In a Brother Act with Putin, Xi Reveals China’s Fear of Containment

Instead of focusing on a solution to the war in Ukraine, the Chinese leader’s visit to Moscow reinforced China and Russia’s shared opposition to American dominance.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, flew into Moscow this week cast by Beijing as its emissary for peace in Ukraine. His summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, however, demonstrated that his priority remains shoring up ties with Moscow to gird against what he sees as a long campaign by the United States to hobble China’s ascent.

Talk of Ukraine was overshadowed by Mr. Xi’s vow of ironclad solidarity with Russia as a political, diplomatic, economic and military partner: two superpowers aligned in countering American dominance and a Western-led world order. The summit showed Mr. Xi’s intention to entrench Beijing’s tilt toward Moscow against what he recently called an effort by the United States at the full-fledged “containment” of China.

Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin used the pomp of the three-day state visit that ended on Wednesday to signal to their publics and to Western capitals that the bond between their two countries remained robust and, in their eyes, indispensable, 13 months after Mr. Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. They laid out their vision for the world in a nine-point joint statement that covered everything from Taiwan to climate change and relations with Mongolia, often depicting the United States as the obstacle to a better, fairer world.

“It looks like a strategic plan for a decade or even more. It’s not a knee-jerk reaction to the war in Ukraine,” said Alexander Korolev, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who studies Chinese-Russian relations. Noting the statement’s repeated criticisms of the United States, he said: “The threat is no longer implicit and hypothetical; it’s very explicit.”

Discussion of China’s murky proposal to end the war in Ukraine appeared only in the last section of their joint statement, offering no specifics about a way forward. In a warning to Western countries supporting Ukraine, it said that any settlement to the crisis must “prevent the formation of confrontational blocs that add fuel to the flames.”

Instead, the leaders talked up plans to enhance economic cooperation and draw more Chinese investors to Russia. They declared their admiration for each other’s authoritarian rule, with Mr. Xi going as far as endorsing Mr. Putin for another term in power, indicating to Russians that he was sure that they should back Mr. Putin in elections a year away.

“Xi Jinping in effect launched the re-election campaign for Putin,” said Maria Repnikova, a scholar at Georgia State University who studies political communication in China and Russia. “It seems like an important signal that highlights the extent of their friendship and that he’s really rooting for Putin.”

But while Mr. Xi sought to show China’s commitment to Russia, he stopped short of writing Mr. Putin a blank check of support. Though Mr. Putin claimed that a new pipeline for delivering natural gas to China would be finished by 2030, Mr. Xi did not confirm the deal.

China also calibrated the language used to describe its relationship with Russia. When Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin issued a joint statement last year, three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, they had said that Beijing and Moscow had a “limitless friendship.” This time, they sought to draw clearer boundaries, declaring that they are not in a traditional political and military alliance. Mr. Xi and other Chinese officials have also generally avoided reviving that rhetoric of “limitless friendship,” even though Mr. Putin still used it.

Still, the symbolic support that Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin offered each other will have its own value for each leader, said Ms. Repnikova, the scholar at Georgia State University. She noted that the main state-owned broadcasters of the two countries also signed an agreement to share historical content, underscoring their shared interest in inoculating their populations against Western political influences.

“It’s signaling that, however limited, it’s still a very important partnership — that China is not alone vis-à-vis the West, and Russia is definitely supported by China,” she said.

Mr. Xi’s and Mr. Putin’s media operatives have cast their relationship as a brotherly bond, cemented over shots of vodka, birthday cakes and ice cream during more than 40 meetings. But Mr. Xi’s calculus toward Russia is not based on sentiment. It is founded in China’s broader strategic calculations that are likely to remain fixed, whatever the outcome of the coming spring battles in Ukraine.

In Mr. Xi’s view, recently stated in unusually blunt terms, the United States is engaged in “all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China” — a campaign of sanctions and diplomatic pressure that he says has brought “unprecedented severe challenges” to the country. To counter Western pressure, Mr. Xi wants to give Mr. Putin the political and economic support to secure their partnership, even if China may not want to wade into Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Xi is making a significant gesture of political support to Putin with this trip, basically demonstrating that the relationship will be resilient even in these straitened circumstances and that he is willing to live with the opprobrium of the West,” said Andrew Small, the author of “No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War With the West.”

Beijing had indicated that Mr. Xi would help promote talks between Russia and Ukraine as part of his visit, after Western powers urged China to use its influence over Russia to stop the war. But in the end, Mr. Small said, “There was even less of a simulation of a ‘peace mission’ than Chinese diplomats had pre-briefed.”

The visit by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan to Kyiv this week in support of Ukraine, coinciding with Mr. Xi’s talks with Mr. Putin, appears likely to deepen Chinese views that the war has coalesced into a global contest also aimed at Beijing.

Strong relations with Russia have become more crucial to China as its ties with the United States have deteriorated. A succession of events since last year appear to have hardened Mr. Xi’s wariness of Washington, even as he as sought to stabilize relations with President Biden.

Chinese officials have pointed to U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced semiconductors that are needed in anything from supercomputing to weapons development. They have also condemned moves by the United States and Britain to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines, to counter China’s military growth.

After Mr. Xi’s state visit ended, China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, issued a statement about its significance, saying: “The principal contradiction in the world today is not the so-called ‘confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism’ that a handful of countries have played up, but rather the struggle between development and the containment of development.”

“Beijing is trying to emphasize to a mainly domestic audience that the United States is engaged in a multidomain, multipronged, and multi-actor effort to actively inhibit China’s continued rise,” said Jude Blanchette, the holder of the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mr. Xi’s term of “all-around containment” is intended to summarize “an effort to slow Chinese growth, block its access to cutting-edge technologies, and to erode China’s ties with neighboring countries,” Mr. Blanchette said.

According to this worldview, Ukraine, rather than being the victim of an unprovoked war by Russia, was caught up in a proxy battle by the United States and its allies against Moscow — and by extension, Beijing — aimed at reasserting American global dominance. That theme is echoed in many recent assessments of the conflict by Chinese state institutes and People’s Liberation Army analysts.

“The eruption of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was the inevitable outcome of the United States government’s long-term strategy,” Yang Guanghai, a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology, wrote in a recent study of the war. “The U.S. position of exploiting Ukraine as a proxy will not change. Like Russia, China is also a primary target of the U.S. strategy of ‘great power competition.’”

Any willingness by Mr. Xi to try mediating between Kyiv and Moscow, then, is likely to remain tightly constrained by his wider commitment to sticking close to Russia and Mr. Putin.

In the wake of his meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Xi may reach out to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. That would be Mr. Xi’s first call with the leader since the invasion began. Even if he does so, the peace proposal that China has outlined is unlikely to gain favor in Kyiv because it implicitly echoes official Russian grievances with NATO that could limit Ukraine’s claims.

In their joint statement, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin criticized NATO’s efforts to pay more attention to Asia. The leaders held up China and Russia’s relationship as superior to traditional Western military blocs because it is “mature, stable, independent and resilient.” China’s official news agency, Xinhua, issued an article explaining why the two countries would not want to establish a formal alliance that obliged them to aid each other in wars.

Some readers were not convinced. “It’s only in name that we’re not allies,” said one reader’s comment.