China’s exports to Russia saw significant growth as Chinese automakers filled the void left by Western companies leaving Russia. China reported a 12.4% drop in exports in June, while imports also fell by 6.8% during the same period.
So that’s why they’ve been banging war drums lately.
Imo the massive geopolitical movements of the last 500 days is second only to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s just crazy to watch in real time.
You would think these Chinese auto companies would be looking to diversify away from Russia with the way global geopolitics is going
China is large enough that they don’t greatly care about global political opinion, their entire focus is on hoovering up and consolidating capital and influence while maligning any actions outside of their country that can be construed as unethical so that by lowering the bar, their dictatorship doesn’t look so bad.
Redirecting the flow of capital from Russia toward themselves is just the most recent opportunity available to them. It wouldn’t matter if it was Spain or Mexico or any other country in a weakened or different state, the whole focus of the CCP is to malign all countries more powerful than them while siphoning capital from countries both more and less powerful than themselves in an effort to lower the reputation of other countries to their levels so that the CCP can pull ahead.
Russia plays an important foil and by being worse than China, they take away attention from how bad China is.