China’s Ukraine Policy: Unchanged Rhetoric Despite Changing Conjuncture

Abstract

This article discusses China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis and the factors that shape China’s attitude to this situation in the comparative timelines of the 2014 and 2022 crises. Despite the changes in China’s security perceptions and the balance of power in the international system, China’s rhetoric about the ongoing Ukraine crisis has vague rhetoric similar to the crisis in 2014. While China regards the 2014 Ukraine crisis as a regional crisis, it sees the recent situation as a crisis with global effects. China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis, which is on its way to becoming a global power, is shaped within the framework of multiple contradictory parameters. First, at the discursive level, the ‘five principles of peaceful coexistence’ have formed the discursive framework of Chinese foreign policy since the 1950s. Second, the rapidly developing China–Russia relations after the Cold War, and third, the increasing threat China perceives from the United States, which it sees as a global hegemonic power, and in this context, its global policies. As a result, it is possible to define China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis as passively pro-Russian.