Shanghai, China — China’s support for Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine by providing missile and other weapons technology is a “big mistake,” US Ambassador to Beijing Nicholas Burns said on Wednesday.
Speaking in China’s financial hub of Shanghai, Burns also said the Russian invasion, now in its third year, had become an “existential crisis” in Europe.
“We believe it is a huge mistake to allow thousands of Chinese companies to ship so many components, technological components, microprocessors (and) nitrocellulose to Russia to reinforce and strengthen the defense industrial base of the Russian Federation for this brutal war,” Burns said.
China “is not neutral, but has effectively sided with Russia in this war,” the ambassador said, adding that the decision directly contradicted China’s long-standing insistence on “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
China insists it does not provide direct military aid to Russia but has maintained strong trade ties throughout the conflict, along with visits between Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
China is also a major buyer of Russian oil and gas, providing a lifeline to Moscow’s war economy, which is under international sanctions. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, China and Russia signed an agreement pledging unfettered friendship. China has refused to refer to the invasion as such and has blamed NATO for provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There was no immediate Chinese reaction to Burns’ comments, which came during a seminar on China-U.S. relations focusing on the life of Henry Kissinger, a career diplomat who died last year.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Burns also criticized Beijing for undermining people-to-people cultural and educational exchanges by questioning and intimidating citizens attending U.S.-hosted events in China, stepping up restrictions on embassy social media posts and stoking anti-American sentiment.
His comments prompted a rebuke from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
“It is the United States, not China, that has disrupted and prevented people-to-people and cultural exchanges between the two countries,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Wednesday. “The United States has used national security as a false pretext to harass, interrogate and deport Chinese students arriving in the United States. Such actions have caused enormous harm to the people involved. They have created a chilling effect.”
In Washington, the State Department “absolutely” agreed with “everything the ambassador said” in the interview, spokesman Matthew Miller said.
“It’s very difficult” to improve people-to-people relations “when the Chinese government is harassing American citizens who are in China or harassing Chinese citizens who are participating… or trying to participate in American programs,” Miller said.
In the past, the State Department has said it welcomed Chinese students, and that less than “one-tenth of 1 percent” of them had been detained or denied admission.
Relations between Washington and Beijing also remain strained over trade issues, territorial disputes and Taiwan’s self-ruled democracy. The United States maintains close political and military relations with Taiwan despite a lack of formal diplomatic ties in deference to Beijing.
China claims the island as its own territory and will annex it by force if necessary. In recent days it has threatened to hunt down “diehard” supporters of the island’s independence and sentence them to death. It has given no indication of how it plans to respond to this threat.
