Anti-China Rhetoric at G7 Moves Moscow Closer to Beijing
Make no mistake, the U.S. sees China, not Russia, as its peer competitor and biggest challenge
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China has warned European countries against following the U.S. down the path of confrontation in its zero-sum game to prevent the emergence of a unipolar world and to keep the current “global world order.”
European countries are divided on the matter of “de-risking” with China, with France striking a more pragmatic tone compared to Germany’s antagonistic posture. But regardless of how the chips fall in the West, there is one certainty: all this diplomatic muck is forcing China and Russia, far from natural allies, closer, as exhibited last week.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met last week with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing to discuss bilateral cooperation between the two countries and continue to pursue a “no limits partnership.”
Mishustin said the two countries stand in opposition to the “attempts of the collective West to maintain global dominance and use illegal sanctions to impose their will on independent states,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
The paper, citing Russian outlet Tass, quoted Mishustin saying the relationship between the Kremlin and Beijing is at “unprecedentedly high levels.”
He noted that trade between the two powers could surpass $200 billion, which the WSJ noted is one year earlier than anticipated in 2019. (The U.S. is China’s top trading partner and accounted for $582.8 billion in exports in 2022. If the number stands, Russia will become China’s second most important trade partner.)
Xi repeated the claim that China will continue to offer Russia “firm support on matters of core interests.”
TRENDPOST: The U.S. has tried to downplay the risk of China’s close ties to Russia and has tried to portray Moscow as playing a subservient role in the relationship. Beijing has irked the West because it refuses to come out and condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. Washington sees Beijing as Russia’s life support system and if trade ever dried up with Beijing, the economic collapse in Moscow that the Biden administration dreamed about would begin.
China sees the war in Ukraine as an opportunity, especially when it comes to Taiwan, western observers say. If the U.S. loses in Ukraine, that would bolster Beijing’s confidence to invade the island.
Li Hui, the Chinese special representative on Eurasian Affairs, told German Federal Foreign Office State Secretary Andreas Michaelis last week that Europe should focus on finding and fixing the “root causes” that led to the Ukraine War, RT, the Russian news outlet reported.
China has previously criticized NATO expansion as a key factor leading up to Russia’s invasion.
The Trends Journal reported in 2016 that “forward positions in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic States are hundreds of miles further east than the Oder-Neisse border between Germany and Poland, where U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush solemnly promised Soviet and Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would halt its expansion more than a quarter-century ago.”
Today, China sees NATO provoking war in the Indo-Pacific.
Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, is expected to address a NATO summit in July in Lithuania.
Make no mistake, the U.S. sees China, not Russia, as its peer competitor and biggest challenge.
G7 Chinese Hate
Russia labeled this month’s G7 meeting in Hiroshima nothing more than an incubator, which “under Anglo-Saxon leadership, hatches destructive initiatives and subverts global stability,” the WSJ reported.
The West, guided by the U.S., has been focused on becoming less dependent on China because of what it sees as an unfair trade balance, a disapproval of Beijing’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “economic coercion,” and bellicose language vis-à-vis Taiwan.