Harold James

Could China get sucked into war in Ukraine?

(Getty images)

If war in Ukraine is to end any time soon, the relationship between Moscow and Beijing will prove crucial. A relatively benign scenario is that China might become increasingly frustrated by the protracted war, and by the obvious incompetence and spectacular inhumanity of Putin’s military offensive. It would be rational for president Xi Jinping to tell the Russian autocrat that he has to stop. But there is a much darker, more frightening, scenario in the history books that could point to what happens next.

That precedent is the story of the development, and increasing belligerence, of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II before 1914. Like modern China, the German Empire was an autocracy trying to modernise, very well connected with the world economy and with a powerful export industry that would suffer from long drawn out conflict or a collapse of world trade. It was at the same time trying to find an alternative to what it perceived as an illegitimate and hypocritical British domination of the world, achieved by means of a control of finance. It wanted a land-based globalisation that would rival Britain’s sea-based trade and political network.

All these aspects are easily translated in the modern parallel of China’s increasing frustration with what it sees as the decaying US control of global finance and the world’s political and security architecture. There are quite precise echoes of the Berlin-Baghdad railway project in Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Like modern China, the German Empire before 1914 was an autocracy trying to modernise

But the Kaiser’s Germany was also increasingly worried about its isolation and friendlessness. It believed that with France on the west, the Russian empire in the east, and Britain across the North Sea, it was encircled, and its development restricted. It needed to look to adventures far away – in southern Africa, or in the Middle East – in order to find room to expand.

The only ally for Germany was Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg dynastic empire.

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