Turns out Chinese President Xi Jinping’s partnership with Vladimir Putin has limits after all: He doesn’t want to follow the Russian leader into diplomatic isolation.
With speeches and gestures in recent weeks, Xi has taken his most significant steps to create space between Beijing and Moscow since Putin invaded Ukraine almost nine months ago. The latest signal came at the Group of 20 summit on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, where China signed off on a communique Wednesday saying that "most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine.”
"The Russian president is almost alone in the world with his policy and has no strong alliance partner,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who met Xi in Beijing earlier this month, told reporters in Bali on Wednesday. He noted the statement’s "astonishingly clear words.”