China’s Rulers Show Their Hypocrisy On Ukraine

Amid global outrage at Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, one nation stands out: China – not for showing the moral courage to condemn and sanction Russia, but for repulsive, two-faced hypocrisy.

Officially, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has taken a bloodless, neutral stance, offering to mediate and insisting on peace, dialogue and respect for sovereignty while at the same time pinning the blame for the crisis on NATO and the US and repeating Russian canards about “legitimate security concerns” and “NATO expansion.”

Unofficially, China has sided with Russia and dictator Vladimir Putin, as illustrated by two YouTubers who previously lived in China and today do videos about CCP propaganda, American Matthew Tye and South African Winston Sterzel. The CCP has suppressed public advocacy for Ukraine while allowing even the most bloodthirsty rhetoric supporting Russia and Putin to flood social media, as state-run news media have also backed the invasion. Meanwhile, schoolchildren undergo creepy Orwellian indoctrination, shouting slogans defending Russia.

As Western websites have limited or banned Russian state media outlets, Chinese state media have done Putin’s propaganda work for him, like spreading the falsehood that the US helped Ukraine develop biological weapons. While Russian forces have already shot and killed journalists near Kyiv, they have been all smiles when mingling with Lu Yuguang, the Moscow correspondent for China’s Phoenix Television, who embedded with them in Mariupol, the same city where they would later bomb a maternity hospital.

China has also deepened trade ties with Russia, providing a market for goods it can no longer sell in the West and a backstop to sidestep financial sanctions. Chinese UN Ambassador Zhang Jun has criticized the “unilateral” sanctions, saying they will “create disastrous humanitarian consequences,” by which he apparently is referring more to Russians unable to buy Gucci bags or vacation in Mykonos than to the murder of Ukrainian men, women and children.

Private citizens in China have gotten in on the action too. Since Canada’s embassy in Beijing erected signs in the colors of the Ukrainian flag reading “We support Ukraine” and “We and Ukraine stand together” in Chinese, some enterprising Chinese nationalists have taken to spray painting “FUCK NATO” on them and photographing themselves displaying the Russian military’s “Z” emblem, which has recently emerged as a fittingly half-assed Russian answer to the swastika. Chinese nationalists’ online behavior has, in turn, raised fears of feeding a backlash against Chinese people living in Ukraine leading to racial discrimination and violence. But China’s government has shown little regard for their well-being, advising them to stay put even as other countries encouraged their people to evacuate.

To be clear, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is nothing short of the most blatant act of imperialism since World War II, and Putin’s fascist regime has no reservations about targeting civilians as it seeks to conquer Ukraine, as it has already done in Syria. Despite Putin’s open display of psychopathic evil, China’s government has taken his side, albeit with duplicity and disingenuity.

To understand how glaringly hypocritical the CCP’s response to Russia’s imperialist aggression is, you have to look at China’s recent history and the party’s own ideology.

I lived in China from 2001-2004, meaning I frequently heard about China’s century of humiliation, the period from the Opium Wars to Japan’s horrific slaughter of Chinese civilians before and during World War II. Just as multiple countries have sent military aid to Ukraine, when Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in 1937, the US and Soviet Union sent some $390 million in funding and equipment, equivalent to $7.8 billion in 2022 dollars. But that wasn’t enough to stop atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre or Unit 731’s human experimentation.

China’s experience with colonialism and imperialism and overcoming of both is a major source of the CCP’s mandate to rule the country and continues to play a significant role in the popular imagination today.

That’s what makes China’s underhanded support for Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine all the more revealing, as it belies any claim the CCP might still have to being in any way anti-imperialist or noninterventionist.

You would think that, as a country that along with the Soviet Union suffered disproportionately at the hands of the Axis Powers in World War II, China would sympathize with Ukraine and oppose Russia’s actions.

But alas, it doesn’t. Just as Russia absurdly claims to “de-Nazify” Ukraine while committing the sort of fascist aggression of which it was once a victim, China ignores the lessons of its own painful history of imperial subjugation in condoning Russia’s crimes.

The CCP’s blatant hypocrisy here is even more apparent when considering that its standard response to criticism from the US is to highlight the US’ history of preaching democracy and human rights while historically often violating those principles in its foreign policy when it suits its geopolitical and economic interests.

Then again, Beijing is no stranger to that either. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 in retaliation against unprovoked attacks by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, China invaded Vietnam to defend a regime that is best known for exterminating nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s entire population.

And that pattern hasn’t really changed. Today, China cites some dusty old maps to claim the entire South China Sea as its sovereign territory, attacking fishing boats from Southeast Asian countries that also have territorial claims in the area. While the CCP has long responded to criticism of its record in Tibet and Xinjiang by pointing to the US’s ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, it has apparently taken a page from American history in its cultural genocide against the Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities. And while preaching respect for international law, it flagrantly violates its agreement to preserve Hong Kong’s autonomy.

At the end of the day, noble ideals have a habit of standing in the way of making money and securing geopolitical advantage. That’s probably true for any country.

What makes Russia and China different is that despite their shared legacy of communism, both have embraced a combination of aggressive nationalism and totalitarian strongman rule that owes a greater debt to Mussolini than to Marx. In addition to being textbook examples of 21st century fascism, both countries also share the goal of upending the liberal global order and creating Chinese- and Russian-led authoritarian spheres of influence in Asia and Europe.

Thus, much as Washington preached democracy while tolerating horrible dictators like Suharto in Indonesia, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran and Augusto Pinochet in Chile as long as they were allies, Beijing tolerates even the most barbaric imperialism as long as it’s an ally doing it, especially if it’s to China’s long-term benefit.

So given that the Chinese government often responds to criticism by pointing to critics’ misdeeds, admonishing them not to point fingers at others and instead reflect on their own hypocrisy, perhaps it’s about time the leaders in Beijing, the “Little Pink” nationalists online and the “Wolf Warrior” diplomats on the world stage took that advice too.

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Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @alaricnyc.