Time is running out for China

By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Xi has one advantage over Putin. Let’s see if he exploits it.

Life must have looked so sweet to Chinese President Xi Jinping in early February. He had just cemented ties with China’s most important strategic partner in the world, pledging a friendship with “no limits.” China was about to host the Winter Olympics. As Russian President Vladimir Putin started putting the screws on Ukraine, European leaders were expressing some qualms about U.S. intelligence and reservations about how to sanction Russia in a post-invasion scenario.

Six weeks later, it is safe to say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic disaster for Russia and a strategic setback for China. Ideally, revisionist world powers would like other actors to perceive them as possessing increasing capabilities but unclear intentions. This kind of rising power can incentivize some states to bandwagon and others to pass the buck. Russia has managed to reverse this equation. It is now perceived as a great power with overhyped capabilities but aggressively revisionist intentions. Little wonder that Russia’s actions have triggered the worst of all worlds for Putin: a quagmire in Ukraine and a balancing coalition.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not been great for China either. Sino-Ukrainian economic ties were pretty decent before the war, and that has obviously taken a hit. More importantly, it is easy for external observers to conclude that Xi gave his blessing for Putin’s invasion. Beyond the Feb. 4 summit, there is the awkward fact that Russia waited until just after the Winter Olympics ended to launch his invasion.

While Chinese diplomats have stressed their neutrality in the conflict, Xi has apparently doubled down in his support of Putin. According to the Economist’s Chaguan columnist, “In Beijing, scholars and high-ranking government advisers predict that today’s shows of Western unity will fade sooner or later, as sanctions fail to break Russia and instead send energy prices soaring. In their telling the conflict will hasten America’s decline and slow retreat from the world.”

That view might not be as widespread as Xi’s coterie of advisers believes. A lot of Western commentators have noted China’s awkward strategic situation. What is interesting is the Chinese commentators who have arrived at the same conclusion.

Last week, Hu Wei, a Shanghai-based academic and vice chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, offered up a brutal “objective analysis” of the war in Ukraine for Russia and China. Among other things:

The unity of the Western world under the Iron Curtain will have a siphon effect on other countries: the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy will be consolidated, and other countries like Japan will stick even closer to the U.S., which will form an unprecedentedly broad democratic united front.

The power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase. After the Russo-Ukrainian War, no matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world. … The West will possess more “hegemony” both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.

China will become more isolated under the established framework. For the above reasons, if China does not take proactive measures to respond, it will encounter further containment from the US and the West.

Similarly, Wang Huiyao, president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, has an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that China needed to change its tune on Ukraine and play the role of mediator. Wang notes that given the strategic situation it is not in Beijing’s interest to stand in lockstep with Moscow: “The longer the war lasts, the more it will reinvigorate the Western alliance around the idea of a values-based confrontation between East and West, bringing the United States and the European Union into even closer alignment while driving military budgets up around the globe. That is not good for China.”

It is interesting to note that U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan will be meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, in Rome today and, according to a senior administration official, Ukraine will be a “significant topic.” On Sunday, Sullivan said some interesting things on CNN’s “State of the Union” to Dana Bash. That included a warning on sanctions: “We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them.”

Sullivan also included an interesting out, however: that China “may not have understood the full extent of it because it’s very possible Putin lied to them the way he lied to Europeans and others.” Sullivan is clearly trying to offer China a graceful pathway to change its position on Ukraine — and, in the process, allow Beijing to escape from a strategic bind of its own making.

Where Beijing lands over the next week will be a crucial reveal. According to U.S. officials, Russia is now asking China for both military and economic aid to sustain its efforts in Ukraine. If ever there was a moment for Xi to change course, this is it. His choice will say a lot about the future of Sino-American relations, a fact I am sure Sullivan will stress in his meeting with Yang.

Xi Jinping has followed the same personalist path as Putin in his consolidation of power. Xi also shares with Putin a distaste for the concepts of human rights and democracy. He has been willing to be as brutal inside his borders as Putin. Xi has one big advantage over Putin right now, which is to learn from the global response to Russia. Like Putin, the pandemic has helped to isolate Xi, perhaps leading to some bad decision-making. We are about to find out if Xi is willing to engage in course correction or not.

This piece is republished by The Washington Post.