The friendship between Beijing and Moscow "knows no borders"

Why China is friends with the aggressor and what it tells its citizens about the war

The war in Ukraine is forcing China to establish its own world order and bring it even closer to Russia, according to the Western press.
During US President Joe Biden's five-day visit to Seoul and Tokyo, he attended a series of meetings with leaders of the Quadruple Security Dialogue (QUAD), an informal group from the United States, India, Australia and Japan, and strategic bombers from Russia and China exercises over the sea of Japan and East China. These are the first military exercises since the Russian attack on Ukraine and the fourth in six months. This was a clear signal for the American administration, which is trying to strengthen regional alliances in the midst of a growing strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing, writes the American newspaper The Washington Post.
The White House immediately condemned this act. "This […] shows that China continues to provide close support to Russia, despite Russian crimes in Ukraine," a senior Biden administration official told the media on condition of anonymity.
According to David Schullman, senior director of Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council think tank, the combination of two facts - Russian-Chinese exercises during the QUAD meeting and developments in Ukraine - points to the depth of the Moscow-Beijing partnership, which only strengthened in a few months. .
In February, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed in a joint statement that friendship between their countries "has no borders" and that there are no "forbidden" areas for co-operation. A month later, the White House said Moscow, under pressure from Western trade and other economic sanctions imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine, had asked China to provide it with military equipment.

However, so far, according to a senior official in the Biden administration, there is no evidence that Beijing has provided military assistance to Moscow. But the two countries continue to work to promote the division of spheres of influence - whether in Eastern Europe or the Western Pacific - where it will be "natural and acceptable for them to use their power against their neighbors," he said.
Beijing could no longer express its dissatisfaction with Biden, but with the help of Russian-Chinese military exercises during QUAD meetings, agrees the British newspaper The Financial Times. But at the same time, China is using less harsh confrontational tactics - on the diplomatic front, it is promoting an alternative security world order in the form of the Global Security Initiative (GSI). Thus, Beijing is trying to form a coalition in order to oppose the "barbaric and bloody" American leadership, the paper writes.
This is how Tian Wen-Lin, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, described the Western-led world order. In a recent text, he accused the United States of dragging other countries into the war and insisted on "a new paradigm of global security based on equality and mutual trust in the face of rapid change on the international stage".
It could be the Global Security Initiative, the benefits of which President Xi described in detail in a video address to BRICS foreign ministers in May, a group of developing countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa. The Chinese leader especially called on the member states to "strengthen political mutual trust and cooperation in the field of security, […] share each other's key interests and main issues, respect each other's sovereignty, security and development interests, oppose hegemony and power politics, reject cold psychological war and bloc confrontation and work together to build a global security community for all. ”
Such a focus on security indicates a change in Beijing's traditional approach to international relations, experts say. Earlier, when discussing solutions to global conflicts, Chinese officials focused on developing and achieving peace through the prosperity of troubled regions, but now priorities are changing, says Bates Hill, a professor of Asia-Pacific security studies at Macquarie University in Australia.
According to experts, the GSI initiative was conceived before the war in Ukraine and is part of Xi's efforts to distance the global security order from thinking in the Cold War paradigm. Chinese diplomats have particularly promoted GSI in countries such as the Philippines, Uganda, Somalia and Kenya through the media and websites of their embassies. But the Russian invasion made these efforts more urgent and difficult.
"Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, China has done everything to protect Russia's 'legitimate security interests,'" the Financial Times quoted Paul Henle, director of the Carnegie Tsinghua Research Center in Beijing.
At the same time, within the country, the government launched a wide-ranging propaganda campaign. Authorities are doing everything they can to influence the people, Terrence Shen, who lives in Canada and was born in Beijing, who worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and the Chinese capital, is now trying to bring ideas other than the official narrative to Chinese-speaking audiences.
"[In China] you are told everywhere that Russia is good and Ukraine is bad," he said.
Shen has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers. There, he discusses developments in China and around the world and reveals inaccurate information promoted by Beijing.
He has been talking a lot lately about the events in Ukraine and notes that Chinese sources use Moscow's narratives to inform the public about this topic. In particular, state publications, such as the tabloid Global Times, promote the idea that the blame for the invasion is in the West, while Russia is an innocent victim. In addition, they are trying to prove that the West is turning away from Ukraine - apparently to discourage supporters of Taiwan's sovereignty, Shen suggests. There are often theses that the Ukrainian authorities appropriate Western aid and resell military equipment to third countries.
A more academic approach to refuting disinformation in the Chinese media has been taken by Sherman Lai, a researcher in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Queens, Canada. On his YouTube channel, he talks about world events in Chinese, so that listeners can better understand them instead of blindly believing Beijing's propaganda. In the past, he has focused on aspects of Chinese history that the authorities prefer to keep quiet about. But with the start of the war in Ukraine, Lai began to tell subscribers about the history of the USSR, because, according to him, many Chinese experience Ukraine as part of Russia.
"They consider Ukraine a province of Russia," says the scientist. "The Chinese here see a connection to China's internal problems, such as Xinjiang, Tibet or Taiwan."
At the same time, Lai is surprised that the people of China no longer consider the invasion of Ukraine to be like the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. This is partly due to the fact that the history of the attack has not been told clearly enough, Lai believes.
The narratives of Beijing and Moscow about the war in Ukraine often coincide, says Nathan Boshamp-Mustafaga, a policy researcher at RAND Corporation. There is no evidence that the governments of these countries directly coordinate their communications. However, if they ever show up, it will not be a surprise, he said.
Boshamp-Mustafaga mentions another thesis about Ukraine, which is often repeated by Russia and China - the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories with the participation of the United States.
"China is interested in discrediting foreign, mostly Western, critics of its fight against COVID. Therefore, one of the narratives that developed here in recent years is that the US has developed COVID as a biological weapon. And he clearly agrees with Russia's efforts to it discredits Ukraine and justifies its invasion, ”Boshamp-Mustafaga said.