Australian politician and diplomat Kevin Rudd has a post at Project Syndicate outlining the lessons that China can presumed to have drawn from the Russia-Ukraine War. It’s not easily summarized succinctly but the last lesson Mr. Rudd mentions is something that China hardly need have learned at all since it has long seen self-sufficiency as a most desireable goal:
The last lesson that China’s government will take from Russia’s experience is that it is essential to hardwire the Chinese economy against the kinds of financial and economic sanctions that the US and the European Union are now using to isolate and enfeeble Russia.
To avoid suffering the same fate, Xi’s government will accelerate longstanding efforts to strengthen the renminbi’s international position, open China’s capital account, and increase the currency’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves. That will make it more difficult for the US and its allies to seize Chinese assets than it was for them to freeze Russia’s central-bank reserves.
Xi will also be motivated to redouble his effort to make China a “self-reliant†economy, by selectively decoupling supply chains from the West, supporting domestic technological self-sufficiency, and ensuring food and energy security. But beyond prompting China to double down on these existing policies, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to change the regime’s outlook significantly. Under Xi, China has already been pursuing economic self-sufficiency, financial and technological resilience, and a military modernization geared toward challenging, and someday displacing, US strategic primacy.
Unfortunately, I doubt that the ever-overconfident Western leaders will take the right lesson from that themselves: we need to end our dependence on China for strategic goods as quickly as possible. The Chinese have already demonstrated that they view trade as a zero-sum game (one side wins; the other side loses) and they have no intention of losing.
