Amid the power politics, the Syrian people suffer

Why did China veto the UN Security Council resolution on Syria? It doesn’t have the same stake in the survival of Bashar al-Assad’s regime as Russia does. And Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to Hu Jintao, who will take over as president and Communist party boss this year, is going to Washington next week, so it was scarcely a good time to anger the Americans. It’s not as if China frequently exercises its veto – in fact, – it’s only done so eight times since 1971.

I think there are several explanations. First, China hates any government being overthrown by an uprising. The Chinese Communist party long ago gave up being ideological – now they value simply stability and their own power. When they see authoritarian regimes being ousted it makes them nervous. At the beginning of last year’s “Arab Spring”, a handful of Chinese tried to start what they called a “jasmine revolution”. Not only was it quickly quashed, the word “jasmine” was blocked on the internet and the police prevented florists and farmers from selling the flower.

Second, despite the long-running hostility with Russia in earlier years, they feel more comfortable in the anti-western camp. The USA is still an ideological power, proselytising democracy and capitalism, so the Chinese resist it wherever possible. It’s arguable that supporting a government is just as much an act of ‘interference’ as supporting an uprising, but the Chinese don’t see it like that. For them, the status quo is pretty much always better. Change and insecurity spell danger.

Then, they fear Islamists. When they look at Syria, the Russians see Chechnya – they fear that the majority Sunnis who are spearheading the revolt could turn into jihadis, just as they did in the Caucasus. China in turn sees Xinjiang, where many Turkic Uighur people, also Sunnis, resist rule from Beijing. The Uighurs say it’s a nationalist struggle, but the Chinese characterise it as religious, partly because after 9/11 that enabled them to label anti-Beijing Uighur groups as “terrorists”.

And yet, despite all this, China’s Vice Foreign Minister, Zhai Jun, met a representative of one of the Syrian opposition groups in Beijing earlier this week. That suggests that China believes that there will be change in Syria at some future point, so they need to have contacts with groups that might come to the fore.

All this would normally lead to an abstention not a veto. But with the Russians taking the lead, maybe the Chinese felt this was a good opportunity to show the Americans and Europeans that they can’t be railroaded into allowing intervention as they feel they were in Libya. In all this power politics, and Cold War style diplomatic dealing, it’s the people of Syria, of course, who suffer.