Russian ‘invasion was wrong’: The people’s view from China

Liu-wen Fang’s tears flowed as she saw the first footage of Kiev being attacked and on fire as Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The 26-year-old had supplemented her business studies with an exchange year in the Ukrainian capital in 2018, where she studied Russian and Ukrainian at a major university.

In that year she became fond of Kiev and its people. She remembers walking along the city’s winding riverbanks and visiting its sprawling parks, sharing cocktails with friends in its charming bars, and having dinner parties in houses like the ones she now saw turned into charred ruins by Russian missiles.

“It was very hard to see the city that had been my home turn into a war zone,” Fang* told Al Jazeera from her home in Shanghai.

Before the invasion, Fang had a fairly positive view of Russia and President Vladimir Putin. After the invasion, that all changed.

“What I saw and what I heard from my Ukrainian friends about their lives being destroyed by Putin’s imperialist fantasies meant that I lost all my support and respect for Russia and for Putin,” she said.

Fang knows her critical view of Russia is unique, especially in the context of China’s heavily censored 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 ordinary Chinese are shifting toward Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s view of Putin.

China’s waning support for Russia?

Hsia-Liang Hou, 41, from Chengdu province in central China, recently reevaluated his view of Russia and Putin.

For years he had seen Russia as a country with a powerful army and Putin as a strong and intelligent leader who dared to take on the West and NATO.

But after more than a year of war without a decisive Russian victory, Hou said he came to see the invasion of Ukraine as a show of Russian weakness rather than its strength.

“Russia is much bigger than Ukraine in so many ways, and they had all the advantages in the beginning, but they still didn’t get very far on the battlefield,” he told Al Jazeera.

When Hou first learned that Russian troops had invaded Ukraine, he saw it as a retaliatory move by Moscow, intended to resolutely and swiftly strike back at NATO and the United States. After all, NATO had wanted to encircle China and Russia, and Putin “has been one of the few leaders who fought against this,” he said.

But Russia’s lack of success in Ukraine has made him reconsider whether the threat from NATO was as urgent and imminent as he had thought.

“If NATO is such a major threat to their country’s survival, why don’t the Russians fight harder?” he asked.

Tai-Yuan Wan had also thought Russia’s invasion was justified because of what he believed was a cunning US and an aggressive NATO working to push ever more power closer and closer to Russia.

But as fighting continues into a second year, it appears Russian troops are not really trying to “save Ukraine,” as Moscow has insisted, he said.

Russia “now just wants to burn the country down, which I don’t support,” Wan told Al Jazeera from China’s capital Beijing.

Wan also does not support Russia’s recently announced plans to station nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“I think this is a very aggressive move and a threat to world peace, and it makes me think that Russia is starting to act much more aggressively in this conflict than the West,” Wan said.

Wan, Hou and Fang all said they rarely discuss the war in Ukraine with their friends and family in China.

Many Chinese don’t feel like the war is affecting their lives, so they don’t stay abreast of events and have little to say about it, Wan explains.

People in China also get very different information about the war depending on where they get their news from, said Fang, explaining that opinions about the war depend on whether they get news “from Chinese media or whether they also get news from some get foreign media”. .

“That makes it difficult to discuss the topic,” Fang said.

Wan, Hou and Fang said they had noticed that more Chinese were beginning to see the war as a Russian mistake.

Still, Hou believed most still sided with Russia in the conflict.

Hou’s view is supported by a Carter Center China Focus questionnaire held last April on Chinese public opinion on 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.

However, Wan disagreed.

“I think most people in China today believe the invasion was wrong,” he said.

Pale’s belief is supported by a newer study released in November by the Japanese think tank Genron NPOwhich showed that about half of the Chinese respondents expressed some resistance to the Russian invasion.

The more recent research could indicate that sentiment in Chinese society is shifting away from support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

China must be neutral

No such shift appears to have taken place in terms of President Xi Jinping’s policy toward Russia or his views on Putin.

That the Chinese leader stands side by side with the Russian president became clear when Xi arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit from March 20 to 22.

During the visit, the two leaders expressed their condemnation of US behavior on the international stage and expressed their intentions to deepen ties on a wide range of issues from trade to military affairs.

Su-Mei Chen of Shanghai said she was disappointed with the outcome of Xi’s Russian visit.

The 30-year-old told Al Jazeera she was already skeptical of the Chinese government’s 12-point peace plan for the war in Ukraine, unveiled on the anniversary of the Russian invasion. Chen saw the plan mainly in favor of Russia.

She had hoped Xi’s visit would result in more realistic moves to end the war.

“The only positive thing about China maintaining close ties with Russia after the invasion was that China could potentially pressure Russia to find a peaceful solution,” she said.

“But Xi has not even spoken to the Ukrainians and he is expanding cooperation with the Russians, so now it seems that China is fully on Russia’s side in the war,” she added.

China, so staunchly behind Moscow, is not favored even by some of the Chinese who support Russia, such as 48-year-old Kou-Tong Wong from Shenzhen.

“I hope Russia wins the war, but this is not a conflict that has anything to do with China, so we should not send weapons or soldiers to fight in it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Despite the very favorable coverage in the Chinese media of Russia’s perspective on the war, Chen believes there is a general reluctance among ordinary Chinese for Beijing to support Moscow unconditionally.

“This is because many Chinese see China as a peaceful country that does not get involved in distant conflicts, and also because ties between Chinese and Russians are weak,” she said.

Chen’s point contrasts sharply with the relationship between Putin and Xi. Both leaders had repeatedly pointed to the deeper ties between China and Russia during Xi’s visit to Moscow.

But none of the people interviewed by Al Jazeera believed that Xi’s relationship with Putin reflected the general relationship between Chinese and Russians.

“I think it is mainly a political alliance between two governments and not an expression of a deep bond between two peoples,” said Fang, the former exchange student in Ukraine.

“Even if there was a strong bond between Chinese and Russians, it doesn’t guarantee anything,” she added.

“The deep kinship between Russians and Ukrainians did not prevent them from going to war with each other.”

* Interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their identities.