China sees at least one winner emerging from Ukraine war: China
Categories: FOREIGN COUNTRIES
The war in Ukraine is far from over, but a consensus is forming in Chinese policy circles that one country stands to emerge victorious from the turmoil.After a confused initial response to Russia’s invasion, China has laid the building blocks of a strategy to shield itself from the worst economic and diplomatic consequences it could face, and to benefit from geopolitical shifts once the smoke clears.China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has avoided criticizing President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but he has also tried to distance China from the carnage. His government has denounced the international sanctions imposed on Russia but, so far at least, has hinted that Chinese companies may comply with them, to protect China’s economic interests in the West. “This means that as long as we don’t commit terminal strategic blunders, China’s modernization will not be cut short, and on the contrary, China will have even greater ability and will to play a more important role in building a new international order,” Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has advised senior officials, wrote after the invasion in a widely circulated article.“All the difficulties and all the balancing and all the embarrassment that we’re talking about, those are short-term,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, who has studied Beijing’s actions in the lead-up to the war. “In the long run, Russia is going to be the pariah of the international community, and Russia will have no one to turn to but China.” “We also feel very, very anxious because the Russia-Ukraine war will force Europe to lean to the U.S., and then China will be dragged deeper into a dilemma,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University. The United States’ allies in the Pacific, including Japan and Australia, “will also adopt a stronger military posture. So it all seems unfriendly to China.”“In its China strategy, the Biden administration’s policy continuities with the Trump administration are clearly bigger than any differences,” Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, wrote late last year. “Biden has repeatedly avowed that the United States is not in a ‘new Cold War’ with China, but China often feels the chill creeping in everywhere.” “The West should not have become a hegemon in defining universal standards because the West or Europe, or the West in general is only part of humanity,” Dugin told a Chinese state television interviewer in 2019. “And the other part, a majority of human beings, live outside the West, in Asia.”“The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers,” wrote Zheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”