Xi Jinping returns to the international stage this week as he makes his first appearance in almost three years at a major global gathering testing the credibility of Beijing’s claims of neutrality in the Ukraine war.
Apart from a brief trip to Central Asia in September for a regional security summit – at which Xi only interacted with friends and allies, including his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin – China’s president has not ventured abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In his first diplomatic foray into office since his third term last month, Xi will meet US President Joe Biden for their first face-to-face dialogue as heads of state before a G20 summit opens a day later in Bali, Indonesia.
Putin’s last-minute decision to skip the G20 will ease Xi’s mission by reducing much of the drama expected at “the first global summit of Cold War II.”
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and its government’s tacit support of the Kremlin despite its claims of neutrality in the conflict – will nonetheless dominate the agenda and put China’s presidents in an awkward position.
Xi and Putin officially welcomed a borderless partnership between their countries when they met in Beijing in February, just 20 days before the Russian president ordered his military to Ukraine.
But according to four people briefed on the February meeting, Xi was caught off guard by an invasion that Putin failed to warn him about in advance – endangering the safety of thousands of Chinese nationals then living in Ukraine.
“Putin didn’t tell Xi the truth,” a Chinese official told the Financial Times.
“If he had told us, we wouldn’t be in such an awkward position,” the official added. “We had more than 6,000 Chinese nationals living in Ukraine and some of them died during the evacuation [although] we cannot make that public.”
In a speech last month, Putin said he had not told his “close friend” Xi about the upcoming invasion in February. The Russian President added that the strength of ties between the countries is “unprecedented”.
Xi has invested too much political capital in China’s ties with Russia to express his concerns about the war.
The Chinese Communist Party’s senior leadership, now made up of Xi loyalists, values close strategic ties with Russia amid what they see as a US effort to thwart its rise with trade and technology sanctions.
It also blames Washington for frustrating Xi’s ambitions to unite China and Taiwan on the self-governing island, which Beijing describes as part of its sovereign territory.
Ni Shixiong, an international relations expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the Chinese government has done everything it can to express its displeasure with Putin’s threats about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
“China and Russia count on each other strategically,” Ni said. “China has made a concession by publicly opposing the use of nuclear weapons. We have met the requirements of to a certain extent [the US and its allies]. It is time to see if the US recognizes this and acts accordingly.”
Beijing has urged Washington to lift trade and technology sanctions and has suspended bilateral contact on a range of issues following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August.
But the US president has further restricted Chinese companies’ access to critical supplies of semiconductors, a sector vital to Xi’s ambitions for self-sufficiency in next-generation technologies.
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“The Chinese side needs to convince the US that their position has clearly shifted from being pro-Russian to being more neutral,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who recently traveled to China Beijing is to hold informal talks with Chinese politicians. “Washington finds what China has done too little, too late.”
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Xi has called or met with Putin at least three times – but has not spoken to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine.
Zhu Feng, a professor at Nanjing University, said Beijing will seek trade and technology concessions from Washington before adjusting its position on Ukraine.
“There isn’t much China can do about Ukraine,” he said. “China has not recognized Russia [2014] Annexation of Crimea, not to mention eastern Ukraine.
“It’s the best China can do. Why should China help the West when the US sees China as their biggest threat?”