Wang Yi in Moscow: China, Russia won't be swayed by others

It’s a truly amazing phenomenon, that ability of literally all the Western political class to construct an informational phantom and stick to it, regardless of facts. So, meet yet another such phantom – that China’s top diplomat has just visited Moscow with a peace plan for the Ukrainian conflict, being under pressure not to supply, instead, Russia with “lethal weapons” for the same conflict. First and foremost, there has never been a need for such supplies. And nobody was asking for them. Second, there is no such thing as a Chinese peace plan for ending the war as such. At least that plan is not anything like a proposal to draw lines on the map and stop the hostilities, so as to discuss these lines. China knows it’s currently a useless idea. But it’s true that Wang Yi has just visited Moscow at the end of his long European tour, and met there everyone at the top, including President Vladimir Putin. And there you are: Wang Yi, in a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, has not been discussing any “Chinese peace plan on Ukraine” – that’s official, a statement by the ministry’s representative, with an addition that all these Western politicians and the media are often distorting the real picture. So, what does all that mean? To remind you, Wang is not the foreign minister, he is one step higher, being a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs. And his main effort in Moscow wasn’t a mediation between two neighbours, enmeshed in a local conflict. The thing is, the conflict is not local at all. It’s always irritating to decipher official statements after high-level negotiations, nevertheless, these statements always have meaning, if you know how to read them. So, what do we get from Wang Yi’s words like “China and Russia won’t be swayed by others” or “the two countries have stood up to pressure and relations are developing steadily”? The meaning is, that the above-mentioned assertion about China fearing the pressure of the West against weapons deliveries to Russia is an entirely false narrative, meant to intimidate Beijing. And what is the meaning of Vladimir Putin’s words like “cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is important to stabilize the international situation”? The meaning is, that the situation is global, and our two nations aim for a global solution, not for the currently useless negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. Here we have to look at the big picture and discover that China has started a game so as to reach the roots of a truly global showdown, hated and feared by most of the world. China is the major participant in that showdown, while Russia is a secondary one. Moscow is not the only place Wang Yi has visited. We are talking about his trip to the West in general, with a view to the international audience, and China’s peace plan that he promoted is about the need to change approach to all kind of conflicts like the one we still call Ukrainian. China has its own “Ukraine” named Taiwan. You take a territory, recently split from ethnically and culturally the same mainland, you prevent both from reintegration. You propagate, in that splintered new nation, hatred to its roots, and you pump it with weapons and incite it to provoke the mainland in all possible ways. That’s the story of Ukraine, and that’s also of Taiwan. Finally, you use that local hotspot to turn it into a problem for everyone else in the world, by ruining economic normalcy and by any other means. So, what do you do to prevent such things from happening again anywhere and anytime? Here you have to see what happened, last week, in Munich, where the same Wang Yi made a speech. The main topic of the international security conference there, as designated by the organizing committee, was the need to address about 80 per cent of the world population, unhappy about the Ukrainian and Taiwan conflicts that affect next to everyone. The West, or better say the US, may have achieved unity in confrontation with the East, but have lost the rest of the world in the process by trying to wreak havoc on trade and logistics, as in “sanctions”. Explanations that Russia was wrong have not really swayed these 80 per cent, in Munich or elsewhere, they heard it all before. So, Beijing is trying to grab global leadership from the US by offering China’s mentioned peace plan as a number of rules for avoiding situations similar to the current one. You can read that plan now. There is almost no mention of Ukraine there or Taiwan. It’s a set of basic principles, notably the need for equal respect for everyone’s security concerns. And that’s the plan Wang Yi has brought also to Moscow, among other ideas to discuss. These general principles look suspiciously like the call to get back to basic rules of decent behaviour that were, more or less, respected by the world in recent decades. These rules are also been called international law. And they are doomed to be popular with the relatively weaker states, so China is picking its audience just right. So why have these rules been broken, recently, by the West? Here we have a debate, in Russia and in China, and everywhere else. My point is, the laws and rules were around when the world was balancing between two rivalling powers, the USSR and the US. Both avoided excessive trouble. Then came a short period when the US had an illusion that now they could do everything and anything. And then they just could not comprehend in time that the world is moving back to balance of powers. So now one of these powers, together with some others, is capitalizing on the general desire to get some semblance of order back. And that’s the peace plan everybody is talking about. The author is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Views are personal. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.