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Mark Magnier

Despite a torrent of Western sanctions imposed on Beijing and Moscow, there is little evidence they have had any success in altering Chinese or Russian policies, analysts said on Friday.
The punitive measures have not convinced China to reduce its civilian-military integration or augment its policies towards ethnic Uygurs in Xinjiang, said Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, nor have they convinced Moscow to roll back its war on Ukraine.
“It is very hard to think of cases where China has said, ‘Because of the sanctions, we’re going to change,’” added Chorzempa, speaking at a PIIE event in Washington on Friday.
“Can we actually change other countries’ policies? I think we should be quite bearish.”


However, such pressure succeeded in making it more difficult for China and Russia to carry out effective policies over time, analysts said.
The roughly 28,000 sanctions imposed on Russian individuals, companies and institutions since the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for instance, have resulted in decoupling 60 to 70 per cent of European exports to Russia, said Denis Redonnet, the European Commission’s chief trade enforcement officer.
Russia was previously the European Union’s fifth-largest trading partner with 90 billion euros (US$97 billion) of exports annually, Redonnet added.
While Moscow has managed to source some strategic components elsewhere that it once bought from US and European companies, many others it has not, he added.
At the same time, there is evidence suggesting that sanctions have made those militarily related goods significantly more expensive and of lower quality, degrading the Russian economy.
“They were not designed with the idea that they would stop Russia’s aggression of Ukraine,” said Redonnet of the sanctions. “It plays out over time. It’s complicated.”
Financial sanctions have proved the most effective among others in the toolbox, analysts said, whether aimed at impeding Chinese and Russian military development, protecting Western national security, upholding human rights or slowing foreign tech development
The chokehold afforded by the US dollar’s clout has led major Chinese banks to shy away from financing mainland exports of use in Russia’s military campaign, for instance, amid concern the institutions could lose access to global financial markets.
Western sanctions have also spawned starkly different responses by the two authoritarian states, Chorzempa said.

After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region, Moscow sought to make its economy more sanction-proof and defensively wall itself off.
But an unintended consequence was that its trading partners were less integrated and therefore faced less economic pain cutting their Russia ties after the 2022 invasion.
In contrast, Beijing approached its challenge with an eye to its far larger, more globally integrated economy.
That prompted it to be “the most interlinked with the rest of the world as possible on things like payment systems”, Chorzempa explained, leading it to view sanctions as capable of inflicting “enormous negative consequences”.
“So interestingly, China, on the Russia side, has actually been advising its firms and financial firms to comply with extraterritorial Russia sanctions,” he added.
The dynamic has also changed because Beijing now increasingly has its own chokeholds on the West, analysts said, given its grip over strategic minerals as well as drone and lithium battery technologies.
Looking ahead, the big unknown is how US-China economic relations will unfold under the present Donald Trump administration.
On the one hand, the American leader’s top advisers are stoutly hawkish, even as he has slapped wholesale 20 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports. On the other hand, the mercurial president is laser focused on US trade deficits.
“There is a lot of concern among Congress, people in Washington and China that Trump will, in the context of a trade agreement, potentially agree not to use many of these sanctions or even to roll some of them back in exchange for other concessions,” Chorzempa said.
“This is a tricky space.”


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Punitive measures have neither led Beijing to slow its civilian-military integration nor convinced Moscow to roll back its war on Ukraine


Punitive measures have neither led Beijing to slow its civilian-military integration nor convinced Moscow to roll back its war on Ukraine.
