The Los Angeles Post

Things were going very well for China, until the war in Ukraine

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Why Beijing likes stability
As China has emerged as a power over the past decade, it has benefited from the political disarray among its global rivals.
The United States organized a Pacific trade pact meant to counter China’s rise — and then refused to ratify that very pact, because of domestic politics. The U.S. also alienated longtime allies in Europe with Donald Trump’s “America First” policy. The European Union has been even more chaotic, with the departure of one of its biggest members, Britain.
China, all the while, has been strengthening its economic ties with countries around the world. Chinese leaders have been thrilled by the contrast between their own apparent competence and the West’s disorganization. It seemed to augur a new international order, in which China would compete with the U.S. for supremacy.
That scenario still seems likely. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has complicated it. The war is arguably the most problematic international development for China in years.
It has unified much of the rest of the world — including the U.S., the E.U., Britain and Japan — in support of Ukraine, with a diplomatic boldness that these countries have often lacked in recent years. China’s leaders, on the other hand, are in a partnership with the world’s new villain, Vladimir Putin. “This is both a crisis and an opportunity,” Ryan Hass, who oversaw China policy on the National Security Council in the Obama administration, told me.
The crisis part is obvious: A brutal invasion is killing Ukrainians and Russian soldiers and potentially destroying Ukraine as a country. As horrible as the war is, the opportunity is real: The relative isolation of Russia and China offers a chance to help defeat Russia in the short term — and to check the rise of an authoritarian China in the longer term.

Ten times as large
China and Russia share some major interests. They both would like American influence to wane, so that they have a freer hand to dominate their regions and exert global influence. These shared interests help explain why Xi Jinping and Putin released a joint statement last month, professing their countries’ friendship and harshly criticizing the U.S.
“Both share in the belief that the United States is determined to hobble the ascent of their countries,” Amy Qin, who covers China for The Times, told me. “And they have signaled a desire to see a world order in which Washington’s influence is far diminished.”
But the China-Russia relationship also has its limits and tensions. The two countries compete for influence, in Asia and elsewhere, and have fundamentally different diplomatic strategies.
China is trying to shape and lead the existing world order. “It benefits enormously from international stability,” Fareed Zakaria, the foreign-policy journalist, has pointed out. As The Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote, “Peace has been very good for China.”
Russia is both weaker and less satisfied with the recent developments. “Putin may dream of restoring Soviet-era greatness,” Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, “but China’s economy, which was roughly the same size as Russia’s 30 years ago, is now 10 times as large.” Today, Russia’s economy largely revolves around energy exports, giving it an incentive to foment political instability; oil prices often go up when the world is unstable.
“Putin is sort of an arsonist of the system,” Hass said. “China’s interests are not advanced by that.”

The war in Ukraine evidently surprised Chinese officials, at least in its scope. “They did not anticipate a full-scale invasion,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a think tank. That helps explain why China has edged away from Russia over the past two weeks, as my colleagues Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers write:

It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.
These subtle changes are a sign that China is not fully comfortable with Putin’s mayhem. It risks solidifying the “alliance of democracies” that President Biden has called for. It risks reminding the U.S. and its allies that they have more similarities than differences.
“Xi’s growing alignment with Moscow presents something of a Catch-22 for China,” Jude Blanchette and Bonny Lin wrote in Foreign Affairs. “As it competes with the West over global order, Russia becomes a more attractive security partner. But by elevating the relationship with Russia — and choosing to do so in the middle of a Putin-provoked crisis — Beijing is inviting pushback it can ill afford.”

Xi’s leverage
And how might this help Ukraine?
The recent sanctions on Russia’s economy have damaged it and left it dependent on China — to buy Russian goods, to sell goods to Russian consumers and businesses, to give loans to Russian banks and more. If Xi came to believe that the war in Ukraine was hurting China, he could do something about it.
“China doesn’t need to loudly condemn Russia,” Hass said. “They can just choose to be judicious about what they trade in and invest in.” Xi is one of the few people in the world with leverage over Putin. Xi also has reason to be wary of the uncertainty and disarray that Putin’s war has created.