What China’s Social Media Is Saying About Ukraine
A comment widely circulated across various Chinese social-media platforms in recent days depicts the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a romantic triangle: Ukraine is characterized as Russia’s ex-wife, who mistreated the couple’s two children—the breakaway pro-Moscow regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—and who also flirted with the United States and dreamed of joining the NATO family but was rebuffed. Alternate and expanded versions of the metaphor include the U.S. abducting another child, Taiwan, with the implication that China should follow the example of Russia, which took back its own offspring, Crimea.
What is striking about these posts, aside from the obvious misogyny (one comment notes that the characterization “presupposes women have no independent personality, but only an evil mind”), is the central character in all of them: the United States.
Many commentators and Western officials have interpreted China’s noncommittal position over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a
