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Keeping a close watch on China’s support for Russia: US
US believes this is the time for Beijing to live up to its professed desire to be a responsible stakeholder in the international system, state department spokesperson Ned Price said on Monday
While the US has not seen China provide weapons and supplies to Russia so far, it will continue to keep a “careful eye, very careful watch” on the level of support exhibited by China for Russia and believes this is the time for Beijing to live up to its professed desire to be a responsible stakeholder in the international system, state department spokesperson Ned Price said on Monday.
Addressing reporters at a press briefing, Price said that China will make its own decisions about how it supports Russia’s brutality against the people of Ukraine.
“The PRC (People’s Republic of China) is going to make its own decisions about whether everything that it has purported to stand for in the international system in recent decades, including an emphasis on state sovereignty and the viability of borders or whether all of that was just a show, just bluster,” he said.
He said the US had not seen China condemn Russia’s brutality, but instead, heard senior Chinese officials “parrot some of the worst, some of the most dangerous propaganda that is and has emanated from the Kremlin”.
Price said that the US and its European allies and partners had made two points to China with regards to Beijing’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The first was that they would continue to keep a “careful eye, a careful watch on the level of support” China exhibited towards Russia. Reiterating a point made by President Joe Biden to China’s president Xi Jinping during their conversation last month, Price said that if China were to provide weapons and supplies, and seek to help Russia evade sanctions, there would be “strong consequences for that”, not only on the part of the US but also on the part of its allies and partners.
Secondly, the US had told China that this moment called for all responsible countries to make clear where they stand on questions that are fundamental, “on which there should be no nuance”, including questions of “wanton human rights abuses, the massacring of civilians, the ability of a state to pretend that international borders don’t exist, and the ability of leaders to declare, as President (Vladimir) Putin seemingly has, that another country doesn’t have a right to exist”.
“We have heard from the PRC its desire over the course of many decades to be a responsible stakeholder. Well, now is the time to answer that question. And now is the time to show up,” Price said.
