The Russian disaster in Ukraine is one of the factors that has brought about a subtle change in Beijing’s foreign policy over the past year.
A British businessman told me last week that he had recently met with China’s foreign minister and, among other topics, the two discussed the Ukraine war. The minister expressed deep concern about the war. He thought it tragically destabilising both geopolitically and economically. China wanted the war to end, and soon.
Yet in March this year, when Xi visited Moscow, the Chinese leader said China was not taking sides over the Ukraine war. China has refused to supply Russia with lethal weapons and ammunition and has abstained in international forums. Xi’s Putin play is now looking all the more unfortunate as Putin’s power base gradually weakens in the face of more extreme nationalists who want to prosecute the war still more violently.
None of this means that China’s determination to wedge the international political system away from the dominance of the United States has been abandoned. It’s axiomatic of China’s foreign policy that it supports multipolarity and the diminution of American influence more generally.But three things have happened that have caused China’s leaders to reflect on the wisdom of their past hostile actions towards the West, including Australia.
The robust US and NATO support for Ukraine and the efficacy of Western weapons systems has also surprised Beijing ... and Moscow. Xi and his Russian allies had assumed American and Western resolve was fading, drawing the wrong conclusions from the acerbic internal political debates throughout the English-speaking world and the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Third, China’s hostility to the West has come at a very substantial economic price. The statistics are quite dramatic: 2023 has seen a collapse in US venture capital and private equity investment in China. So far this year such investments in China are running at little more than $1 billion whereas two years ago, it was nearly $50 billion.Likewise, European investors are moving away from China. Only Germany remains a faithful Chinese investor.
There are other contributory factors to China’s relatively poor economic performance – not least the reversal by Xi Jinping of some of the liberal market reforms of his predecessors. China’s Victorian-style obsession with COVID lockdowns also hasn’t helped.
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