Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and his Russian junior partner Vladimir Putin emerged from meetings in Moscow on Tuesday to issue various declarations and joint statements. One of them expressed “serious concern” about the “military biological activities” of the United States and demanded “clarifications” from the U.S. government.
This might seem like a breathtaking act of chutzpah from Xi, whose secretive and irresponsible government ravaged the world by unleashing the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, but it fits neatly into China’s nutty conspiracy theories about the U.S. supposedly creating Wuhan coronavirus in a Maryland laboratory and deliberately planting it in Wuhan, or perhaps accidentally shipping it there on packages of frozen fish.
China’s relentless obstruction of the international investigation into the origins of Wuhan coronavirus is a matter of record, complete with wanton destruction of vital scientific data, but Xi did not hesitate to join Putin in demanding more information from U.S. laboratories.
For his part, Putin’s government has pointed to American “biological war labs” in Ukraine as one of the reasons for launching the devastating invasion a year ago.
Putin and Xi merged their grievances in the joint statement by also complaining about American missile defense systems – which China particularly hates because the powerful sensors of the top-shelf U.S. anti-missile systems can see into Chinese territory from places like South Korea – and the AUKUS alliance between America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, which was explicitly established to counter growing Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
China responded angrily last week to news that Australia would purchase U.S.-made nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement, and then begin developing its own sub with American and British technology. China said the AUKUS allies were “walking further and further down the path of error and danger.”
Another joint statement from the Putin-Xi meeting promised to “significantly increase” trade between the two countries by 2030. Putin added that he supports the “use of the Chinese yuan in settlements between Russia and Asian countries, Africa, Latin America.”
This was a direct attack on the U.S. dollar, which has been the international currency standard for decades. The power of the dollar is pivotal to making sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine work, to the extent they can be said to be working, and also for keeping the fantastically debt-loaded U.S. government stable.
China has been laboring for years to promote the yuan as an alternative to the dollar, with limited success so far. In fact, even after China’s aggressive promotion of the yuan as a means of circumventing U.S. sanctions, it sits in a very distant third place behind the dollar and the euro as a reserve currency. If anything the yuan is under-performing the predictions of global financial analysts, probably due to the coronavirus pandemic and China’s economy-wrecking lockdowns.
Xi and Putin made a play to woo Asian allies of the West to their new authoritarian world order by promising “deepening cooperation with ASEAN,” the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Their sales pitch included blaming the United States for North Korea’s latest round of belligerent missile launches and demanding the U.S. accede to Pyongyang’s demands, including sanctions relief.
Chinese state media hailed the new era of Chinese-Russian partnership as a watershed moment for “multilateralism” and a “multipolar world.” The state-run Global Times insisted on Wednesday that the deeper relationship between China and Russia had nothing to do with the Ukraine war, or Russia’s desperate need to find at least one major-power ally and business partner:
Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that “the high-level mutual trust and mature relations built between the Chinese and Russian leaders show that bilateral ties can withstand the impacts of the profound changes that the world is experiencing at the moment.”
The Ukraine crisis and the worsening ties between Russia and the West cannot affect the development of China-Russia ties, and this is a key message sent to the world. It shows that China and Russia are determined to make the world change in a positive way that can better promote multilateralism, multi-polarity and greater democracy in international relations, analysts said.
The Global Times amusingly insisted China’s brotherly love for Russia in no way compromised its “neutrality” on Ukraine or prevented it from serving as an honest broker for peace talks, and only the grumpy Americans feel otherwise:
When China keeps making efforts to promote peace and a cease-fire in the Ukraine crisis, most countries, including Russia and Ukraine, welcome or appreciate China’s sincerity, and expect that China can actually bring positive change to the current situation, but there is one country – the US, that openly opposes and criticizes China’s mediation effort.
Another Global Times editorial blamed the U.S. and NATO for prolonging the war by noticing that Xi’s “dear friend” Putin keeps perpetrating war crimes:
The US and NATO’s inflammatory remarks and actions that add fuel to the fire of the Ukraine crisis need to be counterbalanced by peace forces; the Cold War mentality and security concept of camp confrontation need to be overcome and transcended from the perspective of a community with a shared future for mankind; the simplified understanding of the Ukraine issue widely propagated by Western countries needs more elaboration on the complex and specific historical and current realities of the issue to correct misconceptions. Although China is not a party to the Ukraine crisis, it has not chosen to stand idly by, and its constructive role has been demonstrated in the above aspects. The development of the situation increasingly proves that China’s stance and actions are on the right side of history.
“The international community now has high expectations for China to facilitate dialogue for peace, which reflects people’s disappointment with the U.S. and the West, as well as their genuine appreciation for China’s actions,” the Chinese Communist paper fantasized.
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