While the West has united in its condemnation of the Russian assault on Ukraine, China has refused to condemn Moscow at the UN or elsewhere. Russia and China have strong ideological, economic, and military ties, noted Dan Negrea, and he further argues that the West should act quickly and forcefully to prevent China from more substantive support of Putin’s aggression.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in February at the Beijing Olympics, their 38th visit in the nine years since Xi took power. In a 5,000-word statement on February 4, Xi and Putin proclaimed their friendship with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Just weeks before the invasion, China signed agreements to buy from Russia energy and agricultural products worth over $200 billion.
Despite early reports that Xi was displeased with Putin’s decision to invade, China has since refused to condemn Russia at the UN and elsewhere—and has prohibited criticism of Russia in the Chinese media and on its heavily censored Internet. This close partnership also had a military aspect: Russia felt comfortable enough to move two-thirds of the troops it normally kept on the Chinese border to the Ukrainian front.
China cannot be shamed into abandoning its support for Russia’s brutal aggression. We know this as the U.S. and the free world have publicly condemned the genocide in Xinjiang, but China has not relented. Yet China is vulnerable to economic pressure. The Chinese people accept the dictatorship of the Communist party in the expectation that their standard of living will continue to increase.
But China’s economic news has not been great recently. Its growth is pegged at just 5.5 percent this year, about half of what it has been since 1978. Even this may prove optimistic.
Read more on Spectator: https://spectatorworld.com/topic/china-pay-implicit-support-putin-war/