Liu-wen Fang was devastated when she saw images of Kyiv under attack and on fire as Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Fang had studied in the Ukrainian capital in 2018, where she grew fond of Kyiv and its people. She remembers walking the city’s winding riverbanks, visiting its spacious parks, sharing cocktails with friends in its charming bars, and having dinner parties in homes like those she now watched being turned to charred ruins by Russian missiles. Before the invasion, Fang had held a positive view of Russia and President Vladimir Putin. However, after the invasion, her views changed. She lost all her support and respect for Russia and Putin after hearing about her Ukrainian friends’ lives being destroyed due to Putin’s imperialistic fantasies.
Fang’s critical views of Russia are unique, particularly in the context of China’s deeply censured news media environment and especially when it comes to the war in Ukraine. Yet, more than a year after the invasion, there are signs that the perspectives of everyday Chinese people are shifting towards Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s view of Putin.
Hsia-Liang Hou from Chengdu province in central China recently re-evaluated his views of Russia and Putin. For years, he had seen Russia as a country with a powerful military and Putin as a strong and intelligent leader who dared to stand up to the West and NATO. But after more than a year of war without a decisive Russian victory, Hou said he has started to see the invasion of Ukraine as a display of Russian weakness rather than its strength.
Tai-Yuan Wan had also thought Russia’s invasion was justified because of what he believed was a scheming US and an aggressive NATO working to gain more power closer to Russia. But, as fighting continues into a second year, it seems like Russian forces are not really trying to ”save Ukraine”, as Moscow has maintained, he said.
Wan also does not support Russia’s recently announced plans to station nuclear weapons in Belarus. He thinks that is a very aggressive step and a threat to world peace, and it makes him think that Russia is starting to act much more aggressively in this conflict than the West.
Wan, Hou, and Fang all said that they rarely discuss the war in Ukraine with their friends and family in China. Many Chinese people do not feel the war impacts their lives, so they do not stay up to date on events and have very little to say about it. People in China also receive very different information about the war, depending on where they get their news, said Fang.
Hou believed most still sided with Russia in the conflict. His view is supported by a Carter Center China Focus survey conducted last April on Chinese public opinion regarding the war in Ukraine. That survey found that about 75 percent of respondents agreed that supporting Russia in Ukraine was in China’s best interest.
Wan, however, disagreed. He thinks most people in China today believe that the invasion was wrong. Wan’s belief is backed by a newer survey released in November by the Japanese think tank Genron NPO, which found that about half of Chinese respondents expressed some level of opposition to Russia’s invasion. The more recent survey might indicate that sentiment in Chinese society is shifting away from support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
No such shift appears to have taken place in terms of President Xi Jinping’s policies towards Russia or his opinion of Putin. That the Chinese leader stands side-by-side with the Russian president was made clear when Xi arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit from March 20 to 22. During the visit, the two leaders expressed condemnation of the US’s conduct on the international stage and showcased their intentions to deepen ties on a wide range of topics from trade to military affairs.
Su-Mei Chen from Shanghai said she was disappointed by the outcome of Xi’s Russian visit. The 30-year-old told Al Jazeera she was already sceptical of the Chinese government’s 12-point peace plan for the war in Ukraine unveiled on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion. Chen saw the plan as mostly favouring Russia. She had hoped Xi’s visit would result in more realistic steps towards ending the war.
Despite very favourable Chinese media coverage of the Russian perspective on the war, Chen believes there is a general reluctance among everyday Chinese people for Beijing to give unconditional support to Moscow. This is because many Chinese people see China as a peaceful nation that doesn’t interfere in faraway conflicts, and also because the ties between Chinese people and Russian people are weak, she said.
Putin and Xi’s relationship is mostly a political alliance of convenience between two governments and not an expression of a deep bond between two peoples, said Fang. Even if there was a strong bond between Chinese and Russians, that is not a guarantee for anything, she added. The deep kinship between Russians and Ukrainians didn’t protect them from fighting a war with each other.