China’s Wary Silence: A Brief Russian Victory
By Michael Moran, Skytop Contributor / March 9th, 2022
Michael Moran is a geo-strategy and sustainability expert whose books and documentaries have won awards and influenced the global debate for decades. He currently serves as Chief Markets, Risk & Sustainability Officer at Microshare, a global leader in Smart Building and ESG data technologies, and is a Lecturer in Political Risk at the Josef Korbel School of International Affairs at the University of Denver.
Moran is a former Principal and Chief US/Macro Analyst at Control Risks and led digital content strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations, winning three Emmy Awards for documentary work while there. He also has launched successful editorial offerings for Roubini Global Economics, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and other clients and was a member of the launch team at MSNBC.com, where he served as a columnist and international editor for over a decade.
He is author of several books, including The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy and the Future of American Power, of which Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group wrote: “Moran is a sharp thinker and fine storyteller, and The Reckoning is a terrifically engaging read.” Moran is co-author with economist Charles Robertson of The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution and a novel, The Fall (2015). His analysis of political risk and international affairs has appeared regularly on CNN, CNBC and other major broadcast outlets and in the pages of The New York Times, the Financial Times, Forbes, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines and many other journals.
Power Gymnastics of the Olympic Kind
The question of whether China’s President Xi Jinping had prior warning, or even green-lighted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has been fodder for analysts since the Russian tanks rolled last week. The imagery projects last month’s Olympic moment when Putin effectively kissed Xi’s ring to seal a new “no limits” friendship. The pageantry of this portentous signing invariably brought comparisons to Hitler’s 1936 Munich Games and talk of a grand realignment of geopolitical power.
But it’s worth unpacking some of the assumptions behind all this punditry before forming an opinion.
If Xi did have advanced warning, China is as culpable as anyone for the death and destruction in Ukraine, as well as the malign precedent being set by Putin’s attack.
If Xi did not know ahead of time, then he has been made a fool by Putin. Those of us who follow him recognize that he has done so to world leaders many times before: web search Macron and table or Obama and Syria to support this.
Either way, China’s “pro-Russia neutrality,” as it was described to a Financial Times journalist this week, has at the very least confirmed that China’s position is reflective of its own agenda.
Taiwan on Xi’s Mind
China, at least in the form of its near-absolute ruler Xi, appears very happy for Russia to establish a “new normal” in geopolitical affairs. It muddies concepts of sovereignty and use of force. Clearly Taiwan is what China has in mind.
Beijing seems to be assessing the West’s reaction and gauging the damage such moves might have on its own economy should it choose to use military force to take Taiwan. In effect, this is a real-time war game for Chinese military and strategic planners should they decide to invade the “rogue province” in the near future.
Reshuffling of Post World War Order
By aligning itself with Putin’s Russia, China has advanced its own long game goal of undermining the remnants of the post-World War II Bretton Woods global architecture, including institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank and, by association, the SWIFT global financial transaction system.
China will experience short term, higher energy prices and more scrutiny of its human rights abuses, sprinkled with global opprobrium. The cost will be borne by Chinese citizens precisely because their opinion is irrelevant as long as the Chinese Communist Party wields power.
Did the “no limits” relationship Putin sealed with Xi Jinping by kissing his ring at the Winter Olympics last month include “no limits” on aggressive war? If so, China is deeply regretting that decision already.
Putin Could Not Wait
Western intelligence agencies suggest that, at the very least, Xi asked Putin to hold off on the invasion until after the Winter Olympics in Beijing had concluded. The facts here are very uncertain. Cracker thin sourcing, it cites that, “Western intelligence reports say senior Chinese officials told senior Russian officials.” The New York Times uses this tortured construction to assert this possibility.
It sounds like the run up to the Iraq War, and the smart money has since learned to take such assertions with a large grain of salt. Short of the opening of either country’s archives or a new rash of sensational Wikileaks, we will not likely know the answer for certain any time soon.
Buyers Remorse
Russia’s unfavorable aggression suggests that if Beijing did green-light Russia’s Ukraine war, they are seriously regretting it.
China, the world’s largest importer of oil, is highly sensitive globally to high energy costs. Beijing has used its leverage, and Russia’s desperate desire to formalize an alignment with China, to get favorable terms for oil and gas imports. Russia represents the largest share of China’s oil imports, yet this only amounts to about one third of what arrives in oil tankers from Gulf and African states.
China is paying dearly for Russia’s war to keep its economy fueled.
World opinion, never a decisive consideration for the Middle Kingdom, does sting more than usual right now. Partially, this is because Beijing had expected to be basking in the glow of hosting another successful Olympiad.
Despite China’s stunning medals count and its notable performance in delivering an Olympic event in the midst of a global pandemic, historical memory in the non-censured world will be the Putin-Xi summit that sealed the aforementioned friendship. RT, China’s Epoch Times and their respective domestic media notwithstanding, the wider world is not fooled by China’s double-talk on Ukraine.
Russia Wants a Tight Bond with China
To characterize Russia’s invasion along with the China’s Foreign Ministry’s efforts to obfuscate has only deepened the hole being dug in Beijing.
From Moscow’s standpoint, China’s steadfast unwillingness to condemn the Ukraine War is the silver lining in the increasingly dark and stormy cloud that now hovers over Russia. A historical faction within the Kremlin has long hoped to create a formal Moscow-Beijing axis to resist the West and its allies. Driven by NATO and the events in Kosovo in 1999, this faction argued for “convergence” with Beijing, spying mutual interest on which to build a formal alliance.
This view was sustained as long as Russia aspired to join rather than undermine western institutions, roughly until 2008. The Global Financial Crisis that year won the convergence faction new converts as liberal market democracy seemed to totter. Putin gloated at the West’s troubles and has returned to this “death of western capitalism” analysis frequently since. A theme raised when opportune, he picked it up again last autumn as the first Russian troops headed toward the Ukraine border.
The 2008 Russian war in Georgia and creation of ethnic Russian statelets in Georgia sealed the deal, leading to Russia’s suspension from what had become the Group of Eight (G8) before its formal ejection after the seizure of Crimea in 2014.
Convergence Costs More than China Wants to Pay
While Russia’s desire for “convergence” with Beijing became official policy over a decade ago, it takes two to tango. China, which resents the US-dominated global financial and security architecture at least as much as Russia does, nonetheless has prospered from it and other benefits of letting the American superpower continue thinking it is the “indispensable nation.”
Madeleine Albright once described this, sharing that American warships, for instance, keep the world’s sea-lanes open and secure at no cost to the world’s largest trade power, China. Beijing may not like the International Court of Justice’s rejection of its claims to the South China Sea or U.S. efforts to enforce that ruling through “freedom of navigation” exercises. Nonetheless, the benefits of this global maritime utility far outstrips China’s ability or desire to police the world’s oceans itself.
By aligning itself too overtly with Russia, China knows these and other soft benefits of the Bretton Woods world, including perhaps the veto it wields at the UN Security Council, might fade away.
Historical Enmities Still Live
With the long game in mind, China is in no hurry to overturn a global financial and trade system that is making it stronger each and every day.
There are also historical enmities. Despite what armchair strategists in the West may think, within Russia the idea of an anti-American alliance with China is not universally popular. The two nations share a border as long and twisted as their bilateral relationship. Remember the bitter fraternal rift between Stalin and Mao in the 1950s that Henry Kissinger exploited in 1971 to great effect.
Most Russians look at China as a threat as much as a friend.
Anyone who has spent time in the vast Russian Far East, with a small population about 3.5 million, knows that the locals worry quite a bit about the 80 million Chinese and 25.7 million North Koreans who live in crowded border regions.
A Pregnant Silence
Given all of this, Moscow can be very pleased at not being thrown under the bus by Beijing, for now, for its conduct in Ukraine. But this may not last.
What truly matters to Beijing are the ripple effects of the invasion on its own interests. Putin miscalculated badly both in regard to Ukraine’s will to resist with force, and in the West’s ability to remain united in its response. The highlights of the western response have mostly been financial: a unified set of economic sanctions that not only targeted Putin’s inner circle, as expected, but which froze the country’s access to half of its Sovereign Wealth Fund via sanctions on the Russian Central Bank.
In one fell swoop, that halved the slush fund Putin was counting on to ride out the crisis and outlast the usually short memory that prevails in the West. He was counting on a tough year before being invited back to global summits and business as usual. That appears very much off the table now.
Decades of Hurt Expected
But the longer lasting changes will starkly affect Russian and European security for decades to come.
NATO, always living on borrowed time since the Red Army evacuated its occupation of Central and Eastern European states in the 1990s, has been immeasurably strengthened and reinvigorated. Euro-hawks have been proven right.
Germany, far from being cowed by the Russia energy weapon, instead has reversed its post-Cold War ban on exporting offensive weapons to former Soviet countries. In addition, it has announced a huge increase in defense spending.
U.S., French and British troops have reinforced garrisons in Poland, Romania and the Baltics states with deployments that further flout Russia claims that such movements are forbidden under the agreements that led to Germany’s reunification.
Russia Not Trusted by Its Neighbors
There is no soul searching in the West over the treatment of Russia since the end of the Cold War. It is correct to ask if a different course on NATO enlargement might have forestalled the Ukraine War. There were voices inside and outside Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s questioning the wisdom of inviting former Warsaw Pact and Soviet nations to join NATO so soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Some seek to score points today by drawing a direct line between that decision and Putin’s war, as does Putin himself. However, the argument ignores the fact that these were sovereign nations making their own national security decisions.
Or that, absent expansion, what is happening in Ukraine right now might instead be happening in Lithuania, Latvia or even Poland. A half century of repressive Soviet “brotherhood” turned out to have consequences for its Russian successor state.
Your neighbors don’t trust you.
Scenario Planning Summary
The one benefit China truly accrues from all of this is primarily academic. Its national security and military strategists are carefully watching the tightening vise around Russia and trying to imagine how effective such a tool might be if it were instead squeezing China.
As tempting as it may be to hope this will go down as a cautionary tale, China is more likely to conclude that the test case isn’t entirely valid. Russia, after all, is an economic morsel next to China and a country largely without friends in the world.
China, by dint of its manufacturing prowess and deft use of economic power to create negative incentives even among America’s closest allies, probably thinks it would weather a Ukraine-like storm far better than Russia. If the threat of economic pain mixed with global disapproval does not constitute deterrence, the world is indeed looking at a realignment that will make the 21st Century a much more dangerous time to be alive.
It would be incautious for China to conclude that Russia’s trespass against Ukraine and its people is of no relevance to the Taiwan scenario.