Post One

At the end of December 2020 President Xi Jinping is said to have remarked to Vladimir Putin over the telephone that ties between China and Russia were now so strong they could weather all kinds of international turmoil.  Looked at two years later from the standpoint of the Ukraine war this remark seems curiously prescient (had Putin already given Xi an inkling of what he had in mind?).  Ever since the Ukraine war started the Chinese leadership have continued to maintain the same posture of studied ambivalence they assumed during Putin’s earlier adventures in Georgia and the Crimea – declining to endorse the Russian violation of accepted national borders while pointing at NATO’s steady advance towards Russia’s own borders as a reason why Russia has reacted the way it has done. In March 2023, at the time my Sino-Russian book was appearing, the Western media were agog with excitement at Xi’s forthcoming visit to Moscow:  surely the Chinese leader would now pressure his ‘best friend’ Putin to cut his losses and negotiate an end to the war?  But in the end nothing visible happened.  China’s posture was unchanged, and a special envoy, Li Hui, a former ambassador to Moscow sent this month to go through the motions of mediation  seems to have run up immediately against the irreconcilable positions of the two sides.  One Chinese pundit, Zhou Bo, a former senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, has suggested that Xi may in fact have been exerting a restraining influence on Putin behind the scenes, and it seems possible that there may be a red line, say a resorting by Putin to tactical nuclear weapons, beyond which China would feel unable to keep up its partial support for the Russian position.  Overall, though, there does seem to be a growing consensus among Western observers that the Sino-Russian partnership is indeed pretty solid and unlikely to be disrupted any time soon.