Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the most consequential military conflict Europe has witnessed since the Second World War — has riveted the attention of the world. Observers have grappled with the meaning of the act of aggression and scrambled to ponder the wider implications of the war. Almost inevitably people look to draw analogies—both historical and contemporary ones.
One popular contemporary analogy is between Russia’s actions vis-à-vis Ukraine and China’s approach to Taiwan. Beyond some broad-brush parallels — the most obvious parallel being that both Ukraine and Taiwan are peace-loving democracies that are the objects of belligerent irredentism on the part of more militarily powerful and threatening neighboring autocracies — there are also significant differences. Xi Jinping’s China is not Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Taiwan is not Ukraine.
China Is Not Russia
Russia under Putin has repeatedly dispatched its armed forces for combat missions overseas to a range of countries, including Georgia, Syria and Ukraine, as well as conducted major military interventions against other states, most recently Kazakhstan (albeit at the invitation of that country’s president). Moscow has also actively supported armed groups and militias in some of these same countries and others.
Although China has also been active and assertive in the use of its armed forces beyond its borders in recent years, Beijing has eschewed large-scale combat operations. Around its periphery, China has engaged in provocations, confrontations and even violent clashes. But China, unlike Russia, has refrained from massive interventions, invasions or occupations of other countries since it invaded Vietnam in 1979. China’s largest deployments of troops overseas in the post-Cold War era have been on U.N. Peacekeeping missions. Whereas Russia has more than 20 military installations beyond its borders, to date, China has only one official military base on foreign soil — in Djibouti (established in 2017) — and a handful of other facilities it does not formally acknowledge.
Of course, Beijing has a history of using its potent armed forces and muscular coercive apparatus within China’s borders to repress vigorously peaceful protesters, political dissidents and disaffected ethnic minority peoples. The locations of these operations include Beijing, Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as Hong Kong. China has also not hesitated to employ armed force and a wide array of coercive instruments around its periphery. This includes building roads and bunkers in remote frontier areas of the high Himalayas along its contested border with India and constructing artificial islands and military installations in disputed waters of the South China Sea. In recent years, China’s armed forces have also engaged in deadly clashes and violent confrontations with Indian army units along the disputed Line of Actual Control and harassed and rammed the fishing boats and coast guard vessels of Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries.
Putin appears to relish projecting the image of a strongman who is routinely willing to thumb his nose at the rest of the world. By contrast, Xi — at least to date — has mainly sought to cultivate a statesmanlike image on the global stage. At times he has given speeches attempting to cast China as a more responsible, less meddlesome and values-free version of the United States. And Xi has invested a lot of time and resources in promoting a set of high-profile international efforts intended to demonstrate that China is a constructive and proactive great power. Employing positive rhetoric touting “win-win” solutions and aspirations to build a “community with a shared future for mankind,” China under Xi’s leadership has launched ambitious efforts such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Putin, by contrast, has made no real effort to offer an alternative to U.S. global leadership beyond delivering vague grandiose declarations (often in tandem with Xi) and has offered the world little in the way of economic stimulus beyond the prospect of more energy exports and hype about the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Despite consisting of only a handful of Soviet successor states, the EAEU is touted as Russia’s answer to China’s BRI. In terms of geostrategic activism, Russia’s major multilateralist initiatives have tended to involve China. These include the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperati
