Chinese state media mockingly commemorated Wednesday as “Invasion Day,” the day U.S. President Joe Biden and some of his top officials allegedly predicted Russia would launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
The Chinese jeered that while Biden anticipated the thunder of guns, the only sound to be heard along the Ukrainian border was a hype bubble popping.
China’s state-run Global Times wrote a sarcastic editorial that treated February 16 as a pivotal date in history the world could “learn” from, but not for the reasons advanced by the Biden administration:
The world has once again witnessed the shamelessness and absurdity of a group of “professional screenwriters” in the US intelligence services. People have also seen the complicated tricks of the US when setting an agenda and mobilizing public opinion. Perhaps this is exactly the “intelligence” American politicians need. As the spokesperson of China’s Foreign Ministry pointed out on Wednesday, it is exactly the persistent hype and dissemination of disinformation by some in the West that has added more turbulence and uncertainty to the world already fraught with challenges and intensified distrust and division. We hope relevant parties can stop such disinformation campaigns and do more things that benefit peace, mutual trust and cooperation.
This “intelligence farce” by the US is rare in the current international political narratives. The two sides who are hyped heading into a clash expressed their unwillingness for a war. Russia repeatedly said it won’t attack Ukraine, and the latter clarified that the situation hasn’t been that tense. Yet the US and West have hyped the imminent war non-stop, and even predicted the precise time when the war will break out. Ukraine suffered a huge loss in the panic atmosphere as exchange rates plummeted, capital fled, and flights were grounded…
Recklessly fabricating lies of an “invasion day” shows that the US is not afraid of being embarrassed. It believes that with strong discourse power in the world, it can manipulate public opinion at will. In this crisis, the US is playing a game of two-side bets: whether or not Russia invades Ukraine, the US “wins.” If Russia indeed invades, the US side will say it had expected it long ago and warned repeatedly; if not, the US would say the war was avoided or postponed because of the deterrence of their sanctions.
The Global Times accused Biden of using war hysteria to “alienate the relationship between Russia and Europe, further strengthen the cohesion of NATO, deal a heavy blow to the EU’s “strategic autonomy” tendency, and promote the flow of capital to the US, so as to rip off Europe.”
This latter point has become a staple of Chinese rhetoric on the Ukraine situation: allegations that Biden’s team overhyped the Russian invasion threat because they hope to stampede European capital into fleeing the continent for the safer harbor of the U.S. market. The fact that little Euro capital appears to be stampeding is taken by China not as evidence the allegation was false, but as evidence that Biden’s sinister plan is not working.
The Global Times claimed NATO’s aggressive “eastward expansion” under the hypocritical guise of guarding “regional security” was the real reason tensions escalated in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians should be furious that its putative allies in NATO and the United States were so willing to make it suffer.
“In the long run, this matter will, like the Iraq war and the Afghan war, further consume Washington’s international credibility that has already been left little,” the Global Times concluded, a viewed shared elsewhere on the world stage.
The Global Times was still pounding away at “Invasion Day” on Thursday, praising Russia for maintaining its “strategic composure” in the face of “Western politicians spouting war rhetoric to hype war risks and media disinformation.”
This second broadside looped in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, accused of spreading war hysteria (or, as the Russian embassy to China put it, “information terrorism”) on China’s heavily censored social media platform Weibo.
The Global Times accepted Russia’s claim of withdrawing from the Ukrainian border at face value on Thursday – dismissing growing international skepticism that any real withdrawal is taking place at all – and high-fived the Kremlin for suggesting any Ukrainians who believed Biden’s predictions should have set their alarms for 3 a.m. on Wednesday so as not to miss the big invasion spectacle.
The Chinese Communist paper further took Russia’s military technology claims at face value and saluted Moscow for achieving an “advantage” against the U.S. military “in offensive weapons, primarily hypersonic missiles,” allowing Putin to look down his nose at Biden’s military threats.
Of course, the Global Times made space to praise the Chinese government as well, congratulating Beijing for supposedly helping to negotiate a reasonable diplomatic settlement between Russia and Ukraine while Washington screamed about 3 a.m. invasions and unsuccessfully attempted to drag China into a quagmire.
In the Chinese paper’s telling, China and Russia are the forces of peace and sweet reason, while the U.S., NATO, and the Indo-Pacific alliance of democracies known as the Quad are the “real troublemakers.” China’s loathing for the Quad grows steadily more intense; the alliance is close to displacing “Taiwan separatists” as the top boogeyman in Chinese propaganda.
“Just as Russia has gained experience in long rivalry against the West, China learns lessons from confrontation with the U.S. and knows how to manage relations with world powers and defend its national interests, Chinese experts said,” the Global Times confidently concluded.