Page 56 - bneMag April 2022 Russia living with sanctions

56 Opinion
bne April 2022
COMMENT
Beijing performing a delicate balancing act in its support for Moscow
Ben Aris in Berlin
China’s support for Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine is largely rhetorical and Beijing won’t endanger its own relations with the West to support the Kremlin’s act of aggression on its neighbour, the consultancy Teneo said in a note on March 10.
“Though official diplomatic statements remain supportive
of Russia, Beijing appears increasingly unlikely to provide much concrete support for Moscow's efforts to evade western sanctions,” Teneo said in a note to clients.
Chinese companies are coming under the spotlight and Beijing does not want to risk bringing down western sanctions on its own businesses if it too obviously supports Russia’s war, Teneo analysts believe.
“In Washington, support is rising for secondary sanctions against Chinese groups that defy Western sanctions, and Chinese technology companies are highly exposed to such actions,” Teneo said.
Beijing hopes that public statements criticising the West will be sufficient to uphold its relationship with Russia, even without much material support.
On the other hand and to Beijing’s benefit, there are an increasing number of calls for the West to ask China to intervene in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as one of the few countries with any clout with the Kremlin. European Union's top diplomat Josep Borrell has already said that China is the logical choice to lead peace talks.
“Boris Johnson has declared that Putin must fail. Faced with Russia’s hideous military campaign, it is easy to sympathise with the sentiment – until it comes to defining success and failure. Cornering Putin carries its own dangers. A wiser course would be to encourage a third party, China, to play
a mediating role rather than the West sliding into a new Cold War against the two leading autocratic powers,” former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber said in an opinion piece for the Spectator on March 10.
www.bne.eu
Beijing is trying to perform a delicate balancing act between supporting Russia's defiance of the West to get a new inclusive security deal and bringing down Western sanctions on itself for that support.
The Communist Party is also working to generate Chinese public support of the leadership's pro-Russia tilt. State media is promoting pro-Russian viewpoints, while pro-Western
posts on social media have been censored. A leaked document appeared to contain explicit instructions to editors of the state- owned Beijing News to delete pro-Western comments on the publication's official Weibo account.
Russia was left further isolated after both India and China chose to abstain on an emergency UN Security Council vote
on February 25 to condemn the launch of the Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine the day before. China also abstained in the more general UN General Assembly vote on a resolution to condemn Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine a week later, that was overwhelmingly supported by the international community. China and Russia have no veto in UNGA voting.
The Kremlin had been hoping for a more decisive show of support by Beijing in the two votes and the abstentions were widely seen as a Chinese decision to remain on the fence and further isolated Russia from the rest of the world.
“Two weeks ago we noted that Beijing was struggling to balance support for its strategic partnership with Moscow with a desire to avoid further damage to relations with the West. Since then, Beijing's approach to balancing these conflicting objectives has come into clearer focus,” Teneo said. “On the one hand, China's official diplomatic statements continue
to avoid direct criticism of Russia's invasion and to echo Moscow's criticisms of Nato expansion and Western sanctions. Domestically, the Communist Party is censoring criticisms of Russia online, while state media amplifies Russian grievances. On the other hand, Beijing appears increasingly unlikely to provide substantial material support for the Russian invasion or to help Moscow evade Western sanctions.”
Moscow also has to find a delicate balance going forward.
As Christof Ruehl, Senior Research Scholar at the Columbia University in New York, told bne IntelliNews in a podcast on March 10, China will be one of the few sources of hard currency earnings if the sanction regime remains on Moscow in the long