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China is studying the effects of Western sanctions on Russia to prepare for a possible invasion of Taiwan.
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Her officials have visited Russian agencies fighting the sanctions, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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An inter-institutional group has also been set up to produce reports on how to reduce the impact of sanctions.
China is closely monitoring the impact of Western sanctions on Russia to prepare for a possible invasion of Taiwan, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Unnamed people told the newspaper that China formed an inter-institutional group in the months after its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The aim was to issue regular reports on how to reduce the impact of sanctions if the US and its allies were to impose similar measures on China. China in the event of an armed conflict over Taiwan.
They also said Chinese officials regularly travel to Moscow for meetings with Russia’s central bank, the finance ministry and other institutions involved in countering sanctions.
An unnamed person familiar with China’s sanctions efforts said Beijing is “very interested in almost everything, from ways to circumvent them to all kinds of positive effects, such as incentives for developing domestic production .”
Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told the Journal that Russia acts as a “sandbox” for China when it comes to how sanctions work and how to deal with them.
“They know that if an emergency occurs in Taiwan, the toolkit that will be used against them will be similar,” he said.
The US and its allies have imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia since the start of the war.
Russia has managed to mitigate some of the consequences by relying on middlemen, bartering and trading with non-sanctioning countries, including China, India and Turkey.
Yet the Russian economy has been hit hard by the ongoing conflict and the Western sanctions imposed on it.
Russia’s central bank raised its key interest rate to a record high of 21% in October to combat inflation, and last month the ruble fell to a two-year low against the dollar.
Russian companies and defense contractors have recently said they have scaled back their operations and are struggling to make profits because of high interest rates and sanctions.
Alexander Libman, professor of Russian and Eastern European politics at the Free University of Berlin, told BI that he is not surprised that China is trying to learn from Russia’s experiences.
“China has always tried to understand how to avoid Russia’s mistakes, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was studied very carefully in Beijing,” he said.
Libman added that China has likely already learned that its economy can adapt to “nuclear” Western sanctions by trading with other countries, adapting production facilities to rapid and unpredictable changes in supply lines, and living without access to Western technology.
“In essence, the experience of the past three years has substantially reduced the fear of large authoritarian states regarding Western sanctions, and this is very worrying,” he said, adding that economic cooperation between China and Russia could undermine any future Western sanctions against would make China less heavy. effective.
People close to China’s decision-making process told the Journal that the existence of the research group does not suggest the country is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan, but rather the “extreme scenario” of armed conflict and its economic fallout .
However, some military and defense analysts civil servants have predicted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could occur within the next few years.
Read the original article on Business Insider
