Foreign Policy Beijing’s diplomatic overture has three ulterior motives.
China’s peace proposal for Ukraine has come to nothing—if, that is, peace in Ukraine was actually Beijing’s main motivation. The 12 points outlined in “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” are clearly too abstract to be a road map to end the war. Instead, the Chinese initiative should be viewed as a piece in China’s intensified informational and diplomatic rivalry with the United States. After running its diplomatic activity at reduced speed for almost three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing has recently launched a number of foreign-policy initiatives. The most prominent of these is the so-called peace proposal on Ukraine, with which China aims to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the United States among three specific audiences: the global south, Europe, and postwar Ukraine.
First, China aims to present itself to the global south as a future peace broker. The very same week that Beijing presented the Ukraine proposal, it also issued a concept paper outlining China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI). This was no coincidence. First announced in April 2022, the GSI is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s master plan for a new global security architecture, which envisions an enhanced role for China in safeguarding world peace—especially in the global south—through dialogue, development, and negotiation. Beijing knows that a number of countries in the global south interpret the Russo-Ukrainian war differently from the West and are more inclined to take Russia’s side and call for an early, negotiated end to the war.
Read Full Article Here…(foreignpolicy.com)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
