China's top diplomat says that a "window for peace" is opening amid a quickening pace of U.S. diplomacy around ending the war in Ukraine and steps by Washington to normalize relations with Moscow.
“China supports all efforts dedicated to peace, including the recent consensus reached by the United States and Russia,” and was willing to play a “constructive role” in peace talks, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told ministers a Group of 20 summit in South Africa on February 21, according to a statement.
That statement came after high-stakes U.S.-Russia talks in Riyadh that sparked fears in Kyiv and European capitals about being sidelined and saddled with a peace deal that favors Russia.
But despite Wang's public comments, experts and former officials believe that the prospect of a rapprochement between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump is also fueling unease in China.
“The Chinese have seen this coming since Trump was elected and signaled that he wanted to quickly end the war in Ukraine,” Dennis Wilder, who was a top White House China adviser to former U.S. President George W. Bush, told RFE/RL. “While a complete rapprochement might not be in the cards, they’re nervous because if Trump lifts sanctions on Russia, then Moscow’s dependency on China decreases.”
One of the hallmarks of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s foreign policy has been a burgeoning strategic partnership with Putin that’s grown closer since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Beijing has propped up the Russian economy through enhanced trade and energy purchases while fueling the Kremlin’s war effort with the supply of key goods as both Xi and Putin have found common ground in wanting to challenge the West and unseat the United States.
And fear of all that being derailed by a new type of U.S.-Russia relationship born out of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine -- as was raised this week during talks in Saudi Arabia -- is real for Beijing.
Wilder says that he’s had conversations with “very senior Chinese officials” since Trump’s election in November who have expressed concern about a potential U.S.-Russia reset.
He says they’ve used the phrase “only Trump goes to Moscow,” a play on the historical reference to former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to Beijing in 1972, when he defied precedent and courted China to exploit its split with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Efforts to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow by warming up to Russia have been termed by some analysts as a “reverse Nixon.”
“In the same way as Nixon with China policy, they see Trump as someone who is uniquely placed to run against the current nature of U.S. policy towards Russia and could even travel to Moscow,” Wilder said. “This doesn’t mean the Chinese think that the Russians will break relations, but their strong alignment today could diminish.”
What’s Washington’s Strategy?
It remains to be seen what the Trump administration’s outreach will bear fruit, but following a phone call this month with Putin, recent U.S.-Russia talks in Riyadh, and a deepening rift with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over peace talks, the White House is charting a new course for the war in Ukraine and its ties with Moscow.
“We seem to be witnessing not a reset but a wholesale realignment of U.S.-Russian relations,” Lucian Kim, senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group, told RFE/RL. “In that sense, the war in Ukraine is not a call to resist Russian aggression but a roadblock to closer cooperation between Washington and Moscow.”
For Beijing, this development comes with plenty of worrisome hypotheticals, including allowing Washington to build up its military footprint in the Pacific and leaving China more geopolitically exposed in the event of a crisis with Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own.
“I think China would prefer to see a weak Russia and even continuing the Ukraine war would better serve Beijing as that would have the United States’ focus scattered away from the Indo-Pacific,” Sari Arho Havren, an associate fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL.
The Trump administration has made clear it sees managing a long-term rivalry with China as its top foreign policy objective and may look to deprioritize regions like Europe and the Middle East in order to raise pressure on Beijing in Asia.
Senior U.S. officials have also telegraphed in recent comments that cracking the China-Russia partnership could be part of the motivation in normalizing ties with Moscow.
Following the talks in Riyadh, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the possibility for future “geopolitical and economic cooperation” between Washington and Moscow was among the key points discussed.
A few days earlier at the Munich Security Conference, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, said that the United States aimed “to force” Putin into actions he was “uncomfortable with,” including disrupting Moscow’s ties with China, Iran, and North Korea.
In a February 14 interview with The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said that Washington was prepared to reset the relationship with the Kremlin following an agreement over Ukraine as a move to end Russia’s isolation and its growing dependence on China since the war began.
“It’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China,” Vance said.
Trying to diminish the two countries’ partnership has also been on the radar of Trump administration officials for some time.
Robert O’Brien, who served as national security adviser under Trump from 2019 to 2021, said in an interview last year that the White House had discussed the strategy during his tenure and that reaching a settlement for the war in Ukraine is a vital first step in kickstarting that process.
“Until we get the Ukrainian situation solved, we’re not going to have a chance to make a run at Russia,” he told the Wire China in June.
Can Trump Break China and Russia Apart?
Arho Havren says that the likelihood of the United States engineering a formal split between Beijing and Moscow are small -- especially while Putin remains in office, given the relationship that he’s forged with Xi.
But even new cracks between the two powers may loosen Moscow’s alignment with Beijing and could have a deterrent effect on China, especially if it decides to use military force to take Taiwan, something that U.S. policymakers warn is a growing possibility.
“Even if their ties remain strong, historically there is distrust between them that won’t go away,” she said.
But while the Trump administration’s diplomacy is moving at a dizzying pace, it’s also still in its early stages and more developments could be around the corner.
Steve Tsang, director of SOAS University London's China Institute, says that Washington’s efforts to reset Russia ties are also not all bad news for Beijing.
“Xi does not want Putin to fail in the war, and so Trump delivering a peace that mostly meets Russian conditions is a positive,” he told RFE/RL. “Who knows who will be the next U.S. president and if there will be a reversal of U.S. posture post-Trump.”
In another development that could further complicate things, Trump said on February 19 that he expects Xi to visit Washington and that he’s open to reaching a trade agreement with China, potentially as part of a wide-ranging deal with Beijing.
“Everything is moving very quickly,” Arho Havren said. “China isn’t happy with what it sees right now, but there is room for that to change.”
