Western Sinophobes have recently been surprised by how China’s menacing eagle has suddenly become a dove. After years of sending forth his cadre of splenetic “warrior” diplomats, President Xi Jinping has abruptly decided to depict himself as a peacemaker, listing twenty conflicts in his Global Strategic Initiative that China would be ready to help resolve.

China’s change of tack is a setback for Pentagon hawks, who’d previously done so well by using February’s high-altitude balloon saga to ramp up fears of Chinese spying, and seizing upon the off-the-wall utterances in April by Lu Shaye, Beijing’s ambassador to France, to further increase tensions between East and West. We can discount the Instagram Interlude of Liz Truss’s trip to Taiwan as being as inconsequential as her premiership.

The Biden administration suddenly decided that tensions with China had gone too far with all that talk of cold wars becoming hot

Making hawks even more jittery, the Biden administration suddenly decided that tensions with China had gone too far with all that talk of cold wars becoming hot. The highly capable US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, was sent into the belly of the Zhongnanhai beast for his first meeting with new foreign minister Qing Gan and commerce minister Wang Wentao. Next, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan spent two days in talks with Gan’s predecessor, Wang Yi, who now outranks him as the Communist Party’s top foreign policy advisor. These talks were designed to smooth over the “silly balloons” affair and avoid even the possibility of some Indo-Pacific aerial or marine “mishap” escalating further.

Meanwhile, the UK got in on the act, with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly giving a relatively emollient – actually pretty intelligent – speech at the Mansion House on relations with China that appalled those on the Tory Right, such as Iain Smith, the party’s chief spokesman on the People’s Republic.

All well and good, any reasonable person might say. But alas, the web of sanctions the US has imposed on all and sundry undercuts its main goal of getting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken back into Beijing for the meeting his hosts cancelled over the balloons. Specifically, in 2018 the Pentagon sanctioned People’s Liberation Army General Li Shangfu after he procured Su-35s and S-400 missiles from Russia. Never mind that Biden promised that these sanctions would be lifted so that Li Shangfu – now China’s defence minister – could commune with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: Austin’s own department refused to issue the rescinding order.

So US and UK policy towards China remains prisoner to crude bipartisanship, even when it cuts across real national interests, and is locked into a mix of containment, technological retardation and wary engagement. For obvious reasons, neither government can oppose Xi Jinping’s new interest in playing global peacemaker – even as they pour cold water over the likelihood of any major results. This is especially the case with Ukraine where they claim Beijing has too much of a parti pris, even if the CIA has so far failed to present any hard evidence of China allegedly helping re-arm the Russians.

But Xi’s initiatives have not been without success. China helped repair relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, even though Wang merely put the finishing touches to the efforts of Iraq and Oman diplomats to bring the two sides together. It’s worth noting that such a deal might actually have been achieved three years previously had Trump and the ghastly Mike Pompeo not murdered Islamic Revolutionary Guard supremo Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport in January 2020, after he’d flown in to pick up Saudi responses to an Iraqi-brokered attempt at détente with its Shiite neighbour.

With the US pivoting to the Indo-Pacific, it’s no wonder that medium-sized Middle Eastern powers are turning away from the Americans and towards the Chinese, who at least don’t waste their breath moralising while doing the exact opposite. Some are electing to use yuan rather than US dollars in international oil and gas transactions, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was readmitted to the Arab League, even though he remains heavily subject to US sanctions.

Xi’s real problem as a would-be peacemaker is that China has very little track record in such highwire diplomacy

But what of China’s role in a potential ceasefire in Ukraine? President Zelensky had a “meaningful” phone call with Xi, who then despatched ambassador Li Hui – for ten years Chinese ambassador to Moscow and a fluent Russian speaker. That means he can talk to Zelensky and Putin in their mother tongue. China and Ukraine are on relatively good terms, but Beijing has compromised itself by construing the conflict as NATO’s war and believing that Russia would prevail quickly.

Putin and Xi have met about 40 times and outwardly at least seem to enjoy cordial relations, despite Russian suspicion of the “little lemons” and Chinese contempt for a drunken failed state. Behind the scenes, China is concerned that their mad friend in Moscow might resort to (tactical) nuclear weapons – with Xi giving Putin a warning about that – even though he did not say a peep when Putin then decided to put tactical nukes into Belarus. China fears that by losing the war, Russia is weakening China’s broader strategic position, not least by encouraging the West and some Asia-Pacific allies to gang up in areas nearer its vicinity. The last thing China needs as it tries to recover from the pandemic is western sanctions over Russia, let alone a full- blown war over Taiwan.

Xi’s real problem as a would-be peacemaker is that China has very little track record in such highwire diplomacy. China was part of the six power talks about North Korea’s nuclear testing, and also one of the 5+1 talks in Vienna, which yielded the 2015 JCPOA to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium. But in general, while China can provide a forum for such talks, it has no record of using hard leverage to force agreements.

China does, of course, have grander structural ambitions. First, Xi is determined to replace US unipolar hegemony with a multipolar world order, something many medium-sized powers in the Global South (and beyond) are keen to see after America’s smash-and-ruin interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia. Second, the Chinese have been alarmed by how Biden has managed to craft a developed-world coalition to support Ukraine’s war effort. They will not want anything similar to evolve in the event of conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

China does not want Europe to draw any closer to the US – something that may come to an abrupt end anyway if Donald Trump returns to the White House late next year. Like many isolationist Republicans, Trump detests Zelensky – a genuine celebrity leader – and regards Ukraine as a corrupt sewer draining US resources. Perhaps in the short-term China merely has to show goodwill over Ukraine until Trump blows up the entire transatlantic alliance in favour of God knows what.

Above all else, the Chinese are cautious people, despite being a nation of gamblers. They don’t want Putin to lose this war, lest it triggers chaos within the larger Russian Federation, which abuts China. Nor do they want any kind of “colour revolution” in Russia or the Central Asian “stans”, one of the cardinal tenets of Chinese Communist Party rule for the last three decades.

But there is another factor at play. Any meaningful ceasefire in Ukraine – and one is not in sight – would require China as a guarantor, along with Europe and Turkey. It seems highly unlikely that either Russia or Ukraine will settle for half a cake. That means one, and then both, will resume fighting once they have paused and rearmed. That would put the guarantor powers in an impossible position, rather like France and Germany when they guaranteed the 2015 Minsk II process in Donbas.

Above all else, China would never put itself in a position where it might lose face. So while it may well continue to promote its vision of the new international order by playing a more prominent role in alleviating conflicts such as Sudan, it is unlikely that its doves are going to be needed in Ukraine anytime soon.