Chinese foreign minister meets Russian official in Beijing after uprising

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Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko on Sunday, as Beijing tries to assess the impact of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion on the political stability of one of its closest strategic allies.

Chinese state media said the pair, who were pictured smiling and walking together after their meeting in Beijing, exchanged views. , , On China-Russia Relations and International and Regional Issues of Common Concern”.

Reports do not mention mutiny and China has made no official statement on the incidents. China’s state media has played down the drama on Sunday, giving priority to an exchange of letters between President Xi Jinping and a Belgian zoo operator discussing pandas.

But muted official coverage of the rebellion has belied the importance of the standoff in Russia for Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing’s most important partner in the effort to counter what is seen as American hegemony.

A weakened Russia would not only deprive the Chinese leader of a reliable ally, but also potentially destabilize China’s extensive border with its giant neighbor. “We don’t need another civil war even in Russia, we need stability in all countries,” said Henry Huiyao Wang, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a think-tank in Beijing.

It is because of this desire for stability that Beijing wants peace talks between Ukraine and Russia to begin as soon as possible, Wang said. Chinese envoy Li Hui visited the two countries last month but little progress has been made.

For China’s leadership, the challenge has long been how to express support for Russian President Vladimir Putin without further alienating Europe. Premier Li Keqiang visited France and Germany last week in an attempt to strengthen ties weakened by Beijing’s close ties with Russia.

Over the past two years, Xi has repeatedly expressed strong support for Putin, from declaring “friendship without borders” days before Russia invaded Ukraine last year to Xi’s state visit to Moscow this year .

After the debacle of the past few days, Putin will look to reaffirmation from foreign leaders, especially China, his most powerful and trusted ally. “For Putin, it will be important to get support from China, a globally important player, to stabilize the domestic environment,” said Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczi, a former political adviser to the European Parliament who is now with National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. ,

“They (China) are probably thinking and talking about what is needed to secure Putin’s position because Putin has been very useful to China. It should be thought provoking.

Also, the chaos unleashed in Russia by the war against Ukraine will not deter Beijing, whose long-term ambition is unification with Taiwan, using military force if necessary.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned from what happened last night,” Ferenzi said. The chaos in Russia, he said, could make China think about “how fragile control can be even in the most authoritarian regimes”.

Analysts said that while it sought to sideline Putin, Beijing would also seek greater contact with other power brokers in Russia. This will help protect the relationship in case someone else takes over.

“China can hedge its bets not by withdrawing support from Putin, but by increasing engagement with Russia and other actors around it,” said Leif-Erik Eisley, a professor at Eva University in Seoul.

While coverage of Prigozhin’s mutiny in China’s state media was relatively low, closely tied to the Russian domestic media version of events, social media was more active.

Several posts describe the warlord as An Lushan, a reference to a famous rebel general during the Tang Dynasty in the eighth century who rebelled against the empire and founded a short-lived rival state. But the posts were immediately removed.

Another user on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, appeared to evade government censorship and attracted a lot of reposts by using euphemisms to describe the insurgency, referring to it as “PUBG” the Battlegrounds first-person shooter video game. Did and sarcastically gave the pseudonym Putin. Of “Tsar” and “Grandfather”.

But it was clear that despite the government’s efforts to control the narrative, even the most staunch supporters of Beijing in state media could not completely hide their view of Putin’s waning prospects after recent events.

The end of the rebellion “markedly reduced the impact on Putin’s authority” Hu Zijin, former editor of the nationalist Global Times, said on Twitter, “though not to zero.”

With additional reporting by Gloria Lee in Hong Kong and Edward White in Hong Kong