A three-way video call March 8 with China’s President Xi Jinping and European leaders Francois Macron and Olaf Scholz raises the prospect of a diplomatic initiative that would have been unthinkable only weeks ago: China might mediate the Ukraine crisis, seizing the diplomatic high ground as a peacemaker. For the past decade, China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, intervention in Hong Kong and border skirmishes with India have left it in relative diplomatic isolation. But the Ukraine crisis opens an opportunity for a diplomatic revolution that could position China as a peacemaker.
The tragic combination of American overreach and Russian overreaction has left the world in a diplomatic vacuum. By seeking to extend NATO to the Russian border, Washington persuaded Moscow that its objective was the strategic encirclement of Russia. By abandoning the Minsk II framework, Kyiv convinced the Russians that Ukraine had become an American cat’s paw. France and Germany, who backed the Minsk compromise, failed to stand on their principles against American opposition. The outcome, as I wrote March 4, recalls the blunders of the European powers in the advent of the First World War.
That opens an opportunity for China to mediate, because it is not compromised by the mistakes that led to the crisis, and because it has good relations with the antagonists and a working dialogue with Europe. The odd man out, of course, would be the United States.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in a March 1 phone conversation asked his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to mediate the crisis, stating (according to the official Chinese version) that “China has played a constructive role on this issue and Ukraine is ready to step up communication with the Chinese side. He looked forward to China’s mediation efforts for the ceasefire.” The idea of Chinese mediation is getting traction in Europe.
As a “strategic partner” of Russia and a key trading partner of Ukraine, China is the only world power with strong relationships on both sides of the conflict, as European commentators note pointedly. “When will China stop Putin?,” wrote Eduard Steiner in Germany’s center-right newspaper Die Welt March 8. China has “astonishingly close relations with Ukraine,” the Die Welt analysis notes.
American diplomacy is backed into a corner. Washington is committed to defeating the Russians in Ukraine and breaking the Russian economy, through the provision of high-tech weaponry to the Ukraine Armed Forces, and the imposition of “nuclear” sanctions including the seizure of more than half of Russia’s $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves. That exceeds any economic measures taken by the United States against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and has no peacetime precedent. Washington’s stance leaves it nowhere to go: If the punitive sanctions and weapons provisions fail to break Russia’s will, the only possible outcome will be a permanent standoff.
From Europe’s point of view, the American response was a case of overreach. Chancellor Scholz as well as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson March 7 declared that they would not place sanctions on the sale of Russian hydrocarbons to Europe—in contrast to President Biden, who announced a halt to US purchases of Russian oil on March 8. The price of oil in US trading rose by $9 a barrel, or 8 percent, on Biden’s action. Europeans already are paying about ten times the Feb. 2021 price for natural gas, and the potential economic harm to Europe is dire.
In the video meeting with Macron and Scholz, Xi Jinping said that “China appreciates the efforts of France and Germany to mediate the situation in Ukraine, and is willing to maintain communication and coordination with France, Germany, and the EU, and play an active role with the international community according to the needs of all parties concerned,” according to a report in the Chinese website guancha.cn.
The Chinese news site added, “Xi Jinping stressed that we should jointly support the Russia-Ukraine peace talks, help the two sides to maintain the momentum of the negotiations, overcome difficulties and continue the talks to reach results and peace.” He called for “maximum restraint to prevent a large-scale humanitarian crisis,” adding that China “is willing to provide further humanitarian aid to Ukraine. We need to work together to reduce the negative impact of the crisis.” The sanctions now in place “will have an impact on the stability of global finance, energy, transportation, and supply chains, and will drag down the world economy.”
Xi added that China will support France and Germany “to act on behalf of Europe’s own interests, consider Europe’s lasting security, adhere to strategic independence, and promote the building of a balanced, effective, and sustainable European security framework. China is also happy to see a dialogue among equals among Europe, Russia, the United States, and NATO.”
These are generalities, to be sure. What matters is relationships: China has close ties with both Russia and Ukraine, described as “China’s new bridge to Europe” in one report. Chinese investors have put $2 billion a year into Ukraine since the now-embattled country was the first to sign the statement of intent for the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017. China’s imports from Ukraine nearly doubled to nearly $8 billion in 2020 from just over $4 billion in 2019.
The Die Welt report notes that China’s abstention on last week’s UN Security Council resolution denouncing Russia “was evaluated as a success against Putin in Western diplomatic circles. “Other Chinese actions were also astonishing,” the German daily added, quoting China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun’s declaration that “Ukraine should be a bridge of communication between East and West and not the front line of great power rivalry.”
“The fact is,” Die Welt added, “that until now, China has profited from every conflict between Moscow and Europe, and its share of Russia’s foreign trade rose from 13.5% to 16% between 2013 and 2020…but now the war has driven up raw materials prices, especially for oil and gas. And because there are concerns about secure transport of goods from China to Europe over the Russian railway system, trains on the Chinese side aren’t being loaded.”
