Authors

Discussion

Following Belarus's diplomatic isolation from the West after the 2020 protests, China has increasingly taken on a prominent role in Belarus’s foreign policy (Kłysiński and Jakóbowski, 2021). Although the significance of China-Belarus relations has been analysed by political economy scholars (Hushcha and Gribov, 2019; Rinna, 2021; Zhang, 2021, etc), the dynamics of these relations in the context of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war remain understudied. This paper thus examines the impact of the current crisis on China-Belarus relations and vice versa. 

Both Belarus and China were under the long shadow of the Kremlin, sharing a history of being dominated neighbour to Moscow, in other words, Kremlin's 'little friend'. This similar history continues to impact on their foreign policies, particularly since the onset of the war in Ukraine: Belarus chose to facilitate the war, functioning nearly as a Russian military district, and the Sino-Russian relations reach a new level of closeness. But differences persist: while Belarus publicly aligns with Russia, China officially distances itself, calling for a ceasefire.

To understand these differences, this paper explores the implications of China and Belarus' shared history of relations with Moscow in the context of the war in Ukraine, examing the Russian concepts in the China-Belarus relations. Inspired by postcolonialism theories, this paper interprets China and Belarus’s similar histories of navigating (Soviet) Russian dominance as a kind of (de-)colonized experience. Utilizing discourse analysis of official speeches exchanged between the political elites of China and Belarus since the onset of the war, collected from the digital archives of both states' government websites and their state-run media (a total of 10 pieces in Chinese or Russian as of October 2024), and drawing on decoloniality theories (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018), this study hypothesizes that the diplomatic interactions between China and Belarus are significantly shaped by their concepts of Russian authority, although there is direct influence from Moscow. Both states approach their mutual relationship with their implicit understanding of the Russian impact: for Belarus, this entails managing the realities of living alongside a neighboring superpower and Russia’s strategic partner, while for China, it stems from its historical encounters with (Soviet) Russia. These historically informed concepts of Russian authority are reflected in the diplomatic contact between Beijing and Minsk amid the war in Ukraine, reinforcing both states' alignment with Russia’s broader Eurasian vision, although they articulate their positions regarding the war differently. This paper offers a distinct perspective for rethinking the underlying factors of the war in Ukraine, providing a deeper understanding of the implications of the shared history of Beijing and Minsk's relation with Moscow for the ongoing crisis.