desire for a stable bilateral relationship with the United States. But Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort. More sanctions are likely to come irrespective of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

FRAUGHT LESSONS

In February, a group of experts at Renmin University took stock of the global situation and concluded that “the external environment no longer continuously progresses and improves.” Instead, they went on, “we have a situation of great changes and great struggles that are confrontational, protracted, and cruel.” Although Putin remains firmly in power in Moscow, and his effort to annex Ukrainian territory has not yet yielded the outright strategic tragedy many Chinese analysts initially predicted, Beijing’s external environment is far from benign. Relations with the United States remain fractious. In China’s immediate neighborhood, American allies such as Australia, Japan, and the Philippines are strengthening their defensive capabilities. Conflict is destabilizing the Middle East. China’s position in the international order remains strong but is increasingly unsettled.

All of this has extraordinary salience for China’s own designs on Taiwan. Russia’s war on Ukraine offers general lessons about the complexities of modern warfare, the possibilities for an international response to a purportedly regional dispute, and the costs of a protracted military conflict. What Xi is learning from this crisis remains inscrutable. But Chinese analysts’ views offer a window into the possible lessons the Chinese government is drawing from Putin’s war. Their interpretations are varied and individual. After watching two years of war in Ukraine, however, many have concluded that the West has no stomach for conflict and will grow tired of supporting democracies facing an invading force if the economic costs are high. This conclusion is often overstated and probably underestimates American resolve. But the very fact that they have drawn it suggests that the Taiwan Strait—and the world at large—may be heading in a still more dangerous direction.