In Ukraine Crisis, China Chooses Russia Ties Over Principles – Analysis

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By Richard Weitz



Russia’s military occupation and impending annexation of the Crimea in Ukraine has put Beijing in a difficult spot, confronting Chinese leaders with numerous competing priorities and principles. Having cultivated good relations with both Russia and Ukraine, they would prefer to avoid antagonizing one party by siding too closely with the other. Yet, China’s recent approach shows how Beijing is now more willing to dilute longstanding foreign policy principles to align with Moscow.

Throughout the months of unrest in Ukraine, Chinese media commentary has generally echoed Russia’s line that Western machinations were contributing to the instability in Kiev, which finally led to the change of regime that triggered Russia’s military intervention in the Crimean Peninsula. Beijing can hardly have welcomed the specter of another mass movement overthrowing a government. In addition to recalling earlier “color revolutions” in which pro-Western factions toppled longstanding pro-Moscow rulers in some of the former Soviet republics, Chinese analysts have warned that these same forces were seeking to overturn China’s communist system.

But the official line of the Chinese government has been much more circumspect. On Feb. 24, the day after former President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by the Ukrainian Parliament, China’s United Nations mission issued a statement to the media saying, “We respect the choice made by the Ukrainian people on the basis of national conditions.” Days later, when the first reports of Russian military action in Crimea started trickling in, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang reaffirmed China’s commitment to Ukraine’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and called for a peaceful resolution “with all sides respecting international law”—including the principle of noninterference in another country’s internal affairs.

Chinese foreign policy resolutely opposes the “three evil forces” of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. With regard to the first principle, Beijing demands that foreign countries refrain from supporting Uighur separatism in Xinjiang, Tibetan aspirations for political self-determination and Taiwanese actions that would implicitly acknowledge the island’s sovereignty and independence from Beijing. These principles have led Beijing not to endorse Moscow’s 2008 decision to occupy the Georgian separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and declare them independent countries.

In addition, China has long opposed foreign military intervention in a country without the consent of its host government or the explicit endorsement of the U.N. Security Council, where Beijing enjoys the right of veto. For example, Beijing has objected to Western military interventions over the past two decades that were not sanctioned by the council, such as the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and for the same reason opposes such an intervention in Syria.

Nonetheless, China has been modifying these principles in recent years. Some changes in Beijing’s policies seem only declaratory, such as China’s formal support for the global community’s “responsibility to protect” populations facing genocide or other mass atrocities at the hands of their government. But in some cases events have forced a change in concrete Chinese policies. For example, South Sudan’s successful drive for independence led Beijing to reconcile with the erstwhile insurgents leading Africa’s newest government. More recently, China has had to cope with the Arab Spring regime changes in Libya and elsewhere, in which Beijing has had to accept the removal of former allies in mass popular revolutions.

In the case of Ukraine, Chinese officials have also been bending their principles to reflect changing developments as well as the complexity of the situation. They still have called on all sides “to find a political solution through dialogue and negotiations on the basis of a respect for international law and the principals of international relations,” as China’s ambassador to the U.N., Liu Jieyi, stated. But after the Russian Federation Council on March 1 authorized President Vladimir Putin to use the Russian military to protect Russian citizens in Ukraine, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that in addition to China’s “long-standing diplomatic principles and basic norms governing international relations,” Beijing must also take into account “the history and complexity of the issue” to base its position on “both principles and facts.”

More recent Chinese statements have downplayed the importance of sustaining Ukraine’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity” and instead have emphasized “the lawful rights and interests of all ethnic communities in Ukraine.” The Chinese government has also refrained from joining other countries in criticizing the Russian military intervention or the decision to hold a referendum on whether Crimea should join the Russian Federation.

After the Obama administration imposed sanctions on those deemed responsible for Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, including bans on travel to the United States and freezing of their U.S. assets, the Chinese Foreign Ministry reaffirmed Beijing’s long-standing opposition to sanctions and expressed “hope that all sides can take steps which avoid a further worsening in tensions and work hard to find a way for a political solution to the crisis.” Media commentators even more explicitly argued that Beijing should back Moscow’s position since that would best advance China’s strategic interests in balancing Western influence in Eurasia.

Nevertheless, China would like to maintain good relations with the current government of Ukraine. The country had become an important military and economic partner in recent years under Yanukovych, providing China with many weapons, including its first aircraft carrier. Perhaps more significantly, Ukraine has helped China circumvent Russia’s defense export controls by transferring key Soviet technologies that have assisted China’s defense industry to produce warplanes and other weapons that China previously had to buy from Russia. Meanwhile, in return for pledges of infrastructure development assistance, the previous Ukrainian government agreed to allow Chinese companies to lease Ukrainian territory to grow food crops and raise livestock for food. Ukraine has also been exporting large quantities of grain to China, which has become Ukraine’s second-largest trading partner after Russia.

In siding with Russia, Beijing has placed these investments at risk. Even so, Russia is a considerably more important partner for Beijing than Ukraine, playing a key role in helping China manage instability on the Korean Peninsula, territorial disputes with other Asian countries and the uncertainties generated by the U.S. pivot to Asia. China has been Russia’s leading trade partner since 2008, and their two-way turnover is currently almost 10 times greater than China’s trade with Ukraine. If Russia annexes Crimea, Chinese economic interests there would be best advanced in partnership with Moscow.

Chinese leaders would undoubtedly have preferred to remain as distant as possible from the Ukraine crisis. But in becoming a great power with worldwide interests, China can no longer maintain a low profile in global crises, and will likely have to manage more such dilemmas in the future.




What Would Chinese Hegemony Look Like?

It is certainly not inevitable, but what form would a Sinic Monroe Doctrine take?

By Robert E. Kelly
February 10, 2014



East Asia is becoming, in the language of international relations theory, “bipolar.” That metaphor, from magnetism, suggests two large states with overlapping spheres of influence competing for regional leadership. The Cold War was a famous global example of bipolarity. Most states in the world tilted toward the United States or the Soviet Union in a worldwide, zero-sum competition. Although analysts have hesitated for many years in applying such strong language to East Asia, this is now increasingly accepted. A lengthy twilight struggle between China and Japan, with U.S. backing, seems in the offing.

Until recently, Asia was arguably “multipolar”—there was no one state large enough to dominate and many roughly equal states competed for influence. China’s dramatic rise has unbalanced that rough equity. China is now the world’s second largest GDP. Although its growth is slowing, it is still expanding at triple the rate of the U.S. economy and six times the rate of Japan’s. By 2020 China is predicted to be the world’s largest economy. Its population, 1.35 billion, is enormous. One in seven persons on the planet is Chinese. Were China’s GDP per capita to ever reach Japanese or American levels, its total GDP would match that of entire planet today. These heady numbers almost certainly inspire images of national glory or a return to the “middle kingdom,” in Beijing. They help account for China’s increasingly tough claims in the East and South China Seas.

Until recently, China pursued a “peaceful rise” strategy, one of accommodation and mutual adjustment. This approach sought to forestall an anti-Chinese encircling coalition. China’s rapid growth unnerves many states on its perimeter, from India, east to Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia, north to Taiwan, Japan, and Russia. Were these states to align, they might contain China in the same way the Japan, China, and NATO all worked to contain the U.S.SR. The peaceful rise seemed to work, especially in southeast Asia, where Chinese generosity has successfully blocked a united ASEAN position on South China Sea issues.

Since 2009 however, China has increasingly resorted to bullying and threats. The 2008 Olympics appears to have been read in Beijing as a sign of China’s newfound might and sway. In the South China Sea it has pushed a very expansive definition of its maritime zone of control, and it recently faced down the Philippines in a dispute over the Scarborough Shoal in that sea. Indeed, one possible explanation for China’s expansion of its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea is that a hard line seems to be working in the South China Sea. But China’s northeast Asian neighbors are far stronger and more capable than its southeast Asian ones. Most observers expect Japan, South Korea and the U.S. to push back, as indeed they have. The U.S. flew bombers through the new ADIZ without warning, and both Japanese and South Korean civilian airlines have been instructed by their respective governments not to comply.
All this then sets up a bipolar contest between China and Japan, in the context of China’s rapid rise toward regional dominance.

Chinese Hegemony?

A common theme in the literature on China’s rise is its apparent inevitability. Westerners particularly tend to get carried away with book-titles such as Eclipse (of the U.S. by China), When China Rules the World, or China’s New Empire.

History is indeed filled with the rise to dominance of powerful states. China and Japan both sought in the past to dominate Asia. Various European states including the U.S.SR, Germany, and France did the same. But frequently these would-be hegemons collided with a counter-hegemonic coalition of states unwilling to be manipulated or conquered. Occasionally the hegemonic aspirant may win; Europe under Rome was “unipolar,” as was feudal Asia now-and-again under the strongest Chinese dynasties. But there is nothing inevitable about this. Hegemonic contenders as various as Napoleon or Imperial Japan have been defeated.

To be fair, it is not clear yet if indeed China seeks regional hegemony. But there is a growing consensus among American and Japanese analysts that this is indeed the case. By Chinese hegemony in Asia we broadly mean something akin to the United States’ position in Latin America. We do not mean actual conquest. Almost no one believes China intends to annex even its weakest neighbors like Cambodia or North Korea. Rather, analysts expect a zone of super-ordinate influence over neighbors.

For example, in 1823, U.S. president James Monroe proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, which warned all non-American powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere on pain of U.S. retaliation. This has worked reasonably well for almost 200 years. The U.S. has variously used force, aid, covert CIA assistance, trade, and so on to eject foreign powers from what Washington (condescendingly) came to call “America’s backyard.” Today, of course, such language seems disturbingly neocolonial, but many assume that the fundamental illiberalism of such spheres of influence do not worry non-democracies like China. A Sinic Monroe Doctrine would likely include some mix of the following:

- the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Japan and Korea,
- U.S. naval retrenchment from east Asia, perhaps as far back as Hawaii,
- a division of the Pacific into east/U.S. and west/China zones with a Chinese blue-water navy operating beyond the so-called second island chain running from Japan southeast to New Guinea,
- an RMB currency bloc in southeast Asia and possibly Korea,
- a regional trading zone,
- foreign policies from China’s neighbors broadly in sync with its own.
- the isolation, if not absorption, of Taiwan

This is not going to happen soon of course. This is a project for the next several decades, just as U.S. power over Latin America came slowly through the nineteenth century. But such goals would broadly fit with what we have seen in the behavior of previous hegemons, including Imperial Japan and China, Rome, the British Empire, the U.S. in Latin America, and various German plans for Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The era of U.S. preponderance in Asia is coming to an end.

Robert E. Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly) is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University. More of his work may be found at his website, AsianSecurityBlog.wordpress.com.