Chinese in Ukraine Fend for Themselves as Beijing
Takes a Careful Stance on Russia’s Invasion
By Sha Hua, March 2, 2022, WSJ

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine last week, China’s
government told its roughly 6,000 citizens in Ukraine to
prominently display China’s red-and-yellow national flag
to ensure their safety.

Less than two days later, with the situation deteriorating
and Beijing increasingly perceived by the Ukrainian public
as having sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin,
China’s Embassy in Kyiv offered new advice: Don’t display
your identity, or anything that might give away that you
are Chinese.

The about-face reflects the delicate geopolitical balancing
act that Beijing is walking on Ukraine, seeking to cement
its friendship with an increasingly autocratic Russia, while
portraying itself as a defender of the sovereignty of all nations.

The reversal also reflects an apparent miscalculation by
Chinese officials about the likelihood of war in Ukraine,
which has left it scrambling to protect its citizens there
from an attack launched by Mr. Putin, with whom Chinese leader
Xi Jinping had celebrated a “no limits” relationship just weeks
earlier.

For Chinese citizens on the ground, it has been a dizzying
sequence of sometimes-conflicting advice, including the
flip-flop on the Chinese flag.

An evacuation-flight sign-up form was posted on the embassy’s
social-media account hours after the first explosions in Kyiv
last week, only to be canceled. Instead, the embassy organized
buses for those in the Ukrainian capital, with the first two
arriving in Moldova on Tuesday morning, five days after the
invasion, according to state media.

For those who couldn’t make it onto the buses, the embassy
posted schedules for trains bound for neighboring countries.
“This is a more appropriate way to travel,” the embassy wrote.
The embassy said diplomats in neighboring countries would care
for those who made it out of Ukraine.

Many Chinese citizens say they felt they have effectively
been told to fend for themselves. “The embassy said they
couldn’t help. ‘If you can flee yourself, just flee yourself,’”
said one Chinese music student in Kharkiv, the large city near
Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia that has become the scene
of some of the heaviest fighting.

“There is currently no good way out,” the music student, who
asked only to be identified by her first name, Crystal, wrote
in messages to a reporter. She has been hiding out in a refuge
for most of the past week.

Alekei Guo, a Chinese student in Kyiv, decided to take matters
into his own hands, trying for four days to secure a train seat
to a neighboring country before squeezing onto a Romania-bound
train on Monday.

In the weeks before Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, the U.S., the
U.K., Japan and other nations evacuated their diplomats and urged
citizens to leave the country, citing mounting evidence of a
growing Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s borders.

In contrast, Chinese officials joined Ukrainian and Russian
officials in playing down those warnings. Just hours before
the invasion, China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed U.S. warnings
of an imminent Russian attack, accusing Washington of “heightening
tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare.”

One result of that approach, said Andrew Small, a Berlin-based
senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank: “They put
their own citizens in harm’s way.”

“Either Beijing knew of an imminent invasion and didn’t prepare
its own embassy and people, or their intelligence services
misjudged the trajectory of the war, despite Beijing’s privileged
channels to Moscow, leaving them unprepared,” he said.

Asked by The Wall Street Journal whether China had mismanaged
the safety of its citizens in Ukraine, Foreign Ministry spokesman
Wang Wenbin said during a daily briefing Monday that “the Chinese
government is always concerned about the well-being of our citizens overseas.” The exchange was later omitted from the Foreign Ministry transcript.

Mr. Guo, seeing life going on as usual around him in Kyiv,
initially believed the threat of war was being hyped. “We even
went to class on the 24th,” he recalled, referring to the day
the war began.

After the invasion, Crystal followed the embassy’s advice,
affixing the Chinese flag on her window. “I felt much calmer
after doing it,” she said. The next day, she signed up for a
seat on the government evacuation flight.

On China’s internet, an outpouring of nationalist pride, some
of it fanned by state media accounts, celebrated the flag guidance
as evidence of their country’s might.

Social-media users likened the evacuation plans to the plot of
“Wolf Warrior 2,” a nationalistic film about a Rambo-like action
hero who battles American-led mercenaries and evacuates Chinese
people from war-torn regions. China’s government, invoking the
movie, has promised to protect every member of its growing diaspora.

That euphoria soon gave way to disillusionment. With Russia’s
military offensive stalling, the Chinese Embassy in Kyiv on
Friday asked Chinese citizens not to display any identifying
signs of their nationality, saying the tense situation meant
heightened security risks for Chinese nationals.

On Saturday, the mood darkened further after Chinese state media
posted videos featuring a Chinese student in Kyiv who said that
she had been followed and intimidated by a local Ukrainian,
attracting hundreds of millions of views.

The same evening, Fan Xianrong, Beijing’s ambassador in Ukraine,
told Chinese citizens that the planned evacuation flight had been
delayed, citing security concerns. He asked Chinese citizens in a 10-minute-long video to be understanding of domestic sentiment
and to avoid provoking Ukrainians.

Chinese citizens in Ukraine took to social media, asking
compatriots back home to tone down the pro-Russia triumphalism.
They blamed the negative Ukrainian sentiments on the initial
outpouring of pro-Russian voices on China’s social media, as
well as misogynistic comments made against Ukrainian women.

On Tuesday, a Chinese man was shot while trying to flee the
country, China’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. The circumstances
of the incident couldn’t be learned, but the ministry said that
the man was recovering.

For Adam Ni, publisher of China Neican, a newsletter on Chinese
governance, misguided social media posts only partly explain
Ukrainian sentiments toward Chinese citizens. While Beijing may
have thought that China would be seen as a neutral, benevolent
actor, international opinion has generally viewed China as tacitly
supporting or even encouraging Russia’s actions, he said.

In recent days, Mr. Fan, the Chinese ambassador in Kyiv, has made
a more concerted effort to address Ukrainian sensibilities. “We
respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial
integrity,” he said in the Saturday video, adding he hoped the
crisis would be resolved through negotiations.

China’s internet regulators have also taken action. The operator
of the Twitter -like platform Weibo said it had suspended or shut
down more than 10,000 accounts that had “spread misinformation,”
“hyped up war” or expressed misogyny toward Ukrainian women.
Regulators later blamed overseas voices for fueling anti-Chinese
sentiment in Ukraine.

In his Saturday video, Mr. Fan acknowledged China’s inexperience
in such overseas crises. “In the past few days, like everyone
else, we kept hearing the sound of sirens, explosions and gunshots
and ran for cover,” he said. “We have previously only seen such
scenes in movies.”

For Mr. Ni, the movie reference was a clear nod to the Wolf
Warrior franchise. “The real world doesn’t work in the same way
as in the Wolf Warrior movies,” he said.

By Wednesday, Mr. Guo said he had reached the Romanian capital
of Bucharest, pretending to be a South Korean citizen during his
escape to avoid attack. He expressed anger at what he said were misrepresentations of Chinese sentiments toward Ukraine. “What
we want is peace,” he said.

Crystal, meanwhile, is still in Kharkiv, sheltering from the
daily shelling. “I hope the motherland can come up with an idea
and bring us home,” she wrote.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-careful-line-on-conflict-clouds-outlook-for-its-citizens-in-ukraine-11646217353

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