Putin invaded Ukraine. China may be winning the war.

What’s next in U.S.-China relations.

Feb 23, 2023 View in browser   By Phelim Kine A man carries his bird cages as he walks by a large Ukrainian flag with the slogan "We Support Ukraine" written on it in Chinese characters on the outside wall of the Canadian Embassy, March 1, 2022 in Beijing, China. | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images Hi, China Watchers. To mark tomorrow’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re examining the implications of Beijing’s possible move to try to end the war. We’re also tracking a U.S. diplomatic counter-offensive targeting China’s ‘false information’ on its spy balloon and kick the tires on the state of U.S.-China crisis communications. To wrap it up, we profile a book that argues China’s treatment — and mistreatment — of foreign journalists is a decades-tested barometer of the state of U.S.-China relations. Let’s get to it. — Phelim China’s relationship with Russia and its alignment with Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN’s war on Ukraine is at a crossroads. Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN warned on Sunday that Beijing is “considering providing lethal support to Russia in its aggression against Ukraine.” NATO Secretary General JENS STOLTENBERG echoed that concern on Tuesday. Doing so would plunge U.S.-China ties — still reeling from the Chinese spy balloon incident earlier this month — to a new low. Beijing’s provision of weaponry to Russia would cross a “red line” that the Biden administration would find “unacceptable,” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Crossing that line “would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie,” Sen. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.) said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. While Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson WANG WENBIN accused Stoltenberg of “groundless speculation and smears” and said the Biden administration “is in no position to tell China what to do,” there are signs Beijing may be about to get off the fence and press Putin to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. After a year of blaming the U.S. for Russia’s assault on Ukraine, parroting Russia’s description of the invasion as a “special military operation” and rationalizing that aggression as an expression of the Kremlin’s “legitimate security concerns,” China says it’s hatching a peace plan. Beijing will soon publish “a position document on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” China’s top diplomat, WANG YI, said on Saturday. That plan will prioritize “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries,” Wang said. And that’s just for starters. China’s paramount leader XI JINPING will travel to Russia in the coming months “to push for multiparty peace talks and allow China to reiterate its calls that nuclear weapons not be used,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister DMYTRO KULEBA met with Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday and said in a written statement that they agreed that the “principle of territorial integrity is sacred for both of our states.” That all could signal a backpedaling from the “no limits” alignment with Moscow that China declared a month prior to the invasion. But an end to hostilities would risk the strategic and economic windfall that Beijing has reaped from Russia’s war on Ukraine over the past 12 months. “I don't know if winning is the right word, but China’s not losing on Ukraine,” said KRISTEN GUNNESS, former director of the Navy Asia Pacific Advisory Group at the Pentagon and now a researcher at the RAND Corporation. “China suffered some reputational costs from supporting Russia … but they require diversified sources of energy and the bargain basement prices [for Russian oil and gas] are definitely one part of that.” China has joined India in becoming the largest buyers of deeply discounted Russian gas and oil as Russia’s traditional markets in Europe have halted those purchases. Beijing has also made tidy profits reselling excess Russian liquid natural gas onward to Europe over the past year. That trade has been an economic lifeline for Moscow through hard currency for exports and imports of non-sanctioned high tech equipment, including semiconductors. Chinese state firms have also stepped up to provide Russia with jet-fighter parts and electronic jamming technology, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. “It isn’t arms, it isn’t munitions, but it’s material that can help Vladimir Putin to keep the system afloat and to continue the war effort,” said ALEXANDER GABUEV, senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. That relationship is relegating Russia to the status of a Chinese client state which could pay Beijing long term geostrategic dividends. The two countries settled their long standing border dispute in 2008, but memories run deep in China of a 1969 border conflict with Russia that almost went nuclear. Russia’s future is that of “a junior partner to China, and Russia as a weaker power is good for China,” said NADIA SCHADLOW, former deputy national security adviser for strategy at the National Security Council, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Russia is going to be a different kind of power after this war, one that is less likely to be as worrisome for China.” That may be a palatable trade-off for Putin. Putin’s view of the Ukraine war as a showdown with the U.S. means “the best way to bring America down is to strengthen America's primary opponent, which is China … because ultimately all of that Chinese strength will be directed against the U.S. and America's allies,” Carnegie’s Gabuev said. Meanwhile, Beijing continues to tout the strength of Chinese-Russian ties. “China is willing to make efforts with Russia to assume the role of great powers,” Xi told Putin in September in a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization annual summit in Uzbekistan. Wang at the Foreign Ministry said last week that China will work with Russia “to further advance our comprehensive strategic partnership.” Putin declared on Wednesday that the bilateral relationship had reached “new frontiers” and confirmed that Xi would visit Russia later this year. Beijing and Moscow have put teeth in their alliance with joint naval drills and joint heavy bomber flights at the end of last year on and above the East China Sea. That reflects how Putin and Xi “share a certain vision of the world — like opposition to the ‘hegemony of the West,’” said MARIA REPNIKOVA, director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University and an expert on China-Russia relations. It also highlights the two leaders’ mutual hostility toward the Biden administration’s narrative of an existential global face-off between democratic societies and autocratic countries like China and Russia.  But there are signs that Beijing has grown uneasy in its passive complicity with Putin’s pursuit of a war which last week reaped a U.S. accusation that Moscow was guilty of crimes against humanity in Ukraine. QIN GANG, now China’s Foreign Minister, declared in December that Ukraine-Russia peace talks were “the most urgent task” while offering no support to help broker them. Xi’s Ukraine peace plan — if indeed he has one — will test whether he’s willing to invest political capital and risk eroding some economic and geostrategic advantages by mitigating Putin’s aggression. “Russia is blowing up its relationship with the West … in a nihilistic, bloodthirsty, fascist euphoria,” said DANIEL FRIED, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. The Chinese “get a lot more out of the international system that the Russians so despise. They don't want to destroy it, they want to revise it.” IN CASE YOU MISSED IT… U.S. diplomatic counter-offensive targets China’s ‘false information’ The Biden administration isn’t just calling China out in public. It has embarked on an extensive private pressure campaign to rally allies to its side and make it clear to Chinese officials that the U.S. has proof of their nefarious actions. Over the past few weeks, the U.S. has sent detailed talking points to allies, held more than a dozen meetings with Chinese officials and — most recently — shared new intelligence with both to up pressure on Beijing, according to interviews with three officials and a diplomatic cable obtained by POLITICO. While early conversations focused mostly on the spy balloon that transited the U.S. in early February, more recent warnings have turned to the possibility of China supplying weapons to Russia to use against Ukraine — a defiant violation of what the Biden administration has called a “red line” in its relationship with Beijing. POLITICO’s ERIN BANCO and I have the full story here. Blinken and China's top diplomat spar over spy balloon incident in Munich meeting Secretary of State Blinken warned China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on Saturday that the U.S. will not tolerate violations of its airspace after a Chinese spy balloon flew over North America but received no apologies from Beijing. According to a State Department readout of the meeting, Blinken “directly spoke to the unacceptable violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law” by the Chinese balloon “underscoring that this irresponsible act must never again occur.” POLITICO’s NAHAL TOOSI and I have the full story here. TRANSLATING WASHINGTON — GOP LAWMAKERS TARGET CAMPUS ESPIONAGE THREAT: FIRST IN CHINA WATCHER — Reps. MICHELLE STEEL (R-Calif.) and ELISE STEFANIK (R-NY) will introduce a bill today targeted at foreign espionage and influence efforts, including Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes and other entities, at American universities and colleges. The Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act is the House companion bill to legislation re-introduced by Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas) earlier this month. “This legislation will ensure any bad actors seeking to infiltrate academia to influence our youth and spy on sensitive research projects are quickly and decisively expelled,” Steel told China Watcher. — REPORT: TAIWAN’S FM SPOTTED IN D.C.: Secret meetings this week in Washington, D.C. between Taiwan’s Foreign Minister JOSEPH WU and senior U.S. officials went public via a broadcast by Taiwan’s TVBS news channel on Wednesday. TVBS staked out the Arlington, Va., office of the American Institute in Taiwan on Tuesday morning and captured footage of Wu and Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the U.S., BI-KHIM HSIAO, together inside the building’s lobby. TVBS also recorded Biden administration officials including U.S. Deputy Secretary of State WENDY SHERMAN, National Security Council Indo-Pacific coordinator KURT CAMPBELL, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs DANIEL KRITENBRINK, and China Coordinator and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China and Taiwan, RICK WATERS, entering or leaving the building the same morning. The TVBS report seems to confirm a Financial Times report last week that Wu and Taiwan’s national security adviser, WELLINGTON KOO, would be in D.C. this week for meetings with administration officials. The State Department, White House and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to requests for comment. — CHINA COMMITTEE: AMCHAM SUPPORTING HK PROPAGANDA: The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is concerned that the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, GEOFFREY SIEBENGARTNER, appeared in a recent promotional video for the territory that asserted that Hong Kong has “a sound legal system.” The committee warned that "by participating in this video AmCham Hong Kong demonstrated support for and and gave credibility to the video’s message … days before Hong Kong began a mass show trial of 47 pro-democracy activists,” the Committee said in a letter sent on Sunday. Amcham Hong Kong didn’t respond to a request for comment. — LAWMAKERS, PENTAGON OFFICIAL CONVERGE ON TAIWAN: Taiwanese officials had their hands full this past week juggling visits by both deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, MICHAEL CHASE and two congressional delegations. Chase landed in Taipei on Friday, prompting Wang at China’s Foreign Ministry to accuse the U.S. of “creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait.” Two groups of lawmakers, one consisting of Rep. MIKE GALLAGHER (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select China Committee, and a separate bipartisan congressional delegation including Reps. RO KHANNA (D-Calif.), JAKE AUCHINCLOSS (D-Mass.) and TONY GONZALES (R-Texas) overlapped in Taipei last weekend. Taiwanese officials are “eager for enhanced partnerships with America and for us to clear the backlog of foreign military sales items as quickly as possible,” Gallagher told reporters in a press briefing on Wednesday. Hot from the China Watchersphere Standing Committee member and General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen at a press event at The Great Hall of People, Oct. 23, 2022 in Beijing, China. | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images  — XI JINPING’S GLOBAL SECURITY INITIATIVE REHASH: Beijing issued a “concept paper” on Tuesday designed to flesh out the details of Chinese paramount leader Xi’s signature Global Security Initiative. Xi unveiled the GSI with scant detail at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference in April. Xi’s 202-word description of the GSI leaned heavily on Chinese Foreign Ministry boilerplate, including rejection of “Cold War mentality” and opposition to “unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction.” The concept paper grows that description to 3,500 words and says the GSI’s goal is to “eliminate the root causes of international conflicts, improve global security governance … to bring more stability and certainty to a volatile and changing era.” Though the document urges the establishment of “more international platforms and mechanisms for exchange and cooperation,” it offers no notable new initiatives to facilitate those objectives. Those ambiguities cast doubt on Wang at the Foreign Ministry’s assertion on Tuesday that the paper will spur other countries “to join in the effort to implement the initiative.” — HONG KONG SLAMS ‘MALICIOUS’ U.S. LEGISLATION: Hong Kong’s government has slammed legislation introduced last week by MARCO RUBIO (R-Fla.) and JEFF MERKLEY (D-Ore.) as “maliciously interfering” in the territory’s affairs. The two lawmakers’ Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Certification Act will strip the territory’s official outposts in the U.S. of their quasi-diplomatic status if the Biden administration determines that Hong Kong “no longer enjoys a high degree of autonomy” from Beijing. Translating China A U.S. Air Force pilot looked down at the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovered over the Central Continental United States February 3, 2023. Recovery efforts began shortly after the balloon was downed. | Courtesy of the Department of Defense — THE U.S.-CHINA CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS GAP: The Chinese government took its time — several days — to formally respond to U.S. concerns about the spy balloon detected over the U.S. earlier this month, a U.S. government official unauthorized to speak on the record told POLITICO. And China’s defense minister WEI FENGHE declined a request to speak to Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN after the U.S. downed the Chinese spy balloon on Feb. 4. That underscores Beijing’s persistent rapid response deficit in moments of diplomatic or military crisis. In the hours following the June 4, 1989 massacre of Beijing citizens by Chinese troops dispatched to crush the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations, then-President GEORGE H.W. BUSH urgently tried to call China’s then-paramount leader DENG XIAOPING. “But he was unable to get through,” Bush’s national security adviser BRENT SCOWCROFT recalled in a book published in 1998. History repeated itself 12 years later when Admiral JOSEPH W. PRUEHER, then U.S. ambassador in Beijing, urgently tried to contact China’s Foreign Ministry about the collision of a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane in April 2001 off China’s Hainan Island. Prueher later told POLITICO that he had to wait 12 hours for the Foreign Ministry to open discussions on resolving the crisis. “If we can't handle a balloon … then how are we going to handle a collision at sea or another aerial collision or a shooting incident?” said CHAS FREEMAN, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Official and unofficial bilateral efforts over the years to improve crisis communications systems have stumbled due to basic disagreements on what crisis prevention entails, said MICHAEL SWAINE, senior research fellow on East Asia at Quincy Institute and a veteran of such dialogues. The problem? A mismatch between a U.S. focus on deconflicting acute crises and a Chinese preference to focus on systemic issues — such as U.S. arms sales to Taiwan — that Beijing insists are the ultimate source of such standoffs. “The Chinese view is that we wouldn't be having these crises if the U.S. wasn’t doing this stuff, so why don't we talk about that?” Swaine said. “And the U.S. response is ‘That's policy … we don't want to get into a shooting war with you guys, so let's just talk about how we avoid a shooting war if we do get into crises over these issues.’” When crises do erupt, the information disconnect between China’s military and civilian leadership hobbles speedy resolution. “It's not like Xi Jinping’s sitting in his command control system saying ‘Oh, there's my submarine out there and the United States did something, so we’d better get on the horn,’” Swaine said. “When these things happen, there is no immediate answer [from Beijing] because there often is nobody at the senior level in the government who actually knows what the hell's going on, and because the [CCP] leadership needs to first meet to discuss the causes of the crisis, what or who to blame, and how to deal with it.” Bilateral diplomatic crisis resolution under previous U.S. administrations benefited from the fact that “a range of people — and the right people — on the two sides knew each other reasonably well and were able to communicate, and both sides felt they had something to protect and something at risk depending on how they handled the problem,” said DANNY RUSSEL, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Right now both of these things seem to be missing.” HEADLINES BBC: The protesters who've gone missing as China deepens crackdown Foreign Affairs: China’s hidden Covid catastrophe Foreign Policy: China’s newest action TV show is a propaganda hit HEADS UP — CHINA COMMITTEE’S WEEKEND NY ROAD TRIP: The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party hits the road on Saturday with events in New York City targeting “CCP Transnational Repression.” They include a press conference and rally outside the site of an alleged overseas Chinese police station. That’s a useful warmup for the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on Tuesday that will focus on “Combatting the Generational Challenge of CCP Aggression.” Buckle up! Robin Moyer One Book, Three Questions The Book: Assignment China: An oral history of American journalists in the People’s Republic. The Author: MIKE CHINOY is a non-resident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute and a former CNN senior Asia correspondent. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What is the most important takeaway from your book? Access to China for American and other foreign journalists is the worst it has been since the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979, when U.S. news organizations were permitted to establish bureaus in Beijing after being forced to cover the country from outside following the Communist revolution in 1949. With Xi Jinping’s domestic tightening and international assertiveness, pressure on foreign journalists has increased, including the mass expulsion of American correspondents in 2020. In some respects the situation has come full circle, with all but a handful of reporters again forced to decipher much of what’s happening in China from outside. What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book? Interviewing scores of current and former correspondents, and reviewing decades of coverage, what’s most surprising is not how much they got wrong, but given the conditions under which they were forced to work, how much they got right. The tools of China watching — analyzing state media, scrutinizing images of official public appearances, often dismissed as little more than “tea-leaf reading” — proved remarkably effective. What does your book tell us about the trajectory and future of U.S.-China relations? Beijing’s treatment of journalists has long been a barometer of broader Sino-American relations. The better the ties, the greater the access and the more nuanced the portrayal of the country. Today, however, the size of the American press corps in China is a fraction of what it was just a few years ago. While American news consumers suffer, ironically, China itself is an even bigger loser, with journalists less able to convey the richness, complexity, and humanity of the world’s most populous nation, leaving even more of the coverage focused on the tensions and conflicts driving China and the U.S. apart. Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at pkine@politico.com. Thanks to: Mike Zapler, Heidi Vogt, Erin Banco, Nahal Toosi, Matt Kaminski and digital producer Katherine Long. Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week's items? Email us at chinawatcher@politico.com.   Follow us

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