After a week of runaway diplomacy around how to end the war in Ukraine that has widened rifts between the United States and other Western powers and raised new questions about the future of US assistance for Ukraine, China is looking at how it can capitalize.
For Beijing, the diplomatic fissures between the United States and its European allies -- the latest of which was opened up by an Oval Office clash between US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy -- presents new opportunities to repair its own battered relations with Europe.
The fallout could also ripple out to Asia, where countries aligned with Washington, such as Taiwan, are grappling with the implications of a more transactional United States and the opportunities that could create for China as it looks to ramp up pressure and assert itself more powerfully in the Pacific.
“This has been pretty unequivocally good for China,” Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who previously advised the European Commission on China strategy, told RFE/RL. “Beijing sees the wider opportunities that this could bring, from Taiwan contingencies to more global cooperation with Russia to a weakened United States.”
How Can China Benefit From The US Policy Shift?
China had already been reaching out to Brussels and European capitals before the dustup in Washington that saw Zelenskyy leave the White House early without signing an important minerals deal after being berated by Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
That ongoing outreach by Chinese diplomats has looked to exploit fears that US efforts to reset the relationship with Russia and quickly end the war in Ukraine could leave European countries abandoned by their ally, three European Union officials told RFE/RL.
Beijing, which has professed neutrality but has supported Russia amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is now looking to expand on its pitch and benefit from the transatlantic rift, including from Trump’s plan to hit goods made in the EU with 25 percent tariffs, which Brussels said it would retaliate against with countermeasures of its own against the US economy.
Small says that this Chinese effort is still in an early “fact-finding phase” to “discover what kind of openings are available in this new context.”
“Whatever China puts forward will be met with skepticism,” he said. “But Beijing thinks they will see some opportunities if they can navigate this first phase, especially if tariffs hit.”
Does China Want To Be A Peacemaker In Ukraine?
China has largely been content to remain on the margins amid the flurry of diplomatic activity since Trump took office in January, but officials have been probing the European side.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China believes all stakeholders should participate in peace talks, underscoring Europe's role in them ahead of US-Russia talks in Riyadh that did not include Kyiv or European officials.
“If I was Beijing, I’d be telling the Europeans what they want to hear and one thing they want to hear is that Europe and Kyiv should be at the table to discuss Ukraine’s future,” Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, an assistant professor at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan and a former adviser to the European Parliament, told RFE/RL.
On the sidelines of the conference, retired Chinese colonel Zhou Bo made headlines during an interview in which he floated the prospect of Chinese and Indian peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a settlement to end the war.
That was followed by comments by Wang at the Group of 20 (G20) meeting of foreign ministers in South Africa where he said that the recent US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia were a “window of opportunity for peace” in Ukraine and that “China will continue playing a constructive role in the political settlement of the crisis.”
Ferenczy sees these comments as trial balloons as Beijing tests how receptive its outreach will be, but she cautions that years of trade spats between Brussels and Beijing, as well as strained ties from China's economic support of Russia throughout the war and the supply of dual-use goods for its war efforts, will be difficult to shake.
Beijing will also need to overcome the perception that its diplomatic efforts are more about image building than actual peacemaking.
Soon after the war began, Chinese leader Xi Jinping rushed to paint China as neutral and Chinese diplomats called for peace at international forums. In 2023, Beijing issued a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine that seemed designed to set the stage for a cease-fire and peace talks, but it provided no clear roadmap to end the war and was dismissed by Western officials as setting the stage for a peace on Russia’s terms.
In a similar vein, EU officials say that Beijing is yet to present any new offers to the 27-country bloc in its early rounds of outreach beyond rhetoric about an unreliable United States and the prospect of normalizing trade relations.
“It’s unavoidable that we will be affected by statements from Beijing that sound good to us,” Ferenczy said. “But a less reliable United States doesn’t make China more reliable all of a sudden.”
Will Tensions Over Ukraine Diplomacy Affect Asia?
The Trump administration has said that its efforts are designed to push allies to pay a bigger share of their own defense needs, recalibrate trade relationships, and bring an end to the war in Ukraine.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also said that, if the United States were to scale back military assistance for Ukraine, it would allow Washington to focus its resources on the Asia-Pacific region, where the administration has said countering China is a priority.
But there are early signs that Washington’s approach to ending the war in Ukraine will have ripple effects further east, particularly in Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing has vowed to annex if it refuses to peacefully accept unification.
Taiwan has long faced the possibility of a Chinese invasion, but pressure also looks to be growing.
On February 28, China’s Defense Ministry would not rule out the use of force against Taiwan, and its spokesman Wu Qian warned the United States that “playing sneaky tricks on Taiwan would only backfire.”
Those comments came after Taiwanese authorities said they had detained a cargo ship crewed by Chinese nationals, which they believe may have severed an undersea communications cable. Following that, the Chinese military held what Taipei said was unannounced "shooting training" off the island’s southern coast.
Taiwan’s ability to deter a potential attack hinges on whether the United States stands ready to help, and the Taiwanese government has seen US assistance for Ukraine as something of a bellwether for how Washington could react in the event of a crisis with China.
Ryan Hass, a former director for China on the US National Security Council, said that Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine and his recent spat with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office will no doubt cause anxiety in Taipei, but added that Taiwan’s unique position as the manufacturer of 90 percent of the world’s most-advanced semiconductors leave it in a unique position with the United States.
Trump has called for Taipei to increase defense spending and said that he wants to move some of the island’s semiconductor foundries, which manufacturers the chips largely for US tech companies, to the United States. Any type of relocation, however, would be a costly and slow process.
Hass says this makes Taiwan “indispensable to Trump’s goals for an American industrial renaissance” as he looks to revamp manufacturing back home.
“Taiwan needs the US, but the U. also needs Taiwan,” Hass wrote on X. “Trump knows this fact. There is a complementary division of labor between US tech companies and Taiwan’s chip foundries that cannot be replaced.”
The CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) visited the White House on March 3 and afterward announced plans to make a fresh $100 billion investment in the United States.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a leading supplier to major US hardware manufacturers, said the plan involves building five facilities in the United States in coming years.
