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China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko on Sunday as Beijing seeks to gauge the impact of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s insurgency on the political stability of one of its closest strategic allies.
Chinese state media said the couple, who smiled and walked together after meeting in Beijing, “exchanged their views. . . on Sino-Russian Relations and International and Regional Issues of Common Interest”.
The reports made no mention of the uprising and China has not issued an official statement on the events. China’s state media downplayed the drama, giving preference to an exchange of letters between President Xi Jinping and a Belgian zookeeper about pandas on Sunday.
But muted official coverage of the insurgency belies how important the standoff in Russia is to Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing’s key partner in its efforts to fight what it sees as US hegemony.
A weakened Russia would not only deprive the Chinese leader of a reliable ally, but potentially destabilize China’s sprawling border with its giant neighbor. “We don’t need another civil war in Russia either, we need stability in all countries,” said Henry Huiyao Wang, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank.
This desire for stability, Wang said, is the reason Beijing wants to start peace talks between Ukraine and Russia as soon as possible. China’s envoy Li Hui visited both countries last month, but little progress has been made.
The long-standing challenge for China’s leaders has been to voice their support for Russian President Vladimir Putin without further angering Europe. Premier Li Qiang visited France and Germany last week to try to strengthen ties weakened by Beijing’s close ties with Russia.
Over the past two years, Xi has repeatedly expressed his strong support for Putin, from declaring a “boundary friendship” just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year to a state visit by Xi to Moscow this year .
After the debacle of the past few days, Putin will look to foreign leaders for confirmation, particularly China, his most powerful and credible ally.
In a statement released after the meeting, the Russian Foreign Ministry said: “The Chinese side has expressed its support for the efforts of the leadership of the Russian Federation to stabilize the situation in the country in connection with the events of June 24 and its interest in a Strengthening affirmed.” Russia’s Unity and Further Prosperity”.
“It will be important for Putin to have this support from China, a global player, to stabilize the domestic climate,” said Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, a former political adviser in the European Parliament who is now at National Dong Hwa University works in Taiwan.
“She [China] are probably thinking and having talks about what it takes to secure Putin’s position because Putin has been very useful to China. That has to be the driving consideration.”
At the same time, the chaos that the war against Ukraine has unleashed in Russia will not go unnoticed by Beijing, whose long-term goal is unification with Taiwan, if necessary by military force.
“There are so many lessons to be learned from what happened last night,” Ferenczy said. The chaos in Russia could make China consider “how fragile control can be in even the most authoritarian regime,” she said.
While trying to shore up Putin, Beijing would also seek wider contacts with other rulers in Russia, analysts said. This would help secure the relationship should someone else come to power.
“China can secure its chances not by withdrawing support for Putin, but by increasing cooperation with other actors in and around Russia,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
While China’s state media’s coverage of Prigozhin’s uprising has been relatively muted and closely aligned with the Russian domestic media’s version of events, social media has been more active.
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Several posts have described the warlord as An Lushan, a reference to a famous 8th-century rebel general during the Tang Dynasty who rebelled against the empire and established a short-lived rival kingdom. But the posts were quickly deleted.
Another user on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, appeared to evade state censorship and attracted many reposts by using euphemisms to describe the uprising, calling it a “PUBG” first-person shooter video game and sarcastically calling the aliases Putin from “Tsar” and “Grandpa”.
But it was clear that despite the government’s efforts to control the narrative, even Beijing’s most staunch supporters in the state media could not entirely hide their view of Putin’s bleak prospects following recent events.
The end of the rebellion “obviously reduced the impact on Putin’s authority,” Hu Xijin, the former editor of the nationalist Global Times, said on Twitter, adding, “though not to zero.”
With additional reporting by Gloria Li in Hong Kong and Edward White in Hong Kong