IF THEY have said it once, they’ve said it a million times. Hardly a press briefing goes by at the foreign ministry in Beijing without a stern reminder of the importance China places on the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. These days the phrase is trotted out whenever a spokesman is asked about China’s stance on Ukraine. Yet, oddly, the spokesman never goes on to criticise Vladimir Putin or Russia, which, in annexing Crimea, has interfered in Ukrainian internal affairs in the crudest way imaginable. Swift to pounce on any alleged hypocrisy in Western foreign policy, China now seems to be upholding double standards of its own. In truth, it always has. But the crisis in Ukraine has exposed the contradictions in China’s “principled” diplomacy with unusual starkness.
China has not explicitly taken Russia’s side. Rather, it calls on all parties to resolve their differences through dialogue and negotiation. It opposes the sanctions imposed by America and threatened by Europe. And it harps on about the “complexity” of the situation. But America has tried in vain to persuade China to be explicit in condemning Russia. A telephone conversation between Barack Obama and China’s president, Xi Jinping, yielded no change in the Chinese script. According to the Chinese press, Mr Xi said China hoped “that all parties concerned would tackle their differences through communication and co-ordination”. In the context of Russia’s bullying approach, Huang Jing of the Lee Kuan Yew School in Singapore says that China’s supposedly neutral stance amounts, in effect, to backing Mr Putin.
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