China In Eurasia

When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, meet for a virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on April 1, they plan to warn Beijing that there will be consequences if it provides aid to Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine.

The high-stakes summit comes as ties between China and the European Union are more delicate than ever, as Beijing’s alignment with Russia during its war in Ukraine has undercut its strained relations with Brussels, which were already rattled by a series of escalating trade and geopolitical tensions.

“At the China summit, there is a big agreement among EU representatives that this is not business as usual and Brussels should not be naive,” a senior European diplomat told RFE/RL

The Ukraine war -- and China’s warm relationship with the Kremlin -- will overshadow the meeting at which the EU is looking to show its hardening line toward China and warn against any active support for Russia at the summit.

Beijing’s partnership with Moscow has been in the spotlight since Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin inked a strategic pact in early February, but focus has grown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Western intelligence report alleged that China was aware of the Kremlin’s invasion plans and even asked Moscow to delay them until after the 2022 Winter Olympics, while U.S. officials have said Russia asked China for military equipment and economic support after being hit by Western sanctions.

China has denied both reports and has so far quietly adhered to Western sanctions against Russia, but Beijing has also shown no signs that it will abandon the strategic relationship it has forged with the Kremlin.

At the summit, Brussels is looking to hammer home to Beijing that its alignment with Russia could harm its ties with the EU, which is one of the world’s greatest economic relationships, totaling $828 billion in bilateral trade in 2021.

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“It’s clear that Russia is delighted to have China by its side and it’s clear that this has emboldened Moscow,” another senior European diplomat told RFE/RL. “China has to exert influence over Russia to achieve a cease-fire, to create humanitarian corridors that are working, and ultimately to start peace negotiations. But it probably cannot act as a mediator in a classical sense.”

Russia And China

Beijing has sought to portray itself as neutral throughout the crisis in Ukraine and aimed to distance itself from Moscow’s invasion, but China has also refrained from criticizing Russia and often echoed its talking points about the root causes of the war.

But China’s diplomatic dance is also proving increasingly difficult to maintain as the Ukraine war enters its second month.

China was already in focus during meetings between NATO and European leaders with U.S. President Joe Biden on March 24-25 in Brussels, during which the Western alliance called out Beijing over concerns about Chinese military assistance and disinformation supporting Russia’s narrative around the war.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told RFE/RL that there is “new momentum” forming in how the EU views China and that Beijing’s current line toward Russia’s invasion is untenable.

“You can't sit this one out and by sitting on the fence you [make] it very clear: Either you're supporting Russia -- either you're supporting their war on Ukraine -- or you're not,” Landsbergis said.

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At the summit, the European strategy is to state the costs of more outright support for Russia and highlight that it could be at the expense of the wider relationship with the EU. Those ties have often been used as a buffer by China amid its competition with the United States and have become more important for Beijing as tensions with Washington have grown.

China’s two largest trading relationships are with the EU and the United States, and Beijing could be unwilling to jeopardize ties with Europe while facing the headwinds from the Ukraine war, a growing COVID outbreak inside China, a financial crisis in the country’s property sector, and a crucial Communist Party congress in the fall at which Xi is looking to extend his rule.

Noah Barkin, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, said that gives Brussels added leverage.

“Brussels is betting that Xi will not want to alienate the EU, particularly at a sensitive time,” Barkin told RFE/RL.

EU officials do not expect Beijing to break in its partnership with Moscow and do not believe the bloc should be issuing threats. But they have already considered responses, such as limiting Chinese access to the single EU market, if China openly sides with the Kremlin or arms Russian soldiers, according to four senior European diplomats.

A New Era

The warning from the 27-country bloc comes amid a downward trajectory in the EU-China relationship and a growing alignment between Brussels and Washington on China policy.

In December 2020, after the last EU-China summit, both sides agreed to an ambitious investment treaty following four years of souring relations between Europe and the United States under the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

After taking office, Biden moved to improve ties with his European counterparts and the EU’s relations with China have since faced several obstacles. For instance, the far-reaching investment pact has been frozen since May due to Beijing blacklisting a group of European lawmakers, experts, and diplomats over the EU's sanctioning of four Chinese officials over rights violations against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s western Xinjiang Province.

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The bloc has also introduced new forms of legislation to guard against Chinese economic pressure and also logged a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) over Beijing’s retaliation against Lithuania for letting Taiwan open a representative office in Vilnius in 2021. China responded by blocking Lithuanian imports, including components from the Baltic nation in products from other countries.

In addition to China-Russia ties and the Ukraine war, the summit is also set to cover the trade dispute with Lithuania, Chinese abuses in Xinjiang, and Taiwan.

“Changing the EU’s approach to China to take into account that rivalry is now the dominant mode means lots of hard work behind the scenes in order to reduce dependence on China,” Thorsten Benner, the director of the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute, told RFE/RL. “Europe won't drastically alter its economic ties with China overnight, but it needs to speed up the process of adjusting.”

Europe's Careful Path

While the summit is an opportunity for the EU to showcase its unity in pressing China against actively helping Russia, European Union officials have also signaled a preference from member states to keep lines open with Beijing and follow a middle path that does not alienate China or get Brussels enmeshed in wider U.S.-China tensions.

China has had past success driving a wedge between the EU and the United States with promises and opportunities about expanded market access and climate change cooperation, and many analysts predict Xi will play similar cards again during the virtual meeting.

“There is still a belief in Beijing that when push comes to shove, Europe will prioritize the business relationship over all else,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Barkin. “But over the past year Beijing has repeatedly misread Europe.”

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The Ukraine war has marked a turning point for Europe, with Brussels and its member states greenlighting severe economic sanctions against Russia and moving to supply military and security assistance to Kyiv that many countries had previously opposed and that the Kremlin had not expected.

While the EU is still looking to chart its own course in dealing with China, Barkin says that Beijing runs the risk of counting on old assumptions about European policy.

“Misreading Europe on Ukraine would have far more serious consequences,” said Barkin. “It could be a tipping point for EU-China relations, tilting the balance decisively toward systemic rivalry and away from any talk of partnership.”

RFE/RL Multimedia Editor Ray Furlong contributed to this report

Russia's outlawing of Facebook and Instagram after declaring the activities of the sites' parent company, Meta Platforms, as “extremist” is part of a broadening crackdown on free speech inside the country since Moscow's war with Ukraine started last month.

The full implications of the March 21 Moscow court ruling are unclear and the case originates in part from Meta's decision earlier this month to allow some calls for violence against Russian soldiers and President Vladimir Putin on its platforms.

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But the decision fits into a wider campaign being waged by the Kremlin against big tech and ongoing efforts to control the flow of information that has accelerated since Moscow's February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

In addition to targeting foreign platforms, the Kremlin has also gone after foreign news organizations, leading many to pull out of the country. (RFE/RL suspended its operations in the country on March 4.) Russian authorities have also passed new laws that criminalize public statements about Ukraine that do not align with the Kremlin's official view of what it calls the “special military operation.”

The growing crackdown could have major implications for the future of civil society and an open Internet inside Russia and has echoes of the beginning of the vast Internet censorship system built inside China known as the “Great Firewall.”

Initially, China’s firewall blocked only a handful of anti-Communist Party Chinese-language websites and it was relatively easy to circumvent the blockage and access the forbidden sites, but its scope has since grown into a wider mechanism aimed at restricting all types of content, identifying and locating individuals, and providing immediate access to personal records.

Could the future of Russia’s Internet more closely resemble China’s system? To find out more, RFE/RL spoke with Jessica Brandt, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies digital authoritarianism and disinformation in Russia and China.

RFE/RL: Russia declared that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is an “extremist organization.” What does this mean for the future of the country’s information space and free access to information in the future inside Russia?

Jessica Brandt: Russia has been ranked low on measures of openness for some time, but its recent steps to constrain the activities of Western social media platforms and to clamp down on expressions of dissent have really taken a toll on freedom of information within Russia.

I think one thing that's important to note is that Russia [has generally] been fairly measured -- or calculating -- in the way that it has pursued its clampdown on big tech. For example, it has blocked Facebook and Instagram but has made exceptions for WhatsApp, and it has threatened Google but has kept YouTube relatively unrestricted. Now, WhatsApp and YouTube are channels that are much more frequently used among the Russian population for coordination and for sharing information than, for example, Facebook and YouTube.

RFE/RL: So where does that mean that Russia is headed? Do you think that Russia is drifting closer to China and converging with the censorship and restrictions that we’ve seen there? Russian officials have often mentioned the idea of a sovereign Internet and this crisis seems to mark an important moment. Could Russia have its own version of the “Great Firewall”?

Brandt: Russia has had a tightly controlled information space for a long time, but it’s [still] a much different picture than in China. There has been independent media in Russia [and] there is access to Western social media platforms. That's just not the case in China. I think recent moves are taking [Russia] closer to the China model, but I think there are still significant differences.

There's a lot of talk about how Moscow's crackdown on big tech is accelerating a splintering of the Internet -- and I think that's the case -- but right now what we're seeing is that [it’s] splintering primarily at the content layer, which is very different than splintering at the sort of fundamental architecture of the Internet.

China has really pioneered that path and Russia may seek to follow it, but I think there are lots of reasons to think that it's not quite capable of doing that right now. It just doesn't have the chip capacity, and recent moves to sanction Russia will make it only harder for it to access the technology that it needs to do that.

So I think there are ways in which this is taking Russia down a Chinese path, but I think there are differences that persist.

RFE/RL: What are some of those differences?

Brandt: Russia has put in place in recent weeks a set of laws that would criminalize so-called disinformation about the conflict with Ukraine, and what we're really talking about there is [actually] criminalizing the use of the word “war,” the use of the word “invasion.” This is not about spreading disinformation. This is about [limiting] the ability to speak truth to power and freedom of expression.

So [the Russian government] has closed the space for public conversation and for dissent, but not entirely in the way that China has.

China has what is known as the "Great Firewall" [and] China really tries to dominate digital distribution channels [with] national champions of its own, and it has social media platforms of its own that are widely used. Russia has some of that, but just not at the same scale.

So I think some of that [gap] is the technological prowess that China has and [how] it [designed] its Internet at the start towards this end.

Today, Russia may see the benefits [of China’s model] because I think Putin, very much like [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping], is primarily concerned with regime stability and preserving his own grip on power. I think he can very much see the utility of a tightly controlled information space, but he doesn't have the technological capacity to get there. [Also] he does have a population that expects a certain amount of space to access Western information sources and to communicate with one another.

RFE/RL: Russia is becoming more isolated and more authoritarian as a result of the war in Ukraine. When it comes to tech, despite its statements of self-reliance, it does depend a great deal on Western tech for a whole host of industries, but especially for social media and communications. Does this inevitably mean that Russia will have to look to Chinese alternatives as well as standards and models in the future?

Brandt: I think it's very likely that this series of events will increase Russia's dependence on China for things like technology, but also just to evade sanctions.

RFE/RL: It does seem that Beijing and Moscow are becoming closer politically and economically, and the same seems to be true with the types of propaganda and disinformation we see being spread by both country’s officials and state-run media. I think, in particular, how Chinese officials and media have taken up the conspiracy theory that the U.S. is developing bioweapons in labs in Ukraine, which had been a thread within Russian propaganda even before the war, but has begun to be pushed again in recent weeks. What do you make of this? Is this a sign of growing coordination or something else?

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Brandt: Watching China's information strategy here [with spreading disinformation and propaganda] has been fascinating because they're really walking a tightrope. On one hand, they've been unwilling to condemn Russia's actions and quite willing to cast blame for the conflict at the foot of the United States and NATO, while still declining to condone Russia's activities.

A fascinating space is this bioweapons conspiracy, where China [is] now outpacing Russia [in spreading] those themes. But I think it's important to know that [Beijing] is doing this for its own reasons. China has an interest in increasing skepticism about the United States’ biological research facilities. This is really about COVID; it’s about China pushing back on the narrative that it might bear responsibility for COVID’s origins and has a desire to push conspiracy theories of its own around the origins of COVID.

Broadly, I think Russia and China have very different long-term strategies here. Russia’s interests are served by chaos, and its interests are served by destructive and destabilizing activities in Europe and by churning up divisive political sentiment within the United States.

China doesn't really seek a world of disorder. China seeks a world that's sort of reordered in its own favor and this is just a way station to that end. China's interest in Russia's biological weapons conspiracies isn't really about deflecting blame from Russia [for its invasion of Ukraine], and it isn't really about the divisive domestic political turn in the United States that those narratives are [feeding]. It's really about its own interest in deflecting blame for COVID.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.