The number 996, which so aptly describes China’s work environment, has long become known in the West as well: Slaving away from nine in the morning until nine in the evening, six days a week. However, testimonials from workers who have gone through this grind are rare. The fear of repression or being fired is far too great.
Fabian Peltsch has managed to speak with a former employee of the Chinese delivery service Meituan about the exploitative everyday work routine in China. It quickly becomes clear that 996 is merely the lower limit in many companies. The workload and psychological pressure have long since become far greater. And some Chinese CEOs seem to be proud of it.
There is also pride in China’s leadership in the 5G mobile communications standard. And while there is still a dispute in Germany about whether Chinese companies such as Huawei should be allowed to build the necessary infrastructure for a 5G network, China is already one step ahead: Researchers have now reached new milestones in the development of 6G.
Our author team in Beijing shows what extremely high data transmission speeds 6G can achieve and what strategic economic and military advantages China could gain from it. A revolution in communications technology is dawning.
I hope you enjoy today’s issue!
At the end of January, Zhang Yifei’s post went viral in China. In it, the 25-year-old Chinese publicly condemned the working conditions at his employer Tencent. “Have you ever considered that it’s a matter of life and death for your employees when you set up such work schedules?” he ranted in an internal company chat group with 600 members.
One of Zhang’s colleagues had previously been praised by management for working more than 20 hours at a stretch, making around 200 changes to a product design. As a result, it was still able to launch as planned. “To reinterpret a gradual death as an honorable motivation might be considered black humor. But any decision-maker who makes such a thing possible is an accomplice,” the programmer, who had been hired only a few months earlier, scoffed and submitted his resignation shortly afterward. His refusal to compromise made Zhang the hero of many overworked Chinese practically overnight.
Many complain about the sometimes inhumane working conditions in China’s tech industry. However, only very few of them dare to take action, let alone resign. On the contrary, there have been repeated tragic deaths in recent years, which can also be traced back to the consequences of overwork.
Just earlier this month, a 25-year-old employee of the successful video platform Bilibili died of a brain hemorrhage. Shortly before, he had worked almost non-stop at the company’s headquarters in Wuhan over the Chinese New Year. The young man’s job was to check new videos coming in by the second for “illegal or offensive content” – a job so monotonous and soulless that it has also been described as “assembly line work of the Internet era“.
An acronym that has become a synonym for China’s harsh working culture is “996”: Employees, especially in the tech industry, are expected to work from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. “Working life in China is highly competitive,” says John Wang. The 31-year-old worked for Chinese tech giant Meituan as a product manager until a year ago. Since August 2021, he has been living in Leipzig, Germany, where he is doing his MBA at the HHL Graduate School of Management. He also came to Germany to escape the daily grind in China.
“My workday officially went from 10 AM to 9 PM. But I usually started at eight in the morning and didn’t go home until eleven,” he recalls in an interview with China.Table. There was an immanent pressure to be the last to leave the office in the evening, says the physics graduate. “And if you did make it home early, the work didn’t stop. You always had to be available and respond as soon as a question came in. Your body was at home, but your mind was still on your job.”
According to the Chinese Labor Law of 1994, the standard working time is eight hours per day and a maximum of 44 hours per week. However, in a survey conducted by the Chengdu Economic Daily, more than half of the workers surveyed said they worked overtime every day, with only 44 percent receiving compensation for doing so. Employers argue that their employees “voluntarily” choose to work overtime and would forgo extra money in the process.
Tech giant Huawei even had this “voluntariness” confirmed in writing by employees. Others explain that potential overtime is already included in the salary. If you want to keep your job, you can hardly do anything against these conditions. Independent trade unions are banned in the People’s Republic.
So the only place to vent his anger anonymously is on the Internet. In January 2021, a list appeared on the Internet in which employees of major Chinese tech companies compared their working hours. The document was titled 996.ICU – after the abbreviation for intensive care unit. Within just three days, the spreadsheet already had more than 1,000 entries. It was then deleted from the Chinese web by censors.
In response to the public debate, China’s Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) at least declared last August that Chinese employees were not allowed to work more than 36 hours of overtime per month and three hours of overtime per day. But not all employees were happy about it. “When you work for a company like Meituan or Tencent, you are prepared to work overtime. Also, because the salaries are so high,” Wang explains. “Many employees went to the best universities in the country.”
China’s growing middle class is on the one hand proud of the prosperity it has achieved, but on the other hand, there is a growing desire to be able to enjoy this prosperity with more free time. For a long time, overtime was also a survival factor for China’s companies: What Chinese startups lacked in financial resources and know-how, they made up for with low labor costs, speed, and flexibility – which all depend on quickly replaceable manpower.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei proudly referred to his company’s work environment as “wolf culture“. When employees compete with each other between eating and being eaten, this is reflected in the company’s greater competitiveness. Those who don’t participate quickly fall through the cracks, Wang says. “If you don’t want to do the job, someone else will do it with more overtime.”
In China, more than ten million new university graduates are entering the job market this year alone. Companies prefer young employees under 30 because they are simply considered more energetic. In addition, their pay is lower than that of a long-term employee, Wang explains. “If you haven’t landed an executive job by the time you’re 35, the chance that you are suddenly laid off becomes more likely with each passing year.” There would be no legal defense against that, either.
“Corporate management doesn’t tell you’re fired because you’re too old. They tell you, for example, that your work is falling short of their expectations. They lay off so many older employees every year, so they can hire new ones. And the newcomers often work extra hard because they want to prove themselves.”
When recruiting, companies like Meituan or Huawei often prefer graduates from smaller cities who want to earn their “first pot of gold” (第一桶金 dìyī tǒng jīn) to move up into the middle class. The fear of failure is great, and the pressure to succeed quickly brings people to the brink of collapse. “Burn-out” has not yet arrived as a concept in China, Wang says. “You might hear about it once in a while, but you don’t ask yourself if you’re suffering from it yourself. You think you have stress. You think that’s just what you have to do to make a career.”
In the race for technological supremacy, Beijing’s Tsinghua University has announced a milestone. In the development of next-generation wireless communications (6G), a team of researchers has been able to send a terabyte of data over a distance of one kilometer in just one second for the first time. This would make the People’s Republic the global leader in researching potential 6G key technologies.
Scientists led by Professor Zhang Chao from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering had already run corresponding tests on the grounds of the Beijing Olympic Stadium before the Winter Olympics. With the data volume of the experimental system, more than 10,000 HD live broadcasts could theoretically be streamed simultaneously. This would allow the entire range of popular streaming service Netflix to be played in parallel. These extremely high transmission speeds form the basis for strategic advantages in economic and military sectors.
Years ago, the Chinese government already set the course for the next generation of mobile data transmission. At that time, not even 5G technology was in commercial use, which is currently still considered to be the benchmark. The current Five-Year Plan also explicitly mentions 6G research. Tens of billions of US dollars are to be invested in companies and research institutes to ensure China’s victory in the race for 6G. China is already considered a leading nation for 5G.
It is expected that the next generation of mobile communications will not be used worldwide until around 2030. It is also still completely unclear which standard and which technological solution will ultimately prevail. What is clear, however, is that technological supremacy provides a good foundation for having a decisive say in standardization. And here, China is setting standards (China.Table reported). Researchers have so far largely agreed only on the requirements for the new technology. It is expected that 6G will achieve speeds in the terabit range and thus offer 100 times the capacity of 5G.
If researchers at Tsinghua University had their way, their approach could make it possible to raise that bar. Key to their technology is the use of high-frequency radio waves called vortex millimeter waves. While current 5G technology uses two-dimensional electromagnetic waves that move up and down to display information, vortex millimeter waves have three dimensions that the researchers compared to the swirling motion of a tornado. This three-dimensionality would be suitable for carrying additional information and thus achieving a higher transmission speed.
Vortex waves are by no means a Chinese invention. They were first demonstrated by British physicist John Henry Poynting in 1909. Researchers in Europe conducted the earliest communication experiments with vortex waves in the 1990s. Finally, in 2000, a Japanese team used vortex waves to transmit data for the first time at a speed of over 200 Gbit per second over a distance of around ten meters. One gigabit (Gbit) is equivalent to 125 megabytes.
“The most exciting thing is not just about the speed. It is about introducing a new physical dimension, which can lead to a whole new world with almost unlimited possibilities,” the South China Morning Post quoted a 6G researcher said to be working on confidential research projects for the Chinese government. Vortex waves would be “the beginning of a revolution” in communications technology.
Researcher Zhang does not hide the fact that this technology also has many military applications. Three years ago, he and his team already created a vortex wave link over a distance of 172 kilometers between a military aircraft and a ground station. Tsinghua’s team is also researching a quantum radar using similar technology to detect stealth aircraft. Analysts expect China’s military to possess 6G technology years before it is commercially available. It could be used, for example, to precisely control supersonic weapons. Gregor Koppenburg/Jörn Petring
Beijing may be 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles) from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but the geopolitical stakes for China in the escalating crisis over Ukraine’s fate could not be higher. If Russia invades Ukraine and precipitates a drawn-out conflict with the United States and its Western allies (though a direct military confrontation is unlikely), China obviously stands to benefit. America will need to divert strategic resources to confront Russia, and its European allies will be even more reluctant to heed US entreaties to join America’s anti-China coalition.
But if US President Joe Biden defuses the crisis by acceding to some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands, China will likely end up worse off strategically. While Putin will reap the benefits of his coercive diplomacy, and Biden will avoid a potential quagmire in Eastern Europe, China will find itself the sole focus of America’s national security strategy. Worse still, after Putin has skillfully exploited the US obsession with China to re-establish Russia’s sphere of influence, the strategic value of his China card may depreciate significantly.
For Putin, capitalizing on Biden’s fear of being dragged into a conflict with a secondary adversary (Russia) in order to extract critical security concessions is a risky but smart move. But ordering an invasion of Ukraine – and thus effectively volunteering to be America’s primary geopolitical adversary, at least in the short to medium term – is hardly in the Kremlin’s interest. Crippling Western sanctions and the high costs of fighting an insurgency in Ukraine would almost certainly weaken Russia significantly and make Putin himself both domestically unpopular and more dependent on Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Intriguingly, despite the high stakes for China in the Ukraine crisis, the Chinese government has been extremely careful about showing its hand. While the heightened tensions dominate Western media headlines, Ukraine receives scant coverage in the official Chinese press. Between December 15 (when Putin and Xi held a virtual summit) and January 24 this year, The People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, carried only one article about the crisis – on the inconclusive talks in mid-January between Russia and the US and its NATO allies. Editorials or commentaries voicing Chinese support for Russia also are notable by their absence.
Even more intriguingly, the summary of the Putin-Xi summit released by the Kremlin claimed that Xi supported Putin’s demand for Western security guarantees precluding NATO’s further eastward expansion, but the Chinese version, published by the official Xinhua news agency, contained no such reference. Instead of explicitly endorsing Putin’s position, Xi’s statement was vague and general pabulum about “providing firm mutual support on issues involving each other’s core interests.”
The pattern continued when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 27. Western media characterized Wang’s statement on Ukraine as an expression of support for Putin. In fact, Wang planted China’s diplomatic stake squarely on the sidelines, saying only that “Russia’s reasonable security concerns should be stressed and resolved.”
Chinese reticence on Ukraine suggests that Xi is carefully hedging his bets. To be sure, Putin’s aggressive diplomacy is serving Chinese interests, at least for now. Should he decide to invade Ukraine and divert US strategic focus away from China, so much the better.
But, assuming that Xi does not know the Kremlin’s real intentions vis-à-vis Ukraine (it is doubtful that Putin has shared them with his Chinese counterpart), he is prudent not to show his own cards, either. Any expression of unequivocal Chinese support for Putin’s demands could leave China with little wiggle room. At worst, goading Putin down the path of war could be construed in some circles in Moscow as a diabolical Chinese plot to use Russia as a strategic pawn in the Sino-American cold war. Alternatively, should Putin choose to pocket face-saving gains in order to avoid a potential disaster, China would look foolish for having backed the Kremlin’s unattainable demands.
Strategic uncertainty aside, China’s rulers know that explicitly supporting Putin will almost certainly antagonize the European Union, which is now China’s second-largest trading partner. In Chinese policymakers’ strategic calculation, it is vital to prevent the US from recruiting the EU into its anti-China coalition.
Ukraine’s independence and security are crucial to the EU, and Chinese efforts to aid and abet Putin would trigger a European backlash. At a minimum, the EU could make China pay by restricting technology transfers and expressing more diplomatic support for Taiwan. In particular, the EU’s Eastern European members, which have fewer trade ties with China but are most threatened by Russia’s aggressive stance, are in a much stronger position than large member states to play the Taiwan card as retaliation against China. Few in the Chinese leadership are likely to consider this a risk worth taking.
China’s leaders are realists and know that they can do little to influence the outcome of the current crisis in Ukraine even if they choose to intervene publicly. With Putin holding most of the cards in the ongoing standoff, China’s diplomatic support is unlikely to alter the strategic calculus of the principal protagonists in Washington, Brussels, or even Moscow. Its influence will increase dramatically only if Putin rolls the dice and invades Ukraine, because he will then need Chinese economic support to lessen the impact of Western sanctions.
But for now, all this is speculative as far as Xi is concerned. Although a superpower, China is temporarily reduced to being an onlooker, watching both anxiously and hopefully on the sidelines as the Ukraine crisis unfolds.
Minxin Pei, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
Together against Covid: Epidemiologists from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are taking a close look at Hong Kong’s pandemic management this weekend because the coronavirus is currently spreading rapidly in the special administrative region. Beijing fears the virus could sneak into the People’s Republic from Hong Kong. Guangdong is one of China’s most important economic centers. So far, the region has been spared from lockdowns.
The number 996, which so aptly describes China’s work environment, has long become known in the West as well: Slaving away from nine in the morning until nine in the evening, six days a week. However, testimonials from workers who have gone through this grind are rare. The fear of repression or being fired is far too great.
Fabian Peltsch has managed to speak with a former employee of the Chinese delivery service Meituan about the exploitative everyday work routine in China. It quickly becomes clear that 996 is merely the lower limit in many companies. The workload and psychological pressure have long since become far greater. And some Chinese CEOs seem to be proud of it.
There is also pride in China’s leadership in the 5G mobile communications standard. And while there is still a dispute in Germany about whether Chinese companies such as Huawei should be allowed to build the necessary infrastructure for a 5G network, China is already one step ahead: Researchers have now reached new milestones in the development of 6G.
Our author team in Beijing shows what extremely high data transmission speeds 6G can achieve and what strategic economic and military advantages China could gain from it. A revolution in communications technology is dawning.
I hope you enjoy today’s issue!
At the end of January, Zhang Yifei’s post went viral in China. In it, the 25-year-old Chinese publicly condemned the working conditions at his employer Tencent. “Have you ever considered that it’s a matter of life and death for your employees when you set up such work schedules?” he ranted in an internal company chat group with 600 members.
One of Zhang’s colleagues had previously been praised by management for working more than 20 hours at a stretch, making around 200 changes to a product design. As a result, it was still able to launch as planned. “To reinterpret a gradual death as an honorable motivation might be considered black humor. But any decision-maker who makes such a thing possible is an accomplice,” the programmer, who had been hired only a few months earlier, scoffed and submitted his resignation shortly afterward. His refusal to compromise made Zhang the hero of many overworked Chinese practically overnight.
Many complain about the sometimes inhumane working conditions in China’s tech industry. However, only very few of them dare to take action, let alone resign. On the contrary, there have been repeated tragic deaths in recent years, which can also be traced back to the consequences of overwork.
Just earlier this month, a 25-year-old employee of the successful video platform Bilibili died of a brain hemorrhage. Shortly before, he had worked almost non-stop at the company’s headquarters in Wuhan over the Chinese New Year. The young man’s job was to check new videos coming in by the second for “illegal or offensive content” – a job so monotonous and soulless that it has also been described as “assembly line work of the Internet era“.
An acronym that has become a synonym for China’s harsh working culture is “996”: Employees, especially in the tech industry, are expected to work from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. “Working life in China is highly competitive,” says John Wang. The 31-year-old worked for Chinese tech giant Meituan as a product manager until a year ago. Since August 2021, he has been living in Leipzig, Germany, where he is doing his MBA at the HHL Graduate School of Management. He also came to Germany to escape the daily grind in China.
“My workday officially went from 10 AM to 9 PM. But I usually started at eight in the morning and didn’t go home until eleven,” he recalls in an interview with China.Table. There was an immanent pressure to be the last to leave the office in the evening, says the physics graduate. “And if you did make it home early, the work didn’t stop. You always had to be available and respond as soon as a question came in. Your body was at home, but your mind was still on your job.”
According to the Chinese Labor Law of 1994, the standard working time is eight hours per day and a maximum of 44 hours per week. However, in a survey conducted by the Chengdu Economic Daily, more than half of the workers surveyed said they worked overtime every day, with only 44 percent receiving compensation for doing so. Employers argue that their employees “voluntarily” choose to work overtime and would forgo extra money in the process.
Tech giant Huawei even had this “voluntariness” confirmed in writing by employees. Others explain that potential overtime is already included in the salary. If you want to keep your job, you can hardly do anything against these conditions. Independent trade unions are banned in the People’s Republic.
So the only place to vent his anger anonymously is on the Internet. In January 2021, a list appeared on the Internet in which employees of major Chinese tech companies compared their working hours. The document was titled 996.ICU – after the abbreviation for intensive care unit. Within just three days, the spreadsheet already had more than 1,000 entries. It was then deleted from the Chinese web by censors.
In response to the public debate, China’s Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) at least declared last August that Chinese employees were not allowed to work more than 36 hours of overtime per month and three hours of overtime per day. But not all employees were happy about it. “When you work for a company like Meituan or Tencent, you are prepared to work overtime. Also, because the salaries are so high,” Wang explains. “Many employees went to the best universities in the country.”
China’s growing middle class is on the one hand proud of the prosperity it has achieved, but on the other hand, there is a growing desire to be able to enjoy this prosperity with more free time. For a long time, overtime was also a survival factor for China’s companies: What Chinese startups lacked in financial resources and know-how, they made up for with low labor costs, speed, and flexibility – which all depend on quickly replaceable manpower.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei proudly referred to his company’s work environment as “wolf culture“. When employees compete with each other between eating and being eaten, this is reflected in the company’s greater competitiveness. Those who don’t participate quickly fall through the cracks, Wang says. “If you don’t want to do the job, someone else will do it with more overtime.”
In China, more than ten million new university graduates are entering the job market this year alone. Companies prefer young employees under 30 because they are simply considered more energetic. In addition, their pay is lower than that of a long-term employee, Wang explains. “If you haven’t landed an executive job by the time you’re 35, the chance that you are suddenly laid off becomes more likely with each passing year.” There would be no legal defense against that, either.
“Corporate management doesn’t tell you’re fired because you’re too old. They tell you, for example, that your work is falling short of their expectations. They lay off so many older employees every year, so they can hire new ones. And the newcomers often work extra hard because they want to prove themselves.”
When recruiting, companies like Meituan or Huawei often prefer graduates from smaller cities who want to earn their “first pot of gold” (第一桶金 dìyī tǒng jīn) to move up into the middle class. The fear of failure is great, and the pressure to succeed quickly brings people to the brink of collapse. “Burn-out” has not yet arrived as a concept in China, Wang says. “You might hear about it once in a while, but you don’t ask yourself if you’re suffering from it yourself. You think you have stress. You think that’s just what you have to do to make a career.”
In the race for technological supremacy, Beijing’s Tsinghua University has announced a milestone. In the development of next-generation wireless communications (6G), a team of researchers has been able to send a terabyte of data over a distance of one kilometer in just one second for the first time. This would make the People’s Republic the global leader in researching potential 6G key technologies.
Scientists led by Professor Zhang Chao from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering had already run corresponding tests on the grounds of the Beijing Olympic Stadium before the Winter Olympics. With the data volume of the experimental system, more than 10,000 HD live broadcasts could theoretically be streamed simultaneously. This would allow the entire range of popular streaming service Netflix to be played in parallel. These extremely high transmission speeds form the basis for strategic advantages in economic and military sectors.
Years ago, the Chinese government already set the course for the next generation of mobile data transmission. At that time, not even 5G technology was in commercial use, which is currently still considered to be the benchmark. The current Five-Year Plan also explicitly mentions 6G research. Tens of billions of US dollars are to be invested in companies and research institutes to ensure China’s victory in the race for 6G. China is already considered a leading nation for 5G.
It is expected that the next generation of mobile communications will not be used worldwide until around 2030. It is also still completely unclear which standard and which technological solution will ultimately prevail. What is clear, however, is that technological supremacy provides a good foundation for having a decisive say in standardization. And here, China is setting standards (China.Table reported). Researchers have so far largely agreed only on the requirements for the new technology. It is expected that 6G will achieve speeds in the terabit range and thus offer 100 times the capacity of 5G.
If researchers at Tsinghua University had their way, their approach could make it possible to raise that bar. Key to their technology is the use of high-frequency radio waves called vortex millimeter waves. While current 5G technology uses two-dimensional electromagnetic waves that move up and down to display information, vortex millimeter waves have three dimensions that the researchers compared to the swirling motion of a tornado. This three-dimensionality would be suitable for carrying additional information and thus achieving a higher transmission speed.
Vortex waves are by no means a Chinese invention. They were first demonstrated by British physicist John Henry Poynting in 1909. Researchers in Europe conducted the earliest communication experiments with vortex waves in the 1990s. Finally, in 2000, a Japanese team used vortex waves to transmit data for the first time at a speed of over 200 Gbit per second over a distance of around ten meters. One gigabit (Gbit) is equivalent to 125 megabytes.
“The most exciting thing is not just about the speed. It is about introducing a new physical dimension, which can lead to a whole new world with almost unlimited possibilities,” the South China Morning Post quoted a 6G researcher said to be working on confidential research projects for the Chinese government. Vortex waves would be “the beginning of a revolution” in communications technology.
Researcher Zhang does not hide the fact that this technology also has many military applications. Three years ago, he and his team already created a vortex wave link over a distance of 172 kilometers between a military aircraft and a ground station. Tsinghua’s team is also researching a quantum radar using similar technology to detect stealth aircraft. Analysts expect China’s military to possess 6G technology years before it is commercially available. It could be used, for example, to precisely control supersonic weapons. Gregor Koppenburg/Jörn Petring
Beijing may be 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles) from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but the geopolitical stakes for China in the escalating crisis over Ukraine’s fate could not be higher. If Russia invades Ukraine and precipitates a drawn-out conflict with the United States and its Western allies (though a direct military confrontation is unlikely), China obviously stands to benefit. America will need to divert strategic resources to confront Russia, and its European allies will be even more reluctant to heed US entreaties to join America’s anti-China coalition.
But if US President Joe Biden defuses the crisis by acceding to some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands, China will likely end up worse off strategically. While Putin will reap the benefits of his coercive diplomacy, and Biden will avoid a potential quagmire in Eastern Europe, China will find itself the sole focus of America’s national security strategy. Worse still, after Putin has skillfully exploited the US obsession with China to re-establish Russia’s sphere of influence, the strategic value of his China card may depreciate significantly.
For Putin, capitalizing on Biden’s fear of being dragged into a conflict with a secondary adversary (Russia) in order to extract critical security concessions is a risky but smart move. But ordering an invasion of Ukraine – and thus effectively volunteering to be America’s primary geopolitical adversary, at least in the short to medium term – is hardly in the Kremlin’s interest. Crippling Western sanctions and the high costs of fighting an insurgency in Ukraine would almost certainly weaken Russia significantly and make Putin himself both domestically unpopular and more dependent on Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Intriguingly, despite the high stakes for China in the Ukraine crisis, the Chinese government has been extremely careful about showing its hand. While the heightened tensions dominate Western media headlines, Ukraine receives scant coverage in the official Chinese press. Between December 15 (when Putin and Xi held a virtual summit) and January 24 this year, The People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, carried only one article about the crisis – on the inconclusive talks in mid-January between Russia and the US and its NATO allies. Editorials or commentaries voicing Chinese support for Russia also are notable by their absence.
Even more intriguingly, the summary of the Putin-Xi summit released by the Kremlin claimed that Xi supported Putin’s demand for Western security guarantees precluding NATO’s further eastward expansion, but the Chinese version, published by the official Xinhua news agency, contained no such reference. Instead of explicitly endorsing Putin’s position, Xi’s statement was vague and general pabulum about “providing firm mutual support on issues involving each other’s core interests.”
The pattern continued when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 27. Western media characterized Wang’s statement on Ukraine as an expression of support for Putin. In fact, Wang planted China’s diplomatic stake squarely on the sidelines, saying only that “Russia’s reasonable security concerns should be stressed and resolved.”
Chinese reticence on Ukraine suggests that Xi is carefully hedging his bets. To be sure, Putin’s aggressive diplomacy is serving Chinese interests, at least for now. Should he decide to invade Ukraine and divert US strategic focus away from China, so much the better.
But, assuming that Xi does not know the Kremlin’s real intentions vis-à-vis Ukraine (it is doubtful that Putin has shared them with his Chinese counterpart), he is prudent not to show his own cards, either. Any expression of unequivocal Chinese support for Putin’s demands could leave China with little wiggle room. At worst, goading Putin down the path of war could be construed in some circles in Moscow as a diabolical Chinese plot to use Russia as a strategic pawn in the Sino-American cold war. Alternatively, should Putin choose to pocket face-saving gains in order to avoid a potential disaster, China would look foolish for having backed the Kremlin’s unattainable demands.
Strategic uncertainty aside, China’s rulers know that explicitly supporting Putin will almost certainly antagonize the European Union, which is now China’s second-largest trading partner. In Chinese policymakers’ strategic calculation, it is vital to prevent the US from recruiting the EU into its anti-China coalition.
Ukraine’s independence and security are crucial to the EU, and Chinese efforts to aid and abet Putin would trigger a European backlash. At a minimum, the EU could make China pay by restricting technology transfers and expressing more diplomatic support for Taiwan. In particular, the EU’s Eastern European members, which have fewer trade ties with China but are most threatened by Russia’s aggressive stance, are in a much stronger position than large member states to play the Taiwan card as retaliation against China. Few in the Chinese leadership are likely to consider this a risk worth taking.
China’s leaders are realists and know that they can do little to influence the outcome of the current crisis in Ukraine even if they choose to intervene publicly. With Putin holding most of the cards in the ongoing standoff, China’s diplomatic support is unlikely to alter the strategic calculus of the principal protagonists in Washington, Brussels, or even Moscow. Its influence will increase dramatically only if Putin rolls the dice and invades Ukraine, because he will then need Chinese economic support to lessen the impact of Western sanctions.
But for now, all this is speculative as far as Xi is concerned. Although a superpower, China is temporarily reduced to being an onlooker, watching both anxiously and hopefully on the sidelines as the Ukraine crisis unfolds.
Minxin Pei, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, is a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
Together against Covid: Epidemiologists from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are taking a close look at Hong Kong’s pandemic management this weekend because the coronavirus is currently spreading rapidly in the special administrative region. Beijing fears the virus could sneak into the People’s Republic from Hong Kong. Guangdong is one of China’s most important economic centers. So far, the region has been spared from lockdowns.
