“The biggest surprise for China was that Russia totally misjudged its own power. We thought that Russia would win a very fast war,” the Chinese expert explained ruefully, a few weeks after the invasion.
This was not the official line, which was then in the phase of intense attempts to persuade global audiences that Beijing had no idea what was coming. But it was a better reflection of Chinese foreign policy thinking than either playing innocent or repeating ad nauseam that the invasion of Ukraine was the responsibility of the United States and NATO pushing a big power against the wall. One of the main reasons behind Beijing’s resistance to such entanglements in the past was not because partners and allies weren’t useful but because the countries in question risked dragging China down with their mistakes. The “Pakistan model,” which China had been touting, was conditioned by exactly this experience: Beijing didn’t want to get stuck defending every Pakistani intervention in Kashmir or inadvertently drawn into a conflict with India, so it confined itself to providing the capabilities its friend needed and then staying above the fray. Russia was not the first Chinese partner to believe it would win a very fast war and found itself in a hole, but China wasn’t usually pulled into it with them.
