What did China learn from the near-coup in Russia?

China got very quiet over the weekend as Russia seemed to be experiencing a coup at the hands of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin. It wasn’t until Sunday night when the outcome of the incident had been clear for nearly a day that China finally spoke up.

Beijing finally broke its silence late on Sunday night, backing Russia with a terse statement that brushed off the incident as “Russia’s internal affair.”

“As Russia’s friendly neighbor and comprehensive strategic partner of coordination for the new era, China supports Russia in maintaining national stability and achieving development and prosperity,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in the online statement.

China was waiting to see what would happen before inserting itself into the chaos. On the international scene, Russia has become China’s best ally and comrade in opposing the United States. All of that seemed in danger of being lost on Saturday.

Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist with the Australian National University’s Taiwan Studies Program, said Beijing is likely worried about the weakening of Putin.

“China likely fears a domino effect: that if Russia falls, China may be next,” he said. “For China, Putinist Russia is useful cushion both geopolitically and ideologically, especially during the era of Biden administration’s ‘value-based alignment’ rhetoric.”

And of course, Chinese state media filtered out some of the parts they wouldn’t want Chinese people thinking about, i.e. Putin almost being forced out by a band of rebels. One thing about Chinese media is it’s not very subtle.

Videos of Wagner fighters occupying military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, home to the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, and departing the city to the cheers of local residents were broadcast Saturday around the world.

But those kind of scenes were notably absent from China’s most-watched news program on state broadcaster CCTV.

Instead, the prime time program aired footage showing traffic moving calmly outside the Kremlin and tourists posing for photos near a pair of security officers, as well as a determined Putin vowing retribution for those “on a path to treason” in his national address.

But this Reuters report suggests that Chinese people with business in Russia knew what was happening and were reacting in real time even if the government was quiet.

As news broke on Saturday that mercenary Wagner troops were careering towards Moscow in a short-lived rebellion, several businessmen from southern China began frantically calling factories to halt shipments of goods destined for Russia…

“We thought there was going to be a big problem,” Shen Muhui, the head of the trade body for the firms in China’s southern Fujian province said, recalling the scramble among its members exporting auto parts, machinery and garments to Russia.

And ever after the government came out in support of Putin, some people in China are quietly wondering what comes next.

China “will be more cautious with its words and actions about Russia”, said Shanghai-based international relations expert Shen Dingli.

Some Chinese scholars have gone even further.

Yang Jun, a professor at Beijing’s China University of Political Science and Law, wrote a commentary published on Saturday that called for China to directly support Ukraine to avoid being “dragged into a quagmire of war by Russia”.

“With the development of the current situation and the trend of the war…(China) should further adjust its position on Russia and Ukraine, make its attitude clearer, and decisively stand on the side of the victors of history,” he wrote in Chinese-language Singaporean newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.

China does a lot of trade with Russia so if Putin does go down, that would have a major impact on the Chinese economy. And obviously from China’s perspective that would be a worst case scenario for a couple of other reasons. First, it would be a message about a dictatorship biting off more than it can chew with an unwise invasion, something China is openly thinking about with Taiwan. Second, it would be a reminder that even powerful dictators in charge of nuclear weapons aren’t completely isolated from the will of the people. If Putin does go down, Xi will be thinking he might be the next domino to fall, and he’ll be right.