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Analysis: China's Peace Plan for Ukraine is actually about Taiwan

2023-03-07 22:14:08Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA FOREIGN POLICY
Analysis: China's Peace Plan for Ukraine is actually about Taiwan
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 16, 2022

Twelve months on, China appears no more capable of influencing the outcome of Russia's war in Ukraine than it was at the start of the conflict.

Reduced largely to spectator status, Beijing's main role has been to provide Moscow with a financial lifeline by increasing purchases of deeply discounted Russian crude oil and coal, while reaping a windfall from increased exports to Russia.

But these and other Chinese half-measures seem intended, for now, to ensure that Russia has what it needs to sustain its wartime economy — not actually win the war.

In a similar twist, China's 12-point peace plan for Ukraine is not geared toward restoring peace in Europe. Indeed, China's mission has nothing to do with ending the war in Ukraine and everything to do with setting the conditions for winning a future war over Taiwan. Put another way, China recognizes that the causes of Russia's failure in Ukraine are the same ones that threaten its eventual reunification plans.

China's fake peace proposal could also serve as the basis for a Western-led roadmap to prevent an Indo-Pacific war from breaking out in the first place.

Clearly, Beijing's position paper, titled "Political Solution to the Ukraine Crisis," reflects China's concerns about the current battlefield conditions in Europe.

To this day, the transatlantic resolve to support Ukraine remains more or less firm, even as Western democracies face absorbing the costs associated with cutting themselves off from Russian energy and other raw materials. Although more Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine than during all of Russia's wars combined since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin remains completely convinced that he can defeat Ukraine and completely too stubborn to change course. Meanwhile, China continues to waver on providing lethal aid to Russia, a decision made more complicated now that Washington has revealed details of Beijing's internal deliberations.

Putin remains completely convinced that he can defeat Ukraine and completely too stubborn to change course.

To be sure, Chinese leader Xi Jinping seems powerless to pull Putin back from the brink — not that Xi has demonstrated any inclination to do so.

At the same time, China's refusal to condemn Russia's invasion has destroyed its credibility across Europe, including in countries such as Austria, Poland and Croatia, where Beijing has historically had positive relations.

And China's sunk costs are not just reputational, but increasingly economic. With the war weighing on global growth, outstanding debt in the developing world is closing in, with Beijing holding many of those loans. Economic uncertainty also threatens to dampen worldwide demand for Chinese exports, even as Beijing's efforts to stimulate domestic consumer spending — key to reigniting China's recovery and renewing the country's faltering growth model — have faltered.

The peace plan is both a masterstroke in the wrong direction and a not-so-subtle admission that Western unity, sanctions, supply chain instability and possible grain disruptions could derail China's Indo-Pacific revisionism.

Beijing's proposal highlights the rhetorical and legal scaffolding it intends to erect if and when Xi decides to retake Taiwan by force. If last August's marathon of military maneuvers around the island revealed the attack vectors China is likely to intend to prosecute during an all-out amphibious assault on Taiwan, the list of conditions embodied in the peace plan reveals how China intends to complicate western efforts.

At the heart of China's peace plan are demands that Western countries abandon their "Cold War mentality" and avoid "block confrontation" - phrases that are code for the NATO alliance system and Beijing's belief that Kiev should not receive any additional Western military aid.

China's crack at military de-escalation masks its real motive: it would like Russia to prevail over Ukraine in the absence of continued US and European support.

The same preferred balance of power applies in a Taiwan emergency. In a head-to-head match between China and Taiwan, China wins handily. If Taiwan, like Ukraine, can use enhanced external military hardware, training and real-time intelligence support, all bets are off. And so, Beijing remains focused on degrading the ability of international actors to inject strategic risk into Chinese decision-making.

Equally impressive is the complete rejection of the unilateral sanctions plan, which China sees as a violation of international law. Instead, China prefers that the measures be debated multilaterally by the UN Security Council, where Beijing and Moscow have vetoes.

Undoubtedly, the US and European Union-led sanctions regime against Russia has exacerbated Beijing's fears that it too may one day be hampered economically. But while Russia turned to China economically for support, Beijing would be largely on its own if the situation were to change.

The stark realization underscores China's growing push for self-sufficiency, which aims to protect its economy against sanctions. These measures include the creation of a yuan-based commodity trading scheme and the development of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, augmented by the digital yuan, to enable sanctioned entities to bypass SWIFT, the Western-controlled global payments network.

The same fear of sanctions is driving the plan to "keep industrial and supply chains stable." The reluctance of Chinese firms – large and small, state-backed and ostensibly private – to cross the sanctions threshold suggests that China's campaign to inoculate itself from Western export controls remains very much a work in progress.

Causing proportional pain in the United States, Beijing's concerns could be self-defeating given China's dependence on Western markets and technology. Russia clearly fell victim to a similar vulnerability gap. By connecting to global value chains in ways Russia never could, Beijing hopes to exert influence over Western discussions about Taiwan, rather than the other way around.

The plan has two final priorities: "ceasing hostilities" and "respecting the sovereignty of all countries". The first reflects Beijing's understanding that the number of Russian casualties is unsustainable and that Moscow needs to regroup its forces.

Regarding the latter, China has struggled to rationalize how Russia's violation of Ukraine's borders does not infringe on Kiev's sovereignty. But this is largely irrelevant to Beijing's situation, as China believes that Taiwan enjoys neither borders nor sovereignty. And, at least as far as international law is concerned, China's presumption stands strong.

Taiwan's arbitrary exclusion from the UN system and Taipei's diminished recognition network ensure that, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan's international legal recourse can be limited after an invasion.

However, Beijing rightly understands that any plan to retake Taiwan - or at least any plan that carries less risk - is predicated on manifesting and then supporting the 12 conditions found in its Ukraine peace plan.

In recent years, Washington has made remarkable strides to strengthen its alliance network in the Indo-Pacific, as well as better align and enhance the capabilities of regional partners.

Efforts are also underway to reduce China's supply chain dominance in certain sectors, as well as to undermine Beijing's ability to leverage its control over critical minerals to advance its foreign policy objectives.

But to undermine China's other strategic pillars, much work remains.

The top priority is for Western countries, led by the United States, to speed up the difficult task of defining and telegraphing plans to establish a strong sanctions regime if China mobilizes its forces for an invasion or goes ahead with one.

Democracies should also selectively deepen their trade and industrial ties with Taiwan, effectively reducing Taiwan's economic dependence on China, while also exerting their influence to strengthen Taiwan's legal participation in international organizations.

Finally, and most controversially, Western nations should consider weaponizing China's fundamental vulnerability—and one of the other tenets of its peace plan—by threatening to target its vast foreign support for food. .

As Putin learned the hard way, fighting over wrong assumptions can mean the difference between victory and stalemate. Undermining Xi's assumptions about a potential showdown over Taiwan may be the best way to avoid one altogether.

Source: Foreign Policy


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