China’s views on Crimea serve China’s interest, not Russia’s

In a televised interview with Swiss journalist Darius Rochebin on April 21, Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, stated that former Soviet states “have no effective status in international law.” When asked whether he thought Crimea belonged to Ukraine, Lu said, “It depends on how you perceive the problem,” adding that “it’s not that simple” and that Crimea was “Russian at the beginning.” He did not explain what “the beginning” meant.

One may ponder whether Lu’s commentary regarding Crimea and the sovereignty of former Soviet republics stems from his personal whims or represents a new diplomatic frontier for China. But anyone with an understanding of the politics of Xi Jinping’s Communist China will agree that Lu’s statements may well serve as one of China’s purposeful challenges to the Western narrative of the minimum requirements for a stable and peaceful world.

Lu’s statements diverge from China’s prior official position. The Chinese government has neither repudiated the sovereignty of the former Soviet republics following the dissolution of the USSR nor acknowledged Russia’s claim over Crimea.

So, does this public move by a prominent Chinese foreign affairs figure mean that Xi is determined to reverse the democratic gains made following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union? Yes and no.

For sure, China, which has rapidly developed into an economic and military superpower in part thanks to the West’s mistaken post-Cold War China policy, has become an unprecedented challenge to the West by actively working to deny the value of democracy and human rights and trying to redefine and dominate the world order. In doing so, China needs to play the Russia card, but a restoration of a Soviet Union in any form is not in the best interest of China for well-known historical reasons, as well as potential future geostrategic conflict between China and Russia.

In the past few years, awakening to China’s threat against democratic values and the rules-based liberal world order, the democratic world has begun to overcome various difficulties in coming together and countering China. A new cold war seems imminent. Correspondingly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has successfully transformed one of the pillars of its legitimacy — nationalism — into anti-Americanism. But knowing that it does not yet have the capacity to engage in a full-scale confrontation with the democratic world, the CCP has deliberately sought to avoid a new cold war, while continuing to exploit democracies’ markets and technologies while seeking to weaken the United States. At this moment, Putin’s ambition to invade Ukraine emerged and played into Xi’s hands.

So far, the Russian war against Ukraine has demonstrated that Russia is no longer a world superpower. A post-war Russia ruled by Putin would be a much weaker nuclear country, which would be in China’s best long-term interest. Such a weakened nuclear power would not be able to challenge China’s geostrategic interests for many years or even generations to come, but it would be able to cause trouble for the U.S.-led democratic world and distract it from effectively responding to China’s expansion. Think of the diplomatic benefits a nuclear North Korea has brought to China over the past decades.

Xi Jinping’s high-profile diplomatic maneuvers have displayed his geostrategic calculations and goals regarding the war in Ukraine as well the global order. Xi’s primary goal, starting with playing the Russia card, is to form and solidify a global anti-American alliance with a new rules-based world order that extends from Eurasia to the Middle East and beyond.  

Despite Beijing’s openly pro-Russian stance, China has positioned itself as a potential key mediator in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Xi’s goals are to end the war in a way that preserves Putin’s regime, secures postwar economic opportunities for China for Ukraine’s reconstruction and Russia’s recovery and weakens the U.S.-led democratic world. Even if these aims prove beyond its reach, it will continue to provide Moscow with an economic lifeline, diplomatic support and even military assistance to ensure that Russia is not defeated and that the West continues to drain its military, economic and political resources — as the protracted war shows few signs of abating.

For Xi, a Russian defeat in the conflict would be unacceptable — not only because it would embolden the U.S. and its allies, but also because it would likely lead to the collapse of Putin’s regime, which, in turn, could be a precursor to the emergence of a more pro-Western Kremlin. In that event, not only would Beijing lose a bulwark in the new Cold War with Washington, but the latter would try to play the Russia card to influence China, in a mirror image of the U.S.-China-Soviet strategic triangle of the 1970s.

China’s seemingly reckless new stance on the sovereignty of Crimea and of former Soviet republics represented by Ambassador Lu’s statements is thus not a call for the restoration of the Soviet Union as Putin desires but a supporting statement for Putin’s invasion war narrative to serve China’s strategic goals regarding the Russian-Ukrainian War, as well as the global order.

Jianli Yang is the founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of “For Us, The Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth.”