Friday, March 04, 2022

Zaporizhzhia: China ‘very concerned’ after Russia seizes Ukrainian nuclear power plant

Shweta Sharma
Fri, March 4, 2022

Surveillance camera footage shows a flare landing at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant during shelling in Enerhodar, Zaporizhia blast
 (Zaporizhzhya NPP via REUTERS)

China urged “all sides to exercise restraint” to ensure the safety of the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine, after Russian military forces launched an overnight attack to seize Europe’s biggest nuclear facility.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday that Beijing is “very concerned” about the ongoing situation.

“We will monitor the situation and call on all sides to exercise restraint, avoid escalation and ensure the safety of relevant nuclear facilities,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a daily briefing.

China, a close ally of Russia, which has so far stopped short of condemning Moscow for the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, released a statement after a fire broke out at the nuclear power plant after shelling by Russian forces.

The fire at an adjacent five-story training facility sparked worldwide fears of a potential nuclear disaster in entire Europe.

Ukraine’s Emergency Services said they managed to extinguish the fire with broke out at a building outside the plant’s premises. The Ukrainian authorities claimed the plant has been seized by Russian troops.

The Ukrainian president on Friday sounded an ominous warning by referring to it as a repeat of 1986 Chernobyl disaster and accused Moscow of resorting to “nuclear terror”.

“If there is an explosion, it is the end of everything. The end of Europe,” he said.

The attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was condemned by world leaders who called out Russian president Vladimir Putin as “horrific” and “reckless” attack endangering the safety of the whole of Europe.

Surveillance footage that captured the incident showed a blast lighting up the night sky before sending plumes of smoke out the plant.

In a statement on Facebook, Ukraine’s emergency services confirmed that “at 06:20 [04:20 GMT] the fire in the training building of Zaporizhzhia NPP in Energodar was extinguished. There are no victims.”

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, International Atomic Energy Agency said that it was putting its “incident and emergency centre in full 24/7 response mode due to serious situation” at the nuclear power plant.

China’s Xi Jinping-led government has tried to distance itself from Russia’s aggression in Ukraine while avoiding criticising Moscow. It also denounced trade and financial sanctions on Russia and did not announce any humanitarian aid to war-torn Ukraine.

A China-led development bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), on Thursday suspended business ties with Russia and Belarus, in a sign of Beijing’s limits of its support to the country.

“Under these circumstances, and in the best interests of the Bank, Management has decided that all activities relating to Russia and Belarus are on hold and under review,” the Beijing-based bank said in a statement on Thursday.

The multilateral development bank did not give the reason for the suspension in business with two countries, but said “its thoughts and sympathy to everyone affected”.

What China thinks of the global economic war against Russia

March 3, 2022


China has long expressed its displeasure with what it calls the US’s “financial hegemony” and its corresponding ability to slap sanctions on foreign countries.

Now, as the US and Europe hit Russia with unprecedented sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, Chinese officials, academics, and experts are grappling with the implications of the unfolding full-scale global economic and financial war.

No to sanctions, yes to economic coercion?

Officially, Beijing has opposed the use of sanctions against Russia, deeming them illegal, and counterproductive.

“As far as financial sanctions are concerned, we do not approve of these, especially the unilaterally launched sanctions because they do not work well and have no legal grounds,” Guo Shuqing, China’s top banking regulator, told a news conference yesterday (March 2). He also played down effects of the sanctions on China’s economy and financial sector.

Meanwhile, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations said yesterday that “[b]lindly…imposing sanctions and creating division and confrontation will only further complicate the situation, and result in a rapid negative spillover of the crisis.”

Yet China’s opposition to sanctions does not seem to stop it from deploying economic coercion against businesses and countries that anger it. Most recently, China has blocked Lithuanian goods and launched a state-led corporate boycott of multinationals with ties to the European country. That follows an unofficial Chinese boycott of Australian coal that began in late 2020.

Global integration as protection against sanctions


So far, sanctions on Moscow have included exemptions for energy to allow continued exports of oil and gas supplies that power the world’s economies—particularly Europe’s. That Russia’s integration with the global economy is what earns it a small degree of reprieve from sanctions is not lost on observers in China.

Facing the risk of uses of sanctions by the west in the future, “we need to continue to increase our efforts to integrate into the world economic system,” writes Jin Zhong (link in Chinese), a macro investor and columnist for the nationalist news site Guancha. “Only with a deeper and broader integration with other countries’ economies and investments will the so-called economic sanctions have a ‘half-hearted’ effect.”

At the same time as China weaves itself into the global economic fabric, however, it should also become less reliant on the US, writes Song Guoyou, a professor at Fudan University. “The international community has both seen the full extent of the US willingness and ability to use financial sanctions externally and is further concerned about the real national security risks of excessive financial dependence on the US,” he argued (link in Chinese) in a commentary this week.

One area where China has already seen such risk is when it comes to chips, after the US used export controls against Chinese smartphone maker Huawei.
China’s homegrown SWIFT alternative

Some have argued that Russia’s expulsion from SWIFT, the global financial messaging system, will boost China’s own cross-border payment system CIPS. Yet CIPS is currently still dependent on SWIFT.

In light of this potential vulnerability, China should urgently and “vigorously promote the internationalization of the renminbi, focusing especially on the development CIPS and the digital yuan,” wrote Ming Ming, an analyst at Citic Securities.

The post What China thinks of the global economic war against Russia appeared first on Quartz.


RIGHT WING COMMENTARY; ANTI CANCEL CULTURE
Canceling China Will Not Be as Easy as Canceling Russia

 By Gary Bauer | March 4, 2022 | 

Displayed are Chinese and American toy soldiers. (Photo credit: PETER PARKS/AFP/GettyImages)

Cancel Culture has come for Russia. In response to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been largely cut off from the global financial system. Major credit card companies and electronic payment platforms like Apple Pay cut off their Russian customers. Russian assets are being seized all over the world.

Russian airlines have been banned from American, Canadian, and European airspace. Major movie companies like Disney, Paramount, and Sony are canceling movie releases in Russia. (No "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" for you, Vlad!) Even Russian vodka is now "verboten."

And the sanctions are hurting. There was a run on the banks as Russians rushed to grab whatever cash they could get their hands on. The Russian stock market plunged 30%. The ruble collapsed. The Russian central bank was forced to double interest rates to 20%.

I'm not suggesting the West's "economic blitzkrieg" isn't justified. But the reason it was so easy to cancel Russia is because Russia does not have its economic tentacles all over the world.

There are no Russian centers spewing Russian propaganda on our college campuses. Instead, we have Confucius Institutes spewing communist Chinese propaganda on our college campuses.

Our corporate CEOs are not dreaming of wealth made in Moscow. They're dreaming of wealth made in Beijing.

There are few Russian products, other than oil and vodka, that we depend on. We don't need Russia's oil, and it's easy to cancel vodka. But if the pandemic proved anything, it proved just how dependent we are on communist China for just about everything.

When Americans demanded COVID tests, where did the Biden Administration go to get all those tests? Not to American companies, but to communist Chinese companies. (The irony is breathtaking!)

Our political establishment, the great family dynasties of American politics both Democrats and Republicans (and you know who I'm talking about), are complicit in the transfer of massive amounts of American wealth to communist China. They sent our factories and our jobs to communist China in exchange for cheap goods.

When Donald Trump started to crack down on communist China, there were fears he might deprive American teenagers of TikTok. Oh, the inhumanity! Meanwhile, there's an actual genocide taking place in communist China, but you know, priorities.

Yet even as we see all this, our country is STILL moving toward increasing our dependence on communist China.

Joe Biden talked a good game in his State of the Union address about "Buy American." But he's waging war against the great American energy industry, while he's pushing solar and wind power, which the communist Chinese control.

I would love to think that when communist China eventually moves to seize Taiwan – and we all know it will – we will see the same zealous determination to punish communist China as we have to punish Russia. But I fear we will see the exact opposite.

Powerful segments of American society won't be beating the drums of war. They will instead be apologizing for communist China, trying to protect their bank accounts.

Yes, Vladimir Putin is dangerous, but Russia is a declining power. Its economy is one-tenth of ours. Its empire is over.

Communist China, however, is a rising power. Its economy rivals ours. It is daily engaged in provocative maneuvers to intimidate other nations. Its tentacles are spreading all over the world.

In fact, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently suggested to NBC News that he was "blown away" by the scale of communist China's espionage efforts in the United States, adding that the Bureau is opening up a new case against possible communist Chinese spies every 12 hours.

Wray said, "There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas, and our economic security than China." And he warned that China's efforts are becoming "more brazen [and] more damaging than ever before."

Unbelievably, the Biden Administration just shut down a Department of Justice program to root out Chinese spies. While the left obsessed over what Putin might have on Donald Trump, perhaps we should be asking, "What does Beijing have on Joe Biden?"

One final irony: We're right to boycott Russian products to isolate the Russian economy in response to Putin's aggression. But make no mistake about it: Communist China will take full advantage of this. They are playing the long game, while we obsess over the latest images on the nightly news.

As Sen. Marco Rubio accurately stated, Communist China is "the real long-term problem for this country....China is Russia times 1,000."

We can punish Russia all we want. But at the end of the day, communist China remains our greatest enemy.

Gary Bauer is the president of American Values, an educational nonprofit. He previously served as President Ronald Reagan's chief domestic policy advisor and undersecretary of education, President Donald Trump's appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and president of the Family Research Council.

Why the Chinese Internet Is Cheering Russia’s Invasion

As the world overwhelmingly condemns the assault on Ukraine, online opinion in China is mostly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.

A bombed Ukrainian home in south Kyiv. Many Chinese social media users have praised President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and accepted his justification for invading Ukraine.
Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

By Li Yuan
Feb. 28, 2022
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Sign up for the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing. Every evening, we'll send you a summary of the day's biggest news. Get it sent to your inbox.

If President Vladimir V. Putin is looking for international support and approval for his invasion of Ukraine, he can turn to the Chinese internet.

Its users have called him “Putin the Great,” “the best legacy of the former Soviet Union” and “the greatest strategist of this century.” They have chastised Russians who protested against the war, saying they had been brainwashed by the United States.

Mr. Putin’s speech on Thursday, which essentially portrayed the conflict as one waged against the West, won loud cheers on Chinese social media. Many people said they were moved to tears. “If I were Russian, Putin would be my faith, my light,” wrote @jinyujiyiliangxiaokou, a user of the Twitter-like platform Weibo.

As the world overwhelmingly condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese internet, for the most part, is pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.

Mr. Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a victim of the West’s political, ideological and military aggression has resonated deeply with many on social media. It dovetails with China’s narrative that the United States and its allies are afraid of China’s rise and the alternative world order it could create.

For its part, the Chinese government, Russia’s most powerful partner, has been more circumspect. Officials have declined to call Russia’s invasion an invasion, nor have they condemned it. But they have not endorsed it, either.

Under Xi Jinping, its top leader, China has taken a more confrontational stance on foreign policy in recent years. Its diplomats, the state media’s journalists and some of the government’s most influential advisers are far more hawkish than they used to be.

Together, they have helped to shape a generation of online warriors who view the world as a zero-sum game between China and the West, especially the United States.

translation of Mr. Putin’s speech on Thursday by a nationalistic news site went viral, to say the least. The Weibo hashtag #putin10000wordsspeechfulltext got 1.1 billion views within 24 hours.

“This is an exemplary speech of war mobilization,” said one Weibo user, @apjam.

“Why was I moved to tears by the speech?” wrote @ASsicangyueliang. “Because this is also how they’ve been treating China.”

Mr. Putin with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, in Moscow in 2019. They said this month that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.”
Credit...Sputnik/Reuters

Mostly young, nationalistic online users like these, known as “little pinks” in China, have taken their cue from the so-called “wolf warrior” diplomats who seem to relish verbal battle with journalists and their Western counterparts.

The day before Russia’s invasion, for instance, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said in a daily press briefing that the United States was the “culprit” behind the tensions over Ukraine.

“When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?” asked the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying.

The next day, as Ms. Hua was peppered with questions about whether China considered Russia’s “special military operation” an invasion, she turned the briefing into a critique of the United States. “You may go ask the U.S.: they started the fire and fanned the flames,” she said. “How are they going to put out the fire now?”

She bristled at the U.S. State Department’s comment that China should respect state sovereignty and territorial integrity, a longstanding tenet of Chinese foreign policy.

“The U.S. is in no position to tell China off,” she said. Then she mentioned the three journalists who were killed in NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, a tragic incident that prompted widespread anti-U.S. protests in China.

“NATO still owes the Chinese people a debt of blood,” she said.

That sentence became the top Weibo hashtag as Russia was bombing Ukraine. The hashtag, created by the state-run People’s Daily newspaper, has been viewed more than a billion times. In posts below it, users called the United States a “warmonger” and a “paper tiger.”

Other Weibo users were bemused. “If I only browsed Weibo,” wrote the user @____26156, “I would have believed that it was the United States that had invaded Ukraine.”

The strong pro-war sentiment online has shocked many Chinese. Some WeChat users on my timeline warned that they would block any Putin supporters. Many people shared articles about China’s long, troubled history with its neighbor, including Russian annexation of Chinese territory and a border conflict with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s.

One widely shared WeChat article was titled, “All those who cheer for war are idiots,” plus an expletive. “The grand narrative of nationalism and great-power chauvinism has squeezed out their last bit of humanity,” the author wrote.

It was eventually deleted by WeChat for violating regulations.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said the United States “started the fire and fanned the flames” that led to the war in Ukraine.
Credit...Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

The pro-Russia sentiment is in line with the two countries’ growing official solidarity, culminating in a joint statement on Feb. 4, when Mr. Putin met with Mr. Xi in Beijing at the Winter Olympics.

The countries’ friendship has “no limits,” they declared.

Given that the leaders met just weeks before the invasion, it would be understandable to conclude that China should have had better knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans. But growing evidence suggests that the echo chamber of China’s foreign policy establishment might have misled not only the country’s internet users, but its own officials.

My colleague Edward Wong reported that over a period of three months, senior U.S. officials held meetings with their Chinese counterparts and shared intelligence that detailed Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine. The Americans asked the Chinese officials to intervene with the Russians and tell them not to invade.

Rising concerns. Russia’s attack on Ukraine has started reverberating across the globe, adding to the stock market’s woes and spooking investors. The conflict could cause​​ dizzying spikes in prices for energy and food, and severely affect various countries and industries.

The cost of energy. Oil prices already are the highest since 2014, and they have jumped as the conflict has escalated. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, providing roughly one of every 10 barrels the global economy consumes.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Food prices. Russia is the world’s largest supplier of wheat and, together with Ukraine, accounts for nearly a quarter of total global exports. In countries like Egypt and Turkey, that flow of grain makes up more than 70 percent of wheat imports.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctions intended to restrict Russia’s access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

The Chinese brushed the Americans off, saying that they did not think an invasion was in the works. U.S. intelligence showed that on one occasion, Beijing shared the Americans’ information with Moscow.

Recent speeches by some of China’s most influential advisers to the government on international relations suggest that the miscalculation may have been based on deep distrust of the United States. They saw it as a declining power that wanted to push for war with false intelligence because it would benefit the United States, financially and strategically.

Jin Canrong, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told the state broadcaster China Central Television, or CCTV, on Feb. 20 that the U.S. government had been talking about imminent war because an unstable Europe would help Washington, as well as the country’s financial and energy industries. After the war started, he admitted to his 2.4 million Weibo followers that he was surprised.

Just before the invasion, Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, ridiculed the Biden administration’s predictions of war in a 52-minute video program. “Why did ‘Sleepy Joe’ use such poor-quality intelligence on Ukraine and Russia?” he asked, using Donald Trump’s favorite nickname for President Biden.

Earlier in the week, Mr. Shen had held a conference call about the Ukraine crisis with a brokerage’s clients, titled, “A war that would not be fought.”

When the fighting began, he, too, acknowledged to his Weibo followers, who number 1.6 million, that he had been wrong.


Nationalistic emotions on social media were also sparked by the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine. Unlike most embassies in Kyiv, it didn’t urge its citizens to evacuate. Hours into the war, it advised Chinese people to post the country’s red flag conspicuously on their vehicles when traveling, indicating that it would provide protection.

The state-owned People’s Daily, CCTV and many top government agencies posted about that on Weibo. Many people used the hashtag #theChineseredwillprotectyou, referring to the flag.

The idea echoed a movie, the 2017 Chinese blockbuster “Wolf Warrior 2,” which ends with the hero taking fellow passengers safely through a war zone in Africa as he holds a Chinese flag high. “It’s Chinese,” an armed fighter says. “Hold your fire.”

Two days later, the embassy reversed course, urging Chinese citizens not to display anything that would disclose their identity. Chinese people living in Ukraine advised fellow citizens not to make comments on social media that could jeopardize their security.

As the war drags on, and especially if Beijing calibrates its position in the face of an international backlash, the online pro-Russia sentiment in China could ebb. In the meantime, other internet users are getting impatient with the nationalists.

“Putin should enlist the Chinese little pinks and send them to the frontline,” wrote the Weibo user @xinshuiqingliu. “They’re his die-hard fans and extremely brave fighters.”


Li Yuan writes the New New World column, which focuses on the intersection of technology, business and politics in China and across Asia. @liyuan6
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 28, 2022, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: In China, Many Take Putin’s Side

No comments:

Post a Comment