Here’s what the Chinese are declaring:
During a nearly two-hour-long videoconference, Mr. Xi sought to present China as a peacemaker. “The Ukraine crisis is something we don’t want to see,” he told Mr. Biden, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. “Conflict and confrontation are not in the interests of anyone.”
I take him at his word, because what Putin has done is certainly not in China’s interest.
How inconvenient for the dignified Chinese leader to be so dramatically tied into this Russian Leader who has just made himself into the world’s biggest pariah since Hitler, and a failure besides. ((The incompetence and corruption that Putin cultivated in his nation is now exposed with the astonishingly unimpressive military machine Putin put into action. Getting beat up by a little guy who did nothing whatsoever to justify attack carried out with criminal indifference to humanity.
How embarrassing for Xi to have declared such profound brotherhood for the war criminal and loser.
And how bad for China’s purposes for Putin’s violation of the international order was of a kind and degree and location that the majority of the world came together with astonishing power and unity and speed to defeat it.
Incredible stories of powerful sanctions, with even the Swiss giving up their neutrality to unify with the rest of the world against Putin’s act of aggression.
China would like for NATO to be fractured and weak, but Putin has breathed new life and unity into NATO, and even has Sweden and Finland talking about the possibility of joining.
Everything Putin is doing hurts Chinese interests, so China wishes this war had not broken out. And since it has broken out and put Xi in an awkward position, the Chinese will want this war to be over as soon as possible.
Helping Russia makes no sense, because Putin has a losing hand — every success will just set up a long-lasting Ukrainian insurrection which will ultimately be a Russian failure, even worse than Afghanistan).
The only way the war can be ended soon is for Putin to back down in some way. (Or somehow be replaced.) For China to give Putin support just delays that ultimate outcome.
So on the urgent matter of Putin and his war, the Chinese and the West are in accord.
It’s to be expected that agreement on Putin will not eliminate the China’s struggle to overtake the United States as the world’s most dominant nation. There is a competition that will continue, as evinced by the Chinese Foreign minister also being quoted as saying this:
“The claim that China is on the wrong side of history is overbearing. It is the U.S. that is on the wrong side of history,”
One can quarrel about the history, but it’s irrelevant. Just a rhetorical jab away from the main issue of the moment.
The immediate issue is Putin, and nothing having to do with the United States is relevant to judging what Putin has done.
(Nothing legitimately threatening, and indeed it is Russia that’s been on offense — No threat to Russia, but instead Russia being on offense — threatening his neighbors, and grabbing parts of independent countries, like a piece of Georgia, and then the Crimea in Ukraine, before this unprovoked and unjustifiable war.)
What matters is that the two sides share an interest in getting Putin to stop this war, one way or another. And since Putin can’t win, helping him would only frustrate the Chinese interest in getting this disaster behind them.
The Chinese may make anti-American, anti-Western noises, but I don’t expect they have any desire to do what Biden warned Xi — warning of unspecified “costs” and “consequences” for helping Putin — not to do in their conversation today. My guess is that Xi had already decided for his own reasons— end the conflict, and avoid having Putin’s war-crimes attaching themselves to China, diminishing China’s standing in the world.