Did China Know Russia Would Invade Ukraine? Answer Will Affect Beijing’s Reputation

SAN FRANCISCO — 

China has rejected a report that said its officials told their Russian counterparts to delay an invasion of Ukraine until after the Beijing Winter Olympics. Experts say the flap indicates Chinese leaders could have known an attack was coming and that such a discovery would taint China’s reputation in the West.

Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin called the March 3 New York Times report “pure fake news.” The newspaper cited a Western intelligence report saying senior Chinese officials told senior Russian officials in early February not to invade Ukraine before the end of the Feb. 4-20 Games. The war began a week ago.

“Such practice of diverting attention and blame-shifting is despicable,” Wang told a regular news conference Thursday.

“The ins and outs of the developments of the Ukraine issue are very clear. The crux of the issue is known to all,” he said.

In Washington, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said the report’s “claims are speculation without any basis and are intended to blame-shift and smear China.”

National leaders seldom tell one another in advance about upcoming wars, so information between Russia and China would point to a special relationship, said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“It is important, because it shows the nature and the depth of the China-Russia relations,” Sun said. “If China identifies with Russian invasions, then China is an accomplice. We cannot expect China to respond in a constructive way.”

In the United States, which has harshly criticized Russia’s invasion, State Department spokesperson Jalina Porter said Thursday that supporters of Moscow will land on the “wrong side of history” and that “the world has been watching to see which nations stand up for Ukraine.”

Sino-Russian ties have grown closer over the past year, but China positioned itself this week as a mediator between war-divided Russia and Ukraine rather than a backer of Moscow.

China’s ties with Russia still rank as an “extremely high priority,” said Andrew Small, a senior fellow with the trans-Atlantic cooperation advocacy group German Marshall Fund. The two competed with Washington during the Cold War and have again realigned themselves against the West in recent years.

China probably expected Russia to win quickly in Ukraine, as it has in its past wars, Small said.

“I think the sense that China acted as an enabler for Russia in the runup to this is not something that’s going to go away, and that’s one of the areas where there will be a lot of collateral damage in different ways economically for China and in their relations with other countries in Europe in particular,” he said.

China probably had at least an inkling of Russia’s designs for Ukraine before the Olympics and urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to delay the attack as not to distract from the Games, said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii.

Leaders in Beijing could not easily have influenced Putin’s overall decision whether to invade Ukraine, Vuving added.

“What China could do was to persuade Putin to delay the attack [until] after the Olympics, which Putin did, so I think that was realistic and it indicated a very high level of cooperation between China and Russia,” he said.

Despite Beijing's Baby Boosterism, China's Population Growth Hits New Low

WASHINGTON — 

For the past 10 years, China’s domestic policy changes have carried a growing sense of demographic urgency. A strictly enforced one-child mandate changed to a two-kids-in-some-cases option (2013), which morphed into two children for all (2016), which rolled over to the current government push for three offspring (2021).

But where are the babies? Why aren’t playgrounds as jammed as Beijing’s notorious 3rd Ring Road? The workers of tomorrow are nowhere to be found.

Despite the government’s best efforts, the data released last week by China’s National Bureau of Statistics show that in 2021 in a nation of 1.4 billion people, there was a net population growth of only 480,000 people — against 10.1 million deaths and 10.6 million births — suggesting a disconnect between China’s policy goals and its people.

FILE – Families with young children pose for photos in Beijing, Feb. 13, 2021.Struggling with an aging population and declining birth rates, China is trying to shift its population policies to avert a demographic crisis.

“Working overtime night and day and facing the ridiculous cost of goods … who wants your children to grow up in such an environment?” said a poster on Weibo, China’s microblogging platform.

“You can’t have both mortgage and formula,” another joked.

A third quipped, “Let’s guess … will this year’s Spring Festival gala be promoting the three kid policies?” The Spring Festival Gala, a TV production from the state-owned China Media Group, was recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most watched TV program since 1983. And, according to state-controlled CCTV, it is an annual must-watch New Year’s Eve extravaganza of dancing, singing and comedy.

China’s birthrate has declined swiftly over the past five years, from 12.4 births for every 1,000 citizens in 2017 to 7.52 births for every 1,000 citizens in 2021, the lowest in nearly 60 years, according to statistics bureau records. The time span is significant because the Great Chinese Famine began in 1959 and ended in 1961, three years before China conducted its benchmark second census. “Some 30 million Chinese starved to death, and about the same number of births were lost or delayed,” according to an article about the famine in the National Institutes of Health archive.

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Big Country With an Empty Nest, told VOA Mandarin that “as China’s economic miracle has been heavily based on its inexhaustible labor force, an inflection point in its population will inevitably mean an inflection point in its economic model.”

n this June 1, 2017 photo, women walk with children wearing matching hats as they cross a bridge at a public park on International Children’s Day in Beijing.

Has population already peaked?

Although scholars have already referred to China’s demographic crisis as a ticking time bomb, China’s population may have peaked much earlier than projected given a rapidly aging population coupled with the rapidly declining birth rate, Yi said.

China’s National Population Development Plan (2016-2030) estimated that the fertility rate between 2020 and 2030 would hover around 1.8 babies per woman of childbearing age, and that the country would start to experience negative population growth in 2031. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a public policy think tank, a nation needs a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population.

China’s true fertility rate may be lower than the official estimate, Yi said. “We will start to see the population decline in 2022, nine years earlier than expected,” he added.

Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, wrote last week on his company’s website that “the most likely scenario is that slowing productivity growth and a shrinking workforce prevent China ever passing the U.S.”

China’s seventh census, released in 2020, found that there were 880 million between the ages of 16 and 59 in the workforce, a sharp drop of more than 40 million compared with 2010 figures. You Jun, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said in March that China’s labor force would continue to decline, shrinking by as many as 35 million people in the next five years. In about 25 years, one-third of China’s population will be retirees, according to the 2020 census report by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

Global issue

China is not alone in facing this issue. A study published in October 2020 in The Lancet, a medical journal, warns of the “jaw-dropping” economic, social and geopolitical effects on nearly every country as fertility rates fall and populations shrink. “Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth,” said the authors of the study.

Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow who specializes in economics at the Hudson Institute, said population growth is one of the most important sources of economic growth because as the workforce declines, so does the rate of innovation.

“The innovativeness and ingenuity of human beings is reduced because a large part of the creativity of people comes in the first part of their career,” he told VOA Mandarin. “So, if you have an aging population and a declining population, you’re likely to see less of that ability to innovate, which is another key element of growth going forward.”

Ning Jizhe, head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, acknowledged after the release of the 2020 census that “the country’s economic structure and technological development need to be adjusted and adapted” as the country’s population structure changes.

Bill Conerly, an economist and the author of The Flexible Stance: Thriving in a Boom/Bust Economy, said the declining birth rate would not have an immediate impact on China’s economy.

“A baby is a net drain on the economy for 15, 25 years and sometimes even longer. So I don’t put a lot of importance in this,” he told VOA Mandarin.

But in the long term, the declining birth rate will eventually affect the labor market. “Actually, the birth rate has been coming down for quite some time,” he said. “So maybe China’s only 10 years away from having a very tight labor market. It will eventually come.”