The Economist: Vladimir Putin is an imperialist, but China doesn’t care

For the ardent revolutionaries running China in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was a monstrous crime, but not a surprise. Watching from Beijing, Chairman Mao Zedong and his aides saw the vindication of a long-standing suspicion: that the once-proud Soviet Union was now ruled by “socialist imperialists”, along with the capitalists in charge of the United States, the first imperialist superpower.

Indeed, Mao’s lieutenant Zhou Enlai accused Soviet leaders of active collusion with the United States, involving a plan to divide the world into two spheres of influence, one run from Moscow and the other from Washington. The invasion was evidence of that pact, Zhou charged: Soviet bosses dared to send tanks to shake Prague’s cobblestone streets because they knew the United States would not intervene.

Chinese outrage indicated no sympathy for the Prague Spring liberal reforms that triggered the invasion, much less for Alexander Dubcek, the local party boss arrested and flown to Moscow. Instead, Maoist officials described the invasion as a revolutionary struggle, pitting the heroic Czechoslovak masses against the Soviet occupiers.”fascists”. Later, they were outraged when the jargon of communist diplomacy was used to justify the invasion.

Throwing its high-flown phrases at the Soviet leaders, the People’s Daily newspaper in Beijing demanded to know: “You have sent millions upon thousands of troops to occupy all of Czechoslovakia. What ‘territorial integrity’ can we talk about?”

Half a century after those Mao-era feuds, which eventually escalated into a brief border war between China and the Soviet Union, the world order is upside down.

China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, is the declared best friend and ideological soul mate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Putin ordered an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he made no secret of his war aims. He wants to turn that neighboring country of 44 million people into a neutral and demilitarized satellite. In the forceful words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “Putin wants to create a Russian empire.”

Xi and his government maintain a pose of pseudo-neutrality towards the conflict in Ukraine, but no one doubts China’s pro-Russian bent. China’s approach combines pious calls for peace with tireless recycling of Russian arguments for the invasion, including the claim that the United States is to blame, for welcoming former Soviet satellites into the NATO alliance. after the end of the cold war.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called on Western governments to address the “legitimate security demands” of Russia and accept a dialogue that puts Russia on an equal footing with the 27 members of the European Union. This time it is the turn of the Chinese diplomats to utter empty phrases about their respect for the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries”, even as his Russian friends prepare to dismember the Ukraine, echoing Soviet propaganda as the tanks roared in Prague.

Chinese officials speak of Russia’s legitimate desire to see “a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism”. That is based on a joint statement agreed by Xi and Putin hours before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing on February 4, in which China backed Russian proposals to “legally binding long-term security guarantees in Europe”.

In plain language, Russia demands a veto over European security arrangements and alliances. A Chinese scholar in Beijing explains what the government thinks of him: that European security policies should not target Russia or ignore Russia’s wishes, and should be decided by Europeans alone, meaning the US should go.

Other governments understand what is at stake. On February 28, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan explained why her country is willing to impose sanctions on Russia, even though she traditionally seeks friendly ties with all major powers. “This is an existential issue for us. Ukraine is much smaller than Russia, but it is much larger than Singapore”, he told parliament, adding that: “A world order based on ‘the mighty is right’…would be profoundly detrimental to the security and survival of small states”.

China’s dream of an American withdrawal

A world run by big countries appeals to many Chinese nationalists, who have flooded social media with praise for Putin, even as censors remove posts critical of Russia. The notion that NATO is a collective defense pact that expanded in response to demand from former communist bloc countries fearful of Russian intimidation is almost unknown in China. Instead, the Atlantic alliance is seen as a tool of US aggression that is “in perpetual search for an enemy”, to quote a Chinese essay on Ukraine shared widely in recent days.

NATO is best known as the vehicle used by the United States and its allies to intervene in Yugoslavia’s civil wars in the name of preventing ethnic cleansing: a mission called Chinese meddling. NATO then bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war in May 1999, an event the Chinese government refuses to accept as an accident. The date of the embassy bombing is remembered under the name of a major Chinese weapons program, “Project 995″. On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Hua Chunying accused the West of a long history of trampling on Chinese sovereignty, telling reporters that “NATO still owes a blood debt to the Chinese people.”

How much Xi knew about Putin’s plans in advance may never be known. Chinese diplomats appeared surprised by the Russian invasion. They were “conspicuously elusive” when they were approached by their Western counterparts in Beijing and at the United Nations in New York as the tanks rolled into Ukraine. The war could yet escalate into such bloody violence that it makes China’s pro-Russian stance politically costly. But in Beijing, cynical voices argue that China stands to gain from Putin’s aggression if it forces the US to pay more attention to Europe and less to the Indo-Pacific. China wants a sphere of influence in Asia in which its mandate is not challenged by the United States. As a result, she has made peace with Russian imperialism.