In 2023, Chinese leader Xi Jinping sat down for a conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, stating that “China always stands on the side of peace.” Yeah, I’m not so sure the rest of us are stupid enough to believe this statement, so it’s highly unlikely that Zelenskyy did either. And it has become apparent that Jinping’s words were as empty as the man’s soul because when an international summit sponsored by Switzerland met together to try and seek a peaceful resolution to Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, China was nowhere to be found.
The absence of the country from the summit became even more apparent in light of the the fact that Beijing has put on quite a performance about wanting to mediate a settlement between the two countries.
According to a new report from MSN:
Xi’s excuse was that all parties were not properly represented at the summit—in other words, the Russian party, which had not been invited. His relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin has grown too close for anyone to expect the Chinese leader to be taken seriously as a peacemaker. Any hope that Xi might use his influence with Putin as leverage to help bring an end to the war evaporated long ago. Instead, the focus in Western capitals is now turning to the role that China is actually playing in the conflict—as facilitator of the Russian war effort. In that, the United States and its allies face a distressing reality: A protracted war in Europe suits Xi’s interests just fine.
Xi is, in effect, freeloading off the very U.S.-led global-security system he hopes to destroy, in order to replace it with a China-centric world order. He can leave the heavy lifting of solving the Ukraine crisis to Washington while exploiting it for China’s interests. Right now, this approach looks as effective as it is cynical.
If Putin prevails in his war, Xi has a partner who will have scored a victory against the hated West and promoted the global power of authoritarian regimes. Even if Putin fails to secure such an outright triumph, Xi will have helped Russia drain the U.S. and its allies of military and financial resources, while pulling Putin’s weakened but resource-rich country closer into China’s orbit.
Neither the Chinese leader nor the government backing him will acknowledge the contribution to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that has now raged on for a total of 28 months. China is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. Publicly they push for peace talks while their actions are communicating an entirely different message.
The leaders participating in the G7 summit have stated that the support China continues to offer Moscow is providing them what they need to wage this war, calling on the communist nation to stop shipping components and equipment into Russia that could potentially be used in the country’s weapons.
“Chinese support for Russia would make the war longer,” Zelensky said earlier this month during a visit to Singapore, “and that is bad for the entire world.”
Policy makers still believe that China has not been supporting Putin’s war directly, by supplying weapons to Russia’s armed forces. Zelensky recently revealed that Xi had promised him personally that Beijing would not sell weapons to Putin. But China can’t evade responsibility for aiding Putin indirectly, by propping up the sanctioned-plagued Russian economy.
Total trade between the two countries reached a record $240 billion in 2023, an increase of 26 percent compared with the previous year. China’s exports to Russia have surged by 64 percent since 2021, before the war in Ukraine began. Much of their trade is conducted in the Chinese currency, the yuan, rather than in U.S. dollars—the world’s principal reserve currency, still used for most international transactions. China’s financial sector has developed a Russian ruble–Chinese yuan payments system to bypass international banking’s SWIFT network, from which some Russian banks have been banned by the West’s sanctions.
Russia is now depending on this trade to support themselves. Chinese produced goods now make up 38 percent of all Russian imports, while China is buying 31 percent of all exports coming out of Russia. Take a wild guess who has bought almost half of Russia’s crude-oil exports since the European Union slapped them with an embargo in 2022.
” In a March report for the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, Kimberly Donovan and Maia Nikoladze of its Economic Statecraft Initiative argued that China has created an ‘axis of evasion’ in the oil market through its purchases from sanctioned Russia (as well as from Iran). ‘Oil revenue from China is propping up the Iranian and Russian economies and is undermining Western sanctions,’ they wrote,” MSN reported.
Most disturbing is the fact that there has been no accountability for Xi or China for their support of Russia. The attendees of the G7 summit have threatened to put more sanctions on Chinese financial institutions that have been helping Russia get necessary material to wage their war on Ukraine.
For Xi, withdrawing or curtailing support for Russia might hold greater risk than building a closer connection. China has a strong interest in Russia’s political and economic stability. Anything that might jeopardize that status quo—such as retreat or potential defeat in Ukraine, let alone a descent into economic crisis or political chaos in the Russian homeland (as briefly seemed possible when a mutinous Wagner Group marched on Moscow last year)—could present a major security threat along China’s long northern frontier.
There are significant downsides to all this of too. The more Russia becomes dependent on the support it gets from China, the more power Xi holds over Putin. The more power and influence he has over Putin, the more pressure he can apply to Moscow to support the interests of China. I don’t think that’s going to be good for anyone, including Russia themselves.
Above all, Xi’s support for Russia is part of a much larger, long-term geopolitical strategy to remake the current world order dominated by the U.S. and its allies. Xi sees Putin as a crucial partner in his campaign to build an alternative bloc of developing countries that China can lead against the Western powers. For Xi, that goal may seem too big and important to set aside in order to resolve a far-off war in Europe. If anything, Xi’s incentives run in the other direction—and he gains by sustaining the Russian economy and prolonging Putin’s war. That way, Xi gets to create trouble for the U.S. and its European partners and bind Putin closer to him, with minimal risk to China itself.
Add to this the fact that we, the United States, are gradually being pulled deeper into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which is bad for us on a number of levels, not to mention such intervention is increasing the chances of a global war breaking out. Our economy is in shambles, yet we’re shipping billions to Ukraine to allegedly help them defeat an enemy that is also being financially backed by a major world power.
It’s almost like Russia and Ukraine have become proxies for a conflict between China and the United States. I don’t see how the outcome for that could possibly be positive.