Xi Jinping and the plight of Chinese nationals in Ukraine

The plight of desperate Chinese nationals in Ukraine has further battered Xi Jinping’s credibility, testing his continued refusal to condemn the barbarity of his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin.

There have been unconfirmed reports that four Chinese students were among 13 killed when a Russian rocket hit a dormitory of Kharkiv’s Academy of Culture. Students took to social media to plead for help when none came from the Chinese embassy in Kyiv. ‘The embassy never comes, no plane comes. We can only save ourselves. They abandoned us,’ said one post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform.

A video post claimed students were being shot at indiscriminately by Russian soldiers. Another appeal came from the basement of the Kharkiv Aviation Institute, saying that 188 Chinese students were sheltering there from the shelling. It was accompanied by a photograph of students sitting among a clutter of mobile phones and phone chargers.

A recording of a call to the Chinese embassy was listened to more than 1.5 million times. ‘I’m really scared,’ says a cracked woman’s voice, pleading for help. ‘I called you guys over and over and over again, and really, I am freaking out.’

The plight of Chinese nationals in Ukraine has swept Chinese social media, which initially cheered on Putin’s aggression. Nationalist bloggers have always been allowed more space on the country’s tightly controlled internet, and they applauded the man they called ‘Putin the great’. The tone was overwhelmingly pro-war and pro-Russia, with a heavy dose of misogyny about Ukrainian girls.

At the beginning of the invasion the state-run People’s Daily created the hashtag ‘Nato still owes the Chinese people a debt of blood,’ which became the top hashtag on Weibo. It refers to the 1999 accidental bombing by Nato of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in which three people died.

Unlike most other embassies in Kyiv, China’s did not urge its citizens to leave ahead of the invasion. Then a few hours after Putin’s tanks rolled across the border, it advised citizens to prominently display the China’s flag on their vehicles when moving around, suggesting this would provide protection.

The hashtag ‘The Chinese red will protect you’ reverberated around social media, and nationalists drew parallels with the Chinese movie Wolf Warrior 2, a chest-thumping Rambo-like flick, which broke all box office records. The movie ends with the hero guiding civilians to safety through an African war zone, holding high the Chinese flag. ‘It’s Chinese. Hold your fire,’ says a suitably awed opponent.

The embassy reversed the advice two days later, seemingly deciding that with Xi unwilling to describe the invasion as an invasion and increasingly tainted by association with Putin, flaunting the flag was not entirely wise.

State broadcaster CGTN claimed a Chinese student in Kyiv had been threatened in a supermarket, and another had been ‘called names’ when shopping for cigarettes. Some internet users drew their own conclusion. ‘This is the consequence of not opposing invasion’, said one, responding to the CGTN report. ‘Stop insulting the Ukrainians already, we out here in Ukraine are paying the price.’

The plight of the students has played into a bigger and potentially more dangerous question for the Chinese Communist Party: what and when did it know in advance about the invasion? According to US intelligence reports Chinese officials told Russia in early February not to invade Ukraine before then end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese embassy in Washington described the reports as ‘speculations without any basis... intended to blame-shift and smear China.’

In a summit before the games, Xi described the friendship between the two countries as having ‘no limits’, and it is entirely plausible that Beijing was given some level of advance warning. What seems to have wrong-footed Xi is the sheer barbarity of the Russian assault, with the awful images beamed around the world in real time. Xi shares Putin’s war aims and justifications, but clearly would have preferred something a little less crude – that the violence be kept more low key. He is now being tainted by association.

Even if one were to give Xi the benefit of the doubt, and believe he wasn’t tipped off by Putin, it still represents an enormous failure of Chinese intelligence. China also refused to accept western intelligence reports, which were reportedly shared with Beijing. If Xi didn’t know, then he clearly should have done – and that will be lost on more thoughtful Chinese policymakers.

Whatever the explanation, it still left an estimated 6,000 Chinese citizens in Ukraine in the lurch. China is now scrambling to get them out. The Chinese foreign ministry now claims that ‘nearly all’ Chinese nationals have been evacuated. There is no way of confirming that, nor of the specific plight of the Kharkiv students. The Ukrainian foreign ministry appealed to Russia to allow sage passage out for all foreign students in the city.

Beijing’s new urgency to get them out is no doubt spurred by the knowledge that the experience of Chinese nationals struggling to escape Putin’s tanks, bombs and missiles stands as an indictment of Beijing’s policies and narrative. Xi Jinping may not be able to identify an invasion, but the terrified students of Kharkiv certainly can.