Xi Risks Leaving China Isolated by Backing Putin in U.S. Fight

Bloomberg News - 21 March 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Xi Jinping bet that establishing a “no limits” friendship with Vladimir Putin could prevent the U.S. from containing China. Now that agreement threatens to leave Beijing more isolated and alone.

A phone call between Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday appeared to achieve no major breakthroughs. The U.S. continued to threaten unspecified consequences if China provides support to Russia, and Beijing insisted it was supporting peace talks while blaming the U.S. for triggering the conflict.

That dynamic so far appears to be pushing more countries to the U.S. camp, with the European Union set to reinforce the American warning to Beijing at a virtual summit planned for April 1. China, meanwhile, is struggling to convince the world it’s a neutral player, as assurances to international audiences are undermined by messages at home affirming the China-Russia partnership.

The Communist Party’s reluctance to abandon Russia contains several key risks both for China and Xi personally. In the near term, it could hurt Beijing’s relations with key trading partners when it still needs investment and key technologies to meet its development goals. Perhaps more significantly, it could heap pressure on Xi and the Communist Party if the war ends up backfiring on Putin.

“Xi seems to feel it’s very important to have Russia as a strategic counterweight to the U.S., both diplomatically and militarily,” said Julian G. Ku, a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University, who studies China and international law. “But if Putin is unseated, or if Russia is dramatically weakened, this undercuts Xi’s basic foreign policy strategy of aggressively asserting China’s interests against the U.S. and other countries.”

For now, Beijing is effectively supporting Russia’s rationale for the war as it distances itself from the fighting, a position designed to support Russia while avoiding any U.S. sanctions that could hurt the Chinese economy. China’s envoy to the U.S., Qin Gang, on Sunday said China “will do everything” to de-escalate the war and said Beijing hadn’t sent any “weapons and ammunition” to any side.

But just a day earlier Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng reiterated China’s stance that NATO’s eastward expansion served as the catalyst for Russia’s war, a view articulated during the Xi-Putin summit in Beijing last month ahead of the Olympics. Moreover, Le equated that policy with the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

“The Indo-Pacific Strategy is as dangerous as the NATO strategy of eastward expansion in Europe,” Le told the Fourth International Forum on Security and Strategy via video link. “If allowed to go on unchecked, it would bring unimaginable consequences, and ultimately push the Asia- Pacific into a fiery pit.”