Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently told EU diplomat Kaja Kallas that Beijing did not want to see Russia lose in Ukraine, not because it directly supports the conflict, but because it feared a U.S. strategic realignment against China. If Russia were to falter, Washington could shift its full focus to the Indo-Pacific. While some EU officials were surprised by Wang’s frankness, the comment underscores a widely held belief in Beijing—that a Russian defeat would upend the delicate balancing act China has maintained amid great power rivalry.
Wang further rejected accusations that China was materially aiding Russia’s war effort, claiming that if Beijing were truly providing such support, the conflict would have ended long ago. These remarks, while diplomatically calibrated, reinforce the view that China and Russia perceive their geopolitical fates as closely intertwined.
Ukrainian nationalist accounts have gone into a tailspin about this. I almost feel sorry for you people. We did try to warn you!
no respect to be lost; i know little more than your average american liberal and i’m genuinely interested in reading it.
i’ve run into people on lemmy who know considerably more about dialectical materialism than i do and i posted that comment in the hopes that one of them will see it and respond with a knowledge drop that helps dispels that gloomy perspective you detected.
Although Russia is still a bit of a neoliberal hellhole, it has a lot of institutions, trade relations, and physical infrastructure which are holdovers from the USSR, and its MoD’s separate academic tradition & role in economic decisions + renationalized control of nuclear industry, oil etc sets it apart from more compliant states. At this point Russia has far more economic links to Asia than the western world. Of course if they’d been given the opportunity United Russia gooners would have gone for a subimperialist relationship with US + Europe and not bothered with all of this developmentalism stuff, but it’s really just too large and independent for that to be permitted, making Russia the primary example of an entity the west cannot lay siege to. Lot of Russian poli sci and foreign relations teach people to make decisions based on a kind of mnemonic policy sentimentalism backed by unanalytical historical (including Solzhenitsyn-tier sources so) analogies, they’ve got annoying war on terror Israel policy. They have copied a lot of China’s foreign relations because it produces political stability + reduces foreign diplomatic pressure (independent allies can’t be easily coerced), healthy trade relationships, stable skilled workforces to build industrial capacity that can travel abroad for training, low cost of labor through infrastructure rather than exploitation, creating military self-sufficiency + providing training & technology transfers rather than overburdening yourself through suppling military aid to an isolated country. They don’t have contrary foreign policy building isolated blocs that they attempt to build up into semi-self-sufficient partners, there is a mutual interest in constructing international institutions + law (which mostly de facto dont exist, coalition of the willing rules based yadda yadda) and opposing unilateral sanctions. Instead of picking different countries in the periphery to sponsor they have a mutual interest in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Sahel states, etc are able to develop. KPRF is a lame socdem party but they pressured Kremlin for intervention to stop the aggression against DPR and LPR, and have been successful in ways that the western union/antiwar protest left has not. Like Latam socdems there is more potential for something there because it’s not organizing labor aristocrats & humanities washouts, it’s in the global semiperiphery
I’m not ragging on people, many developmental, human, and theoretical advancements were all made possible by the USSR, it’s just important to see why it was in a position to be disassembled & how some of its institutions persisted, and how it was unable to uproot imperialism, why there was a doctrinal split with China (which made mistakes too). So with all that out of the way, China and Russia now have no reason to go through a diplomatic or military confrontation, and since they’re so economically + militarily interdependent, they have a zillion ways to quash anything before it comes to blows. Even simply postponing the signing of a new bilateral cooperation agreement or not incentivizing tourism would be a stage of escalation in the event of a dispute. Most likely we’ll see more pressure against Russia from across the arctic circle & from eastern Euros + Scandinavians, not Russia working against China and Southeast Asian countries. Russians - even the more 4th positionist/neolib-nationalist-style Russians - are genuine about economic crosslinking, problem is their western-academia-brain-poisoned leadership has been slow to recognize how essential it is + how little western countries will compromise on their mission to undevelop & privatize the natural resources of every global south country & keep their trade links linear + how much allies like Iran & central Asia states need support in order to make international law real for the first time
China and Russia have completely different foreign policy than Cold War China and the USSR, there’s been no sign of friction over China maintaining attitude of neutrality re: Ukraine, they are increasingly collaborating on infrastructure + involved in each other’s supply chains. There’s plenty of other stuff to worry about. I just don’t see any series of events leading to tensions
Well I’ll try to summarize I guess reasons to be hopeful about development in Asia and the difference between Russia and India or even Brazil but I’m doing a dumbass thing where I use my phone in the middle of the night instead of going back to bed so get Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and/or Maldevelopment by Samir Amin off of Anna’s Archive and I will brb