Looking at the photo this week of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and Vladimir Putin, the Russian, shaking hands in Moscow, it occurred to me that Putin should be wearing shorts. The Kremlin painted it as a meeting between equals, as the consolidation of a beautiful friendship, but the reality is that Russia is a junior partner for China.
China is a superpower that goes beyond; Russia, a country ruled by a dangerous guillat, where its primitive economy depends to survive on the sale of raw materials to Beijing.
Next week the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, is traveling to China. When taking a photo with Xi Jinping, long pants will not fit him. They will talk about business, but not in the sense of life or death for the Spanish economy. And when they talk, more delicately, about the Russian war in Ukraine, it will be in a climate of mutual respect, not Chinese condescension.
Sánchez will deal with the issue that most divides the world as a representative of NATO and the European Union, whose position against the Russian invasion Spain unequivocally defends with rhetoric, money and tanks. There is no doubt that Sánchez will consult with his allies in Washington and Europe before meeting with Xi Jinping. No doubt they will encourage him to explore the possibility of opening a rift with China, because perhaps one day the Asian giant will use its immense influence over Russia to help end the war.
Sánchez already said it in Brussels after attending an EU summit: “We will also talk about Ukraine, where the most important thing is that we can guarantee a stable and lasting peace” in which “the fundamental thing is to preserve an international order based on rules”.
No one is under any illusions that the supposed peace plan that Xi Jinping proposed to Putin will achieve results in the short term, which is why Sánchez chose his words well when he added that he was referring to “a peace when it arrives”. Today China and Russia are allies against the perfidious West. Stopping the slaughter of both Russians and Ukrainians is not an imperative for China, nor is it for Putin. China is guided by its interests and period. The question is whether the moment will come when it will decide that a war that entails the danger of an international escalation is against its interests, that is to say commercial ones.
There is a phrase that a president of the United States formulated a century ago: “The chief business of America is business”. The main issue in America is business. The same can be said of China today. If Beijing concludes that Russian warmongering interferes with its mission to conquer the world through trade, it will seriously think about influencing Putin to behave like an adult and responsible person.
What are the chances that day will come? Well, let’s start by seeing how China’s alliance with Russia has fared after a year of war. Being people cold in analysis, the members of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party cannot have exactly celebrated the fiasco that the Russian imperialist adventure has become.
Putin met with Xi Jinping in February last year, three weeks before the invasion. If he managed to convince him then that occupying Kyiv would mean blowing and blowing bottles, today the Chinese leader understands that Putin fell into a colossal self-delusion. As he also understands that the so-called professional Russian army consists of a bunch of demoralized inepts who have not been able to defeat the amateur military force of a poor but daring enemy.
As for geopolitics, this word that Putin likes so much, it has also not gone down very well with China, with its pretensions to global economic dominance. The world has become polarized around the war, but let’s look at the pole that China leads. At the United Nations last month, a resolution was put to the vote demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine. Six countries voted against it alongside Russia: Syria, North Korea, Belarus, Eritrea, Mali and, needless to say, Nicaragua; 32 abstained, including China, and 142 voted in favor, including China’s two powerful pro-Western neighbors Japan and South Korea.
The equation is unlikely to change, so China will have to ask itself one of these days whether it wants to continue to see itself at the head of a collection of puny countries against a bloc it buys from and, in a larger scale, it sells the vast majority of its products.
Ignore everything I have written so far in the event that China decides to supply weapons to Russia with the same enthusiasm that democratic countries are supplying them to Ukraine, in which case we would be seriously approaching the third world war. But there are no signs of it. For example, Xi Jinping did not announce this week that he would export military equipment to Russia, as some had feared. And let’s not forget that China acts as a powerful brake on Putin following through on threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
What could a Chinese peacemaking role consist of? Not to vote with the United States at the UN, not to convince Russia to surrender. Not this. Among other things, because Russia is an important source of oil and minerals for Chinese industry and because Asian tradition places great importance on the principle of saving face.
No. China’s possible role would be seen if the war reached such a point of paralysis that a cease-fire had to be negotiated, followed by a peace agreement. The success of this mission will absolutely depend on the guarantees that can be given that Russia would not again fall into the temptation to invade Ukraine. And also that NATO would not invade Russia. Putin and his propagandists in the Russian media say they believe the United States and its allies wish to eliminate their country. Pure paranoia, but they will have to be played, and no more credible power than China to offer them these guarantees, and incidentally to offer them to Ukraine.
This, I think, is what Pedro Sánchez has in mind when he says he will explore options for Chinese aid to preserve a rules-based international order and maintain stability on the Russian border. The main incentive for Xi Jinping is that, as Sánchez must well know, a world war is not good for business.
