The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has strategically positioned itself to take advantages from the current tensions between NATO and Russia over Ukraine. Any coming sanctions the West may impose on Russia will likely push Putin further into China’s global expansion plan.
As the Western World is still in the process of realizing its own failures in pushing the CCP for political reform over the past 20 years, China’s political leaders have been planning the CCP’s global expansion strategy to secure its next 30 years of comprehensive military and economic growth.
In 2020, Russia’s GDP was only around one tenth of China’s GDP. China’s top two provinces ranked by size of economy, Guangdong and Jiangsu, both have a higher GDP than Russia’s national figure.
What Beijing Wants From Russia
China can’t wait to see the West impose economic sanctions against Russia, which will only make Russia’s economy more reliant on China. China wants Russia and other central Asian countries to be part of its strategic rear when the CCP further expands into the Pacific-Rim.China already feels secure with many neighbors to its west, through its having built strong ties with many in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. China needs Russia to have its back from the north so Beijing can focus on the other directions to compete with U.S. interests.
China has been in communication with Iran and Pakistan for years to build an energy corridor connecting Iran and China through Pakistan. China signed an agreement with Iran in March last year. According to the agreement, China will provide $400 billion in economic aid to Iran over the following 25 years, while Iran will provide a constant oil supply to China in return.
The original design of the energy corridor was to connect Iran and China through Pakistan. Now, after U.S. troops left Afghanistan to the Taliban, China can build oil pipelines through either Afghanistan or Pakistan. China has been building highways and railroads in Tibet over the last two decades, and is ready at the receiving end of the corridor for Iran’s oil. Beijing hopes the energy corridor, once built, will become a strong base to support the anti-U.S. alliance among these four countries.
However, without the support from Russia, China still doesn’t feel safe from the north. Although China has already been purchasing oil from Russia through pipelines, Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants Putin as an ally, not just a trading partner.
CCP’s Plan
Beijing is pursuing its China 2049 Initiative—an aggressive plan to secure China’s global dominance by the year 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of communist China.The CCP has been quietly and steadily working on building a global system under its own leadership, which may have some similarity to the Warsaw Pact under the former Soviet Union, but yet is very different in nature.
The Warsaw Pact, dominated by the Soviet Union, was a military alliance based on the communist ideology. The global alliance that Beijing has tried to build is a system that will be dominated by the CCP through the controls of economy and modern technology.
Beijing has helped Kim Jong-un secure the entire internet information system in North Korea. China’s technologies are famous for their built-in backdoors. Countries that have their information and data infrastructures built by Chinese companies will no longer be able to keep any secrets from China. This backdoor access is a weapon that the CCP can use to watch its allies in a much more effective and efficient way than did the Soviet Union using the KGB.
Of course, China won’t secure global leadership by only providing technologies to its allies. Economic infiltration is the bedrock of Beijing’s plans to dominate a new global alliance centered around China.
Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been China’s national priority project since 2013, which started only months after he took the highest office of the CCP.
Under the BRI, China sends its own companies, workers, equipment, and materials to build roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructures for developing countries all from China. Countries joining the initiative will be left with huge debts owed to China as its local economy suffers.
The initiative was originally designed to solve China’s problems with overcapacity in its construction industry. But gradually, it became the centerpiece of the CCP’s plans for global expansion.
Currently, BRI projects are found in all Central Asian countries, which Russia considers its backyard.
Beijing Wants to See Ukraine Crisis Escalate
Under Xi’s leadership, China has quickly turned towards the practice of communist fundamentalism. Beijing’s leaders knew that without political reform, they would not be able to continue relying on the technologies, investments, and consumer markets from the West in the same way that they have over the last 20 years, after China’s first joining the WTO in 2001.The Chinese regime, therefore, has taken a different approach for its 2049 goal. Instead of relying on assistance from the West for its future economic growth, Beijing wants to win its global leadership through stifling competition with the free world.
In this approach, Russia becomes a crucial factor for a winning strategy.
China knows its own history. Beijing’s leaders don’t want Russia playing a role similar to China did during the Cold War: becoming an ally of the liberal democratic West.
Xi wants Putin to become the second man in the CCP’s global alliance. Many state media in China have been openly discussing making Russia an ally. Xi has initiated talks with Putin to discuss how both countries can start a separate international monetary exchange system outside of SWIFT, the current global interbank financial system that uses only U.S. dollars.
The only problem with Beijing’s aggressive strategy is that Russia is also a country with a long history and a proud, rich culture. Putin is not necessarily interested in listening to Xi.
Therefore, when the Ukraine crisis started to unfold, the CCP’s leaders saw it as the perfect opportunity to bring its slow, polar bear neighbor on board with its plans.
On Jan. 23, China sent 39 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. On Jan. 30, North Korea conducted another missile test, which was the seventh missile test in the month of January.
All these provocative activities were within the month before the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. This was a period supposedly for China’s propaganda machine to tout the CCP’s successful leadership and Beijing’s contributions to help the whole world build the “common destination.”
Why did Beijing’s Xi and North Korea’s Kim choose this month to ramp up its aggressive posturing?
Xi and Kim were clearly trying to send a message to Putin: do whatever he needs to do in Ukraine. China and North Korea are the strategic rear for Russia facing NATO, and in return, Xi and Kim want Putin to have their back when they face the United States in the Pacific region.
Therefore, Xi Jinping can’t wait for Putin to give his invasion command to the Russian military.
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