Foreign Affairs attempts to put a pro-Clown World spin on the way China’s support for Russia is supposedly weakening the world’s largest economy vis-a-vis the West:
A substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted. The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries. Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”
In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit. The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.” Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.” Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.
As the war drags on, Chinese analysts also believe that the West’s unity is fracturing. As Democrats and Republicans fight “fiercely against each other and as the [U.S. presidential] election approaches, [the] situation is getting more and more unfavorable for Ukraine,” the prominent Eurasian Studies expert Ding Xiaoxing wrote in February. Jin Canrong, a hawkish international relations scholar, predicted that a public “backlash” against support for Ukraine in European countries and the United States would eventually doom Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.
Many of these Chinese experts’ analyses are fair, even astute. But missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable before February 2022.
Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.
The war in Ukraine, and particularly Beijing’s decision to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia, is also exacerbating the rifts in an already fractious U.S.-Chinese relationship. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Beijing that the economic, technological, and diplomatic lifeline China is extending to Moscow works at cross-purposes with its stated desire for a stable bilateral relationship with the United States. But Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort. More sanctions are likely to come irrespective of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
The true recognition of the costs? What costs? To the contrary, China, like Russia and a number of other countries both in and out of BRICS, are beginning to recognize the true costs of engagement with Clown World. They see the degeneracy, they observe the material decline in morals, wealth, native birth rates, average IQ, and population demographics, and they rightly don’t want any part of it. What Clown World calls “freedom” and “democracy” is actually a slow-motion societal suicide. No matter what economic costs they might face, or foreign investments they might lose, no price is too high in exchange for removing themselves from the baleful influence of the Clown World cancer.
It’s not China that is in denial, but rather, the clowns of Clown World.