President Xi Jinping said goodbye to President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last Wednesday, telling him that "a change not seen in a hundred years is coming and we are leading it." "I agree," Putin replied, shaking his hand, and wished him a safe journey back to Beijing.
Xi has seen Putin some forty times in the past ten years, more than any other world leader, and in February 2022 they sealed a "no limits" alliance. Together they form an authoritarian axis opposed to the anti-China alliance led by the United States. Xi hopes to prevail, that is, to replace the liberal order, with its norms and human rights, with another based simply on the exchange of economic goods, an order that prioritizes the national interest of each State and in which no one is forced to respect universal values.
This order, which rewards the strongest, was presented again on the 15th in Beijing. It has three “global initiatives”. One, military, which supports the rearmament of China to counteract the US force in the Pacific; another, economic, which defends development outside democracy, and a third, called "civilization", which demands respect for the values of each country, even if they are contrary to human rights. Xi believes that only then can there be coexistence and cooperation between nations. The support for Russia in Ukraine, the mediation between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the ambition to recover Taiwan even by force anticipate "changes not seen in a century" that Xi has been announcing for a long time.
After Xi's visit to Moscow, Ukraine is no closer to peace. His peace plan rewards Russian aggression. It is useless for negotiating, as Ukraine and its allies have said.
China is not interested in a long war in Ukraine because it hurts its export economy, but the defeat of Russia would be much worse because it would break the authoritarian axis and strengthen the United States.
"China has good reason to break Russia's isolation," says Mikhail Korostikov of the Carnegie Institution. He wants to see how it holds up under sanctions and, at the same time, occupy the market that Western companies have abandoned.” "Seeing firsthand how Russia is disconnected from the Western financial, industrial and cultural sectors," Korostikov explains, "allows Xi to prepare for a similar shock, given the increasingly serious rivalry between China and the United States."
US strategic negligence in the Middle East has provided China with another great opportunity. Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq – a war that Xi uses to demonstrate the US's double standards with international law and universal values – China has achieved a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. These two bitter rivals since the 1979 Islamic revolution exchange ambassadors thanks to the mediation of Beijing. Iran and Saudi Arabia are its main partners in the region, and China needs their oil at a good price, just as much or more than Russia's. The economy always marks the path of Chinese diplomacy.
Trade with the Middle East has exploded. It has gone from 180,000 million dollars in 2019 to 259,000 in 2021. That of the US, meanwhile, has been reduced by going, in the same period, from 120,000 to 82,000 million dollars. Pacifying the most troubled region in the world, however, will not be easy and will depend, in large part, on Iran. It is not clear that China can convince him to stop interfering in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf. Burma, North Korea and Afghanistan are countries in which China has also tried to mediate in its favor and has not succeeded. Xi believes that the ties he has forged with the Global South through the Belt and Road Initiative give him an advantageous position over the US, both on the ground and in international bodies, but this is not always the case. It is true, for example, that last October and thanks to the support of India, Brazil and Mexico, he managed to get the UN Human Rights Council to analyze a report that says that China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, a province in which that, since 2007, it has sent a million Uyghurs to re-education camps, but was unable to prevent the report from seeing the light, as had been its intention.
In any case, few countries have echoed the tragedy of the Uyghurs. The United States is among the few that have banned the importation of products from Xinjiang made with forced labor. The European Union, for example, has not done so. China needs the EU and here it walks a very fine line. The plan for Ukraine has not been a gesture in favor of peace but to attract the favor of the EU. The sanctions between Brussels and Beijing as a result of the Uyghurs remain, but the two parties have resumed the dialogue on human rights. Behind this façade of good intentions appear, once again, economic interests. Xinjiang's exports to the EU grew by 30% last year. Beijing talks about "looking to the future", not to the past. He wants the European Parliament to ratify the trade agreement closed in 2020, but blocked until China restores their rights to the Uyghurs.
Ultimately, China views human rights as a colonizing instrument and that, after the "humiliations" suffered since the 19th century, it is a moral imperative not to bow further to the West. China has stopped trusting the US, the great ally that offered it the financial and technological resources to be a great power today. Having digested Hong Kong, it now has ambitions to occupy Taiwan, but the US is willing to defend the island, not because it believes it should be sovereign, but because if it loses it, its position in the Pacific will be seriously jeopardized. In the end, the national interest is always above the universal.
