Media and published views are only a proxy for what China’s leaders think. As Xi Jinping likes to recall, the press has a duty to educate the people along lines that the CCP sets. Yet, as the last decade has shown, it has become much harder to publish expert views on international relations that diverge from CCP lines. If anything, the Ukraine conflict is no exception, with large elements of convergence among literally all published analyses and opinions.
Yet there are also nuances and different accents, sometimes even within the same writing. The messaging has shifted from the days immediately preceding the invasion of Ukraine on February 24 and three to four weeks later, where our source collection for this special issue of China Trends ends. This is not happening in a single direction; the tone against the United States has sometimes radicalized. But there are also realistic doubts about the outcome of Russia’s enterprise.
What has happened, of course, is that the situation in Ukraine has become more difficult to ascertain. There had been little anticipation - in China as elsewhere - of the Ukrainian and Western responses in the first place. On the eve of the invasion, Gu Zuhua, a Taiwan affairs cadre from the Shanghai municipality, drew early, and possibly premature, lessons for China and the Taiwan issue. He claimed the two cases to be interlinked and asserted: "we should make good use of military force, and strengthen the anti-independence and pro-unification momentum (善用军事力量,强化反"独"促统大势)"; "we should have the will and determination to dare to fight (敢于战斗的意志和决心)." Eleven days later, Feng Zhongping, former Vice-President of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), China’s best-informed think tank, dryly noted: "the current state of affairs is constantly changing, and it remains to be seen how the situation in Ukraine will develop."