Moscow’s actions also encroach on China’s consistent hard line over questions of sovereignty and territorial integrity and firm opposition to military intervention on humanitarian grounds.
Russia’s attempts to cast its dispatch of troops to Georgia along the lines of Western intervention in Kosovo have little currency in Beijing, Tsang said.
China also objected to Russia’s attempt to use a Chinese-dominated regional body, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to endorse its recognition of the rebel Georgian regions, Tsang said. Beijing has always insisted the grouping, which met last week in Tajikistan, is not a political alliance and does not pose a threat to any other nation or multilateral institution.
“It’s not meant to rebuke Russia as much as it is to show the world that the SCO under Chinese stewardship is a constructive force,” Tsang said.
Russian assertiveness also helps China by fragmenting US and EU concerns over its own rise while heading off future “color revolutions” that brought democrats to power in Georgia and Ukraine, Tsang said.
Both, he said, are “very welcome developments that China would not like to undermine.”
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