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Officially, China is seeking some kind of peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine but in practice they are buying up Russia’s oil which helps keep the war effort going and also selling Russia non-lethal military equipment. Politico published a story today about a somewhat hidden side of the bromance between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
The pictures posted on the Chinese company’s website show a tall, Caucasian man with a crew cut and flattened nose inspecting body armor at its factory.
“This spring, one of our customers came to our company to confirm the style and quantity of bulletproof vests, and carefully tested the quality of our vests,” Shanghai H Win, a manufacturer of military-grade protective gear, proudly reported on its website in March. The customer “immediately directly confirmed the order quantity of bulletproof vests and subsequent purchase intention.”…
Evidence of this kind shows that China, despite Beijing’s calls for peace, is pushing right up to a red line in delivering enough nonlethal, but militarily useful, equipment to Russia to have a material impact on President Vladimir Putin’s 17-month-old war on Ukraine. The protective gear would be sufficient to equip many of the men mobilized by Russia since the invasion.
Russia has imported more than $100 million-worth of drones from China so far this year — 30 times more than Ukraine. And Chinese exports of ceramics, a component used in body armor, increased by 69 percent to Russia to more than $225 million, while dropping by 61 percent to Ukraine to a mere $5 million, Chinese and Ukrainian customs data show.
If this is a proxy war, China is on the other side. And that’s probably not helping them much. China’s economy hasn’t bounced back the way it was expected to and if the present is a mixed bag the future is looking even less promising thanks to a US led effort to cut China off from high tech equipment. Not only is the US refusing to sell high end chipmaking gear to China, we’ve convinced the Netherlands and Japan to join the effort. This report is from last month:
The Dutch government on Friday announced new restrictions on exports of some semiconductor equipment, boosting a U.S.-led drive to curb supplies of high-tech components to China but drawing an angry response from Beijing.
“We have taken this step in the interest of our national security” said Dutch Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher, adding such equipment may have military applications.
