It's worthless to ding Xi's China for hypocrisy. They don't care.
And yet, it is hard to get past China's decision to effectively (although unofficially) back Russia in its war against Ukraine. For decades, China's guiding diplomatic light has been respect for sovereignty and the idea that countries must not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. That's how China deflected from any criticism of its own abysmal human rights record, or its treatment of minorities like the Uighur and Tibetans. The line was always, you have no right to interfere with anything within our borders because no country has the right to interfere with any sovereign nation's internal affairs.
For China to not condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the ultimate violation of sovereignty and interference in a foreign nation, is a real break from that supposed principle. It looks like the way they are getting around that is by claiming that former member states of the Soviet Union are not real sovereign countries. As Chinese Ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, said:
Even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretise their status as a sovereign country[.]
If Ukraine is not a real sovereign country, then the Russian invasion isn't foreign interference anymore, just as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not be foreign interference, which is, I am sure, exactly what the Chinese government is thinking about.
The problem is that such a broad statement is a direct attack on the 13 other countries that split off of Russia when the Soviet Union fell. Actually theoretically 14. Why not apply it to Russia too? If you take those words at face value, Russia wouldn't really have "concrete sovereignty" with regards to any other former Soviet state either. So if Latvia invaded Russia, by Ambassador Lu's logic, there would not be any interference. Which is utter nonsense and everybody knows it. Putting aside the fact that Latvia would never invade Russia (it's not in any position to do so), I would bet that if NATO ally with the U.S. Latvia attacked China's friend Russia, Chinese leaders would lose their fucking minds.
But beyond that, Lu's statement suggests that, despite the fact that officially China has recognized all 15 former soviet republics, it doesn't really believe that its neighbor Kazakhstan is fully sovereign. Kazakhstan has a good relations with China, so good that the country that claims to be the protector of the Kazakh people won't criticize China when it sends hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs to concentration camps because they are Kazakh. And to keep Chinese relations good, Kazakhstan will even arrest Kazakhs who criticize China for oppressing its own Kazakh minority. Kazakhstan has gone to bat for Xi's government and its oppressive policies, even when it means undermining something that Kazakhstan claims is its most fundamental value.
Which is why China seems to be quicklybacktracking on Ambassador Lu's remarks. The remarks about former Soviet state's lack of real sovereignty has been wiped from the official transcript and from reports of those remarks in Chinese social media. The Chinese foreign ministry also issued a statement reaffirming that China recognizes the sovereignty of former Soviet countries.
But while the comments questioning whether Ukraine has real sovereignty have been walked back, that unanswers the question that Ambassador Lu was trying to answer: how can China give even tacit support to the Russian invasion of Ukraine when it is so dedicated to the doctrine of non-interference?
