Several days ago, the dictatorship of Belarus flagrantly forced down an airplane on an international flight, made its way into the plane, and arrested a dissident on board. Earlier this week, it started banning its citizens from traveling abroad. Under the auspices of the Kremlin, Belarus has seemingly begun a process of North Koreaization. The “golden bond” between Russia and Belarus means that Vladimir Putin will never allow another satellite state of the former USSR to drift outside Russia’s sphere of influence in the footsteps of Ukraine. But it is China, a country thousands of miles away, that has emerged as the biggest loser in this crisis. Governments in Western Europe had already begun to treat the Beijing authorities with suspicion. Now that Beijing has chosen to stand with Russian on the issue of Belarus, it is imaginable that the Russiaphobic Eastern Europe will not be fond of Beijing either. That Belarus has become the “North Korea of Europe” has allowed the European Union, whose Eastern and Western member states have long been on different pages over Russia and China, to forge a consensus. But Russia has long accustomed itself to sanctions by the West, and it does not rely on economic development to prop up its image as a major power. What about China?

First, China’s sanctions on EU officials caused the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) between China and the EU to fall through. Then the escalating crisis of Belarus led Eastern European nations to abandon dialogue with China. If the former was an inevitable, direct consequence of Beijing’s wolf warrior diplomacy, it can be said that the latter was an indirect outcome of Beijing’s close relationship with Russia. For many years Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has yearned for investment from Beijing, and China is Belarus’s third-largest trading partner. But in fact, in the first half of 2020, China accounted for just 7% of Belarus’s total trade volume, a far cry from Russia’s 48.5% over the same period. But this has not prevented Eastern European countries from thinking that China and Russia are tarred with the same brush. Economic aid (which is not as big an amount as imagined) aside, the military cooperation between China and Russia has truly worried these small nations. If the joint military exercises between China and Russia in their respective “sensitive areas”, namely the Baltic Sea and the South China Sea, in 2017 and 2019 did not send warnings that were clear enough, the message was unmistakable for the Eastern European nations, long reliant on protection under the aegis of the EU and NATO, when China acted repeatedly against its own version of Ukraine, i.e., Taiwan. Despite all the Chinese media hype about the “16+1” dialogue mechanism between China and Eastern Europe, no one has talked about it since the beginning of this year.

For China, the timing of the Belarus crisis could not have been worse. Although to a certain extent, issues related to Russia are matters of urgency in Europe, they could have been discussed mostly behind closed doors until the German election in September. However, thanks to the Belarus crisis, Eastern and Western European nations have found a consensus – that their diplomatic priority should be about countering China and Russia. This also gives them - especially the wealthy Western European countries - more room to deal with affairs in other regions, such as the South China Sea. The UK has long had its strategic plans for the Indo-Pacific region. Now the EU and the countries of France, Germany and the Netherlands have issued their respective Asia-Pacific policies as well, and have strengthened their military deterrence in the South China Sea with their allies in Asia. Germany and Japan concluded their defense talks on 13th April, with the Japanese government even proposing that the two countries hold joint naval exercises. If these war games go ahead, they will mark the first time the German navy has entered the South China Sea since 2002.

And the US must be mentioned. In a speech to the annual Oksenberg Conference on China Policy at Stanford University on 23rd May, Kurt Campbell, the US coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, said that “the period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end”. As for the interactions to come, “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.” Not only did Campbell mention the US’s QUAD allies in the Indo-Pacific, but he also talked about countries in Europe that wanted to increase their influence in Asia, hoping that they and Washington would reinvigorate the stressed Indo-Pacific system together. Campbell’s speech almost strung all the US’s allies in the Indo-Pacific region on the same chain.

What bearing does all this have on the Hong Kong people, apart from the lessons that can be drawn from the situation in Belarus? The answer is no for those who have never given a single thought to Hong Kong’s direction of development and status in the international arena and those who are actively preparing to move abroad or flee the city. However, having gone through this extraordinary week, Hong Kong people might as well think about how they can pool their ideas and efforts to create something for the continuation of this city apart from dealing with the impending crisis.

(Tom Wan Tsz-hin, Research Director in European Politics at the Global Studies Institute in Hong Kong)

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