China and Ukraine: The Chinese debate about Russia’s war and its meaning for the world (part II)
Lesson 3: The conflict in Ukraine has made war over Taiwan neither more nor less likely – but Western responses are certainly informing Chinese thinking
The decline of the West has been a longstanding part of Chinese Communist Party rhetoric. This meant that the strength of support shown by the European Union, European states, and the US to Ukraine came as a surprise to many observers in China. Both they and the Chinese government quickly rationalised this expression of solidarity as further proof of American instrumentalisation of their juniors in Europe. Nevertheless, it has not gone unnoticed by those considering the implications of Russia’s war on Ukraine for the future of Taiwan.
At the official level, China rejects analogies between the war in Ukraine and cross-strait relations. In the words of Wang Wenbin, spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Taiwan is not Ukraine” and “those who play with and fan up the fire on the Taiwan question will only wind up burning themselves.” Such views rest on the notion that the US uses the comparison with Taiwan deliberately to antagonise and, ultimately, to destabilise China’s neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, in conversations with Chinese intellectuals it becomes clear that they are looking closely at the war’s implications for China-Taiwan relations. Some note with interest that the US and NATO have refrained from engaging in a direct fight with Russia over Ukraine, and conclude from this that Western powers may also seek to avoid head-on confrontations over Taiwan. As one intellectual put it, “if the US administration’s main argument for not getting directly involved in Ukraine is to avoid a war with a nuclear-armed superpower, why should the same not logic not apply to Taiwan?”
Many believe that Washington will instead arm Taiwan following the Ukrainian model and try to outsource its war efforts to its allies in the region, especially Japan. In this context, scholars expect a rapid military build-up to take place in the Indo-Pacific, and view formats such as the Quad and AUKUS as part and parcel of US-led efforts to tilt the regional balance of power to Beijing’s disadvantage.
Some Chinese intellectuals believe that when US politicians make direct comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan, many of them are in fact using the issue to try to reduce polarisation within US politics. They think that it suits the US to identify a shared enemy whose presence can paper over some of the internal cracks. Many in the Chinese debate point towards Washington “exporting tensions” as a way to bring people together at home.
Fudan University’s Shen Yi, a controversial public intellectual known for nationalist rhetoric, has claimed the US is instrumentalising Ukraine under the guise of a shared fight for freedom and democracy, with Kyiv naively falling for Washington’s overtures. He believes (as do some others) that the US may apply the same argument to Taiwan. For many in China, current assertive shifts in Western policy towards Beijing have nothing to do with China’s own actions, but are instead rooted in foreign countries’ hypocrisy and Sinophobia. As on Ukraine, the Chinese debate does not really regard Taiwan as an independent agent, but sees it more as a ‘pawn’ in the game of superpowers.
At the same time, most Chinese intellectuals do not think Beijing will be the first to initiate a conventional conflict over Taiwan. They argue that Xi’s responses to date have been largely reactive in nature. For example, the People’s Liberation Army conducted military drills following the visit to Taipei of the then speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, in August 2022. Moreover, Chinese scholars seem united in their belief that intensification of informal ties between Taiwan and third countries must meet such reactions from China. They interpret these as a rational response that allows Beijing to signal where its interests lie in the face of what they perceive as Western attempts to alter the ‘One China’ policy status quo. They maintain this is also rational because China is still not as powerful as the US – in the words of one of ECFR’s interlocutors, “China can’t start a war it can’t win.” Yet, observers also suggest that a Chinese response could be more vigorous were the US or Taiwan to undertake what they refer to as a “provocation” – such as a major move that dramatically changes what they perceive as the status quo. They do not exclude the possibility of a war over Taiwan, although for the time being they believe it to be improbable.
Lesson 4: Economic interdependence will not protect China – and Beijing must prepare for sanctions
One of the biggest lessons Chinese observers have taken from the war in Ukraine is that politics and security trump economics. For many decades, the official thinking was that economic interdependence with Western powers would act as a deterrent to conflict with China. But the war in Ukraine has led some Chinese observers to question that assumption. One scholar pointed to the example of Germany as demonstrating the biggest lesson from the war: they maintain that German energy dependence on Russia ended up having no effect at all on Berlin’s foreign policy decisions. In the words of the same interlocutor, “if there is a war between the US and China, we should not expect economic interests to outweigh geopolitical ones for American allies like Germany.”
Both Chinese and Western observers would concur that global changes towards securitisation and the weaponisation of economic interdependencies started long before Russia’s invasion. But it is clear that they have accelerated significantly since the war began: in recent years, countries around the world have turned inward to protect their economies from excessive exposure to external shocks. The US has pursued this course in direct relation to China, for example by taking steps to limit Chinese growth in strategic sectors such as semiconductors and AI.
In this context, and on the basis of speaking with Chinese thinkers, it is evident that sanctions are a particular point of concern for China given the interdependencies it possesses. Beijing officially opposes unilateral sanctions, both in the context of the war in Ukraine and regarding other crises – a position it reiterated in its recent document “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis”. The Chinese leadership regards sanctions as counterproductive and unfair. It stresses their negative impact on developing economies including the populations of third countries, especially in the global south.
Chinese thinkers are acutely aware that the war in Ukraine increases the chances that their country could face sanctions in the future. They largely agree that the conflict has galvanised the Chinese government action to pay close attention to this question. Officials are reportedly running “stress tests”, such as modelling, to understand how China’s domestic market would fare in various scenarios involving sanctions or other measures put in place against China.
This is part of wider challenge for the Chinese state. For some time, Beijing has been preoccupied with changing the country’s development path in the face of the dual challenge of slowing growth and wider security considerations. In this regard, for several years it has pursued its “dual circulation” strategy, a model in which the domestic market becomes the mainstay, with a heavy focus on boosting internal consumption, while international trade and investment play a complementary role. As a prominent Chinese economist and the father of “new structural economics”, Justin Yifu Lin, has noted, this new paradigm “reflects a clear understanding of China’s development trend”. In other words, although international markets will still play an important role in the country’s development strategy, Beijing will be much more selective in welcoming foreign investment.
It is clear that the consequence of China’s own inward turn will be ever more strenuous efforts by the government to enhance the country’s self-reliance, especially in strategic sectors such as high tech. This was reflected during the recent National People’s Congress, which saw a major announcement of a sweeping restructuring of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The Chinese government is planning to deploy more resources to speed up the development of cutting-edge technologies, an area where China still lags far behind the US. With more restrictions on Chinese firms being imposed by Washington, this will not be an easy task to achieve. In the context of cooperation with Russia, therefore, a close relationship with Moscow that entails diversified supplies of energy and raw materials could also play an important role in meeting China’s domestic requirements.
To start to address this challenge, in a recent piece on the American and European sanctions applied against Russia during the war in Ukraine, two senior Chinese economists working for the Bank of China Research Institute recommended that Beijing should build a sanction-immune safety net by developing its own cooperation frameworks. They suggest the BRI, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement could serve this purpose. They even went so far as to propose the establishment of small banks specialising in trade with Russia and fully “decoupled”, as they termed it, from the Western financial system. They also present the internationalisation of the renminbi as one of the pillars of a “contingency plan” that would enable China to become more financially secure in the long run. The authors suggest that further internationalisation would help protect China in the event it was cut off from the SWIFT global payments system.
Finally, some Chinese observers express a degree of quiet glee about the limited success of Western sanctions. As one expert put it, “the so-called most aggressive sanctions in history don’t seem to be having much of an impact.” In this context, it is likely that the Chinese leadership will be examining the approaches adopted by Russia to circumvent sanctions.
The changes to come
In the era of “great changes unseen in a century”, China’s leadership and Chinese intellectuals are deploying a new vocabulary to describe the geopolitical shifts under way; but there is no Chinese equivalent of a Zeitenwende for how the country relates to the rest of the world. Instead they see the conflict through the prism of wider global changes – and are making their decisions around those considerations rather than worrying too much about conditions within Ukraine.
While they vary in their assessments, Chinese observers of the war in Ukraine worry about the competence of a declining and potentially erratic Russia. But their fear of American victory or regime change in Moscow leads to a desire to prevent the Kremlin from failing.
At the same time, conversations with many Chinese intellectuals reveal that they identify an opportunity for Beijing to exploit Western weaknesses to make China more secure, both domestically and internationally, by expanding its ties with the global south, nurturing an image as a peace broker, and speeding up its efforts to become more economically self-reliant. And, by giving its tacit approval to the war in Ukraine while trying to present itself as neutral, China is trying to strike a balance between maintaining its pacifistic façade and the pursuit of outright revisionism.
In the economic realm, the war in Ukraine has given additional impetus to China’s own efforts to become less reliant on foreign partners and more secure in the face of external shocks. Although this trend towards achieving greater self-reliance started long before Russia’s aggression, the sense of urgency over preparing for sanctions now seems much higher in Beijing. The potential threat contained within economic interdependence identified by Chinese intellectuals mirrors these official concerns. Western sanctions and Russia’s responses to them provide a testing ground for China’s own efforts to become more resilient in the future.