Does China Have "Allies"?

It's a story. We've all heard a thousand times a perfectly normal, widely liked, completely unobjectionable person experiences a rapid and positive change in their station. Maybe they come into a lot of money, maybe they're granted some huge promotion, maybe they're elected into public office, and all of a sudden they turn into an a**hole.

Their time, once freely given, must now be scheduled, and only if you're important enough to deserve a meeting. Their support, once shown to their friends, constantly without expectation, now must be bought or won through glad-handing or constant flattery.

Sometimes, by the end of the story, that wayward character learns their lesson, and sometimes they don't.

But from our perspective, on the outside, the moral of the story is clear. Money and power can attract sycophants, hustlers, yes-men, and political parasites, but it can never buy the love of a true friend.

And as it turns out, that lesson also holds true in global diplomacy, where there is a massive difference between partnership of convenience or coercion and a true international alliance.

Around the world, there are a few nations trying to act as leaders on the international stage, gathering power and influence like new age hegemons as they prepare for the grand global games that lie ahead.

Out of all those nations, none has been so aggressive or so focused on bringing as many partners on-side as possible than the nation of China, where Xi Jinping and his inner circle are working to finish the work of becoming a true global superbar. China's diplomatic strategy has been anything but sunshine and rainbows.

It's been a hard, charging, all-out effort to expand and cement Beijing's influence by any means necessary. At this point, it's undeniable, China has become a real leader on the global stage, and at least for now, it's still rising.

But when you get to the brink of superpower status, using the methods and machinations that China has, it's worth taking the time to ask the question, does China have partners of convenience and coercion, or does it have allies?

And whatever the answer may be, what does that mean for China's higher ambitions? In international affairs, alliances are everything. Nations that choose to stand together for both their mutual betterment and the collective deterrence of their adversaries can grow and prosper together.

They can keep the weakest and most vulnerable among them safe from harm, pursue development with a disregard for divides in borders, language, or religion, and make more of the world safe and accessible for their respective people.

Alliances have turned small wars into world wars, and they've been the difference maker in ensuring that countless wars were avoided. They're the glue that holds international organizations together, that enables high concepts like global justice or humanitarian aid to at least try and be put into action.

In essence, they're essential, at least in the estimation of most of the world's powerful geopolitical minds. But ever since it started to really pursue the power and clout different.

We have the principle of the purpose of this operation, which is the power of the system, the defense system, what the system meansất Kellanck means to do this. a global superpower, the nation of China has taken a very different approach.

As a rule, China simply doesn't make formal alliances. It has precisely one such alliance assigned to its name all the way back in 1961 with North Korea, a nation that is entirely dependent on China for its survival today.

Other than that, China does not have any formal allies, and we guarantee you that whatever other nation you're thinking of, they are not the exception to the rule.

China is aligned with Russia in a so-called no-limits partnership. They're deeply engaged in bilateral trade, and China is even supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, but their relationship isn't formalized in any major way.

China is engaged with Iran on economic and security matters, and they signed a 25-year-long comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in 2021, but they've made none of the commitments to each other that you might expect of true diplomatic allies.

The nations of the BRICS organization are partners in a large multilateral cooperative with China at its head, and the same could be said for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, but those organizations too fall far short of what we'd typically imagine to be a true geostrategic alliance.

Where the United States and Europe have NATO, and Russia has the dysfunctional yet still technically intact Commonwealth of independent states, China has nothing of the sort, and it doesn't seem interested in building anything truly comparable. At its most simplified, China's logic on international affairs goes something like this.

Every nation is a self-interested actor on the global stage. Every nation will act in its own self-interest. The self-interest of nations will guide them to pursue things like development, the accumulation of wealth, the ability to reliably defend themselves, and the concentration of their own power.

Often, when considering nations as self-interested actors, you're really considering their rulers and elite class, meaning that their incentives will also include political self-protection, accumulation of personal wealth and power, and safe, reliable engagement in corrupt enterprise. And up until that point, China's logic is fairly non-controversial.

In fact, it's that same approach, treating nations and their leaders as rational actors working in their own self-interest, that we make sure to rely on here at Warfront.

But Beijing seems to extend that logic a little bit further. At the end of this logical chain, China sees and acknowledges the fact that there are only so many powerful nations or blocs that a smaller nation can choose to ally themselves with. An even smaller subset will be true superpowers, or at least something relatively close.

Nations will enter geopolitical partnerships with whatever option is most appealing to them, which China generally seems to expect will be the option that provides a nation with the greatest means to enrich itself and its leaders using its available resources without anybody else meddling in their affairs unless absolutely necessary.

And by China's apparent logic, that's where the decision ends. Nations don't choose their allies because of any politeness or any veneer of generosity or benevolence or fair treatment.

They'll go with the least worst approach, enrich themselves however they can, and suffer through whatever they must as long as it's easier to remain allied with their current partner than to switch sides. For China, that sets up a very interesting dynamic because following that line of thinking, it's important for China to do a few key things at once.

When thinking about its international partners, China has to think about how to incentivize them to continue believing that closeness with China remains in their best interests.

China has to think about disincentivizing them from rethinking their choice, both by sweetening the deal when necessary and also making it harder to disengage once they've already signed on the dotted line. But what doesn't enter into that theory of international diplomacy is the idea that China would have to be liked.

Certainly, China wouldn't be able to tolerate outright critique, let alone some sort of diplomatic slander from the nations that it's chosen to partner with.

After all, that's just bad business. But as long as these partner nations avoid getting in China's way and ensure that they show the appropriate respect to Beijing in public, it doesn't particularly matter how they feel about Beijing in private.

As long as China and its partner nations continue to operate in their mutual self-interest or pursue China's self-interest in ways that aren't so intolerable that another nation would break their partnership, all the rest is irrelevant.

To explain what we mean, we can highlight the broad strokes of China's diplomatic strategy. In an overall sense, China tends to approach international deal-making one agreement at a time, both as it moves from country to country and as it moves from issue to issue.

If China wants to cultivate, let's say, maritime security arrangements with the nations of Southeast Asia, it's typically going to go nation by nation to make individual bilateral arrangements instead of something larger.

If China wants to leverage arms deals as a way to gain the compliance and partnership of different nations, it typically will avoid stating publicly, this is what's required to procure this piece of technology, like, say, the United States would.

Instead, it'll have those conversations with interested nations behind closed doors without subjecting itself or them to the expectation that China would build a consistent set of rules that everyone then has to follow.

China pursues a few key types of agreements with foreign nations between trade, financial, technology, and military agreements, but it strongly prefers the bedrock of its international relations to be a combination of development projects and imbalanced trade relationships where China accounts for a very large proportion of another country's trade, despite

That country making up only a small share of China's total trade volume.

It avoids direct military interventions at all costs and even avoids indirect military deployments through any equivalent of, say, Russia's Wagner Group that would risk sending Chinese nationals to fight in shadowy conflicts abroad. If geopolitics is poker, then China plays with its cards. held very close to its chest.

It keeps its commitments as limited as possible, gives other nations access to Chinese interests as minimally as possible, and holds just about every other world nation at arm's length, even while deeply involving itself in those other nations' affairs.

Frankly, it's not a balanced arrangement, but from China's perspective, it's far less important to be balanced towards its partner and client nations than to be indispensable. Now, thus far, we've spoken about China's approach in broad strokes, but we can learn a lot more by delving into the specifics.

To do that, we've got to focus on a few different nations and initiatives, but we're going to keep focused on highlighting the larger dynamic at play, the way that China ensures that it's always in the interests of its partner nations to keep working together, despite also engaging in the sorts of actions that one would expect to drive a wedge through those

Relationships.

We can start with some of the nations closest to China. North Korea, as we mentioned, and other Asian nations like Pakistan or Myanmar. China's relationships with those nations are all different, as is always the case when China chooses to partner with other countries, but they all share one thing in common.

They're not so much equal partners as they are vassal states. Now, to explore what that means, let's start not with North Korea, but with Pakistan. In comparison to China, Pakistan is about as economically powerful in relative sense as the nation of Israel is in its partnership with the United States.

Both Pakistan and Israel command about 2% of the GDP that their larger ally does.

But whereas Israel is much more of a partner than a vassal state, exerting real political influence in Washington, operating upgraded versions of some of America's best warfighting tech, and working hand-in-glove with the American military as trusted allies, Pakistan enjoys nothing of their sort with China.

Although Beijing refers to their partnership as a, quote, all-weather relationship and invests heavily in infrastructure and economic projects within Pakistan, that relationship goes in one direction only.

Islamabad has no real leverage in Beijing of any kind. It's able to purchase Chinese military hardware, but it can't count on China to fight alongside it.

While it's true that China relies on Pakistan to counter India, similar to how the United States relies on Israel to counter Iran, Pakistan would never bother to hope for the same level of support that Israel receives.

We'll put it to you this way. If Iran disappeared tomorrow, not defeated, not surrendered, just magically disappeared, the United States would still consider Israel a very close ally. If it were India that magically disappeared tomorrow, could we say that China would still treat Pakistan the same way?

Or take the nation of Myanmar, a place where China wields an immense influence even during an active and ongoing civil war? For China, Myanmar is strategically critical. The nation is host to a major pipeline that China considers absolutely essential, since it's the only direct line that China could use to receive fuel from the Persian Gulf.

If... Vital waterways like the Malacca Strait were blockaded in a war over Taiwan. China's invested heavily into Myanmar, and it allowed the nation's military government to enact a takeover in 2021, before continuing to funnel weapons into the country as Myanmar's most important arms supplier.

But saying that China doesn't treat Myanmar like an ally would be an understatement. Hell, China doesn't even treat Myanmar like a sovereign nation.

For one thing, China has propped up an autonomous regional government in Myanmar for decades, Wa State, which lords over drug production areas and basically allows China to offload a whole lot of human vice onto Myanmar's territory.

Drugs, prostitution, gambling, that sort of thing. Myanmar's government has been fighting a civil war against a major rebel coalition for years, and China hardly lifted a finger until 2024, making it clear that it didn't particularly care who won the war.

It was only in the last year or two, when Chinese nationals and investment interests have come to threaten Myanmar, especially as it relates to that pipeline, that China has started to lay down the law.

And even then, China's intervention is less focused on helping Myanmar's regime than it is on making clear to both the military and the rebels that they are not to mess with China's**t. Or take North Korea, the only nation till this day to enjoy a fully formalized alliance with Beijing.

But to call the two nations friends in 2025 would be a major misunderstanding of the dynamic between the two countries.

North Korea is completely dependent on China, more so than any other nation on Earth. China accounts for over 90% of North Korea's total trade. It controls access to North Korea by land, and for the most part, by sea.

And it is the only reason that North Korea has survived, or that its leaders at least remain fed, after decades and decades of isolation from the rest of the world.

China relies on North Korea as a geopolitical asset, both as a strategic buffer between China, South Korea, and Japan, and as an attack dog to express all the rowdiness and geopolitical uncertainty that China considers anathema for itself. But North Korea's need for China is many orders of magnitude greater than China's need for North Korea.

And it's not lost on China that North Korea doesn't tend to act like that's the case. Pyongyang has long resented Beijing's unwillingness to support its nuclear weapons program more extensively, and its unwillingness to do more than what's absolutely necessary for North Korea on the international stage.

And North Korea has responded fairly often by defying China's wishes.

From China's likely perspective, North Korea is disobedient, petulant, and ungrateful.

China, meanwhile, has stood aside, while the UN Security Council heaps sanctions on North Korea, insists that North Korea avoid any action that could lead to war on the peninsula, and fears that North Korea could one day turn its nuclear warheads against China itself, hence China's unwillingness to just cut North Korea loose.

There's a saying in North Korea that sums up the relationship well, according to... numerous senior-level defectors from Pyongyang.

Japan is our enemy of 100 years. China is our enemy of 1,000 years. Moving away from the nations where China exerts the greatest control, we can look at its relationship with Russia.

Beijing speaks openly about its no-limits partnership with Moscow. Xi Jinping once called Putin his, quote, best, most intimate friend. And the two nations collaborate on all manner of important issues.

China is Russia's most important trading partner, sustaining its economy despite a crush of international sanctions. China depends on Russia for a large share of its energy needs and pays Moscow back with technological support, a steady flow of dual-use goods that can be put toward Russia's war effort, and meaningful backing on the diplomatic stage.

But at the same time, Russia has watched its relationship with China become more and more imbalanced as China has noted Russia's increased dependence on its support and sought to deepen those ties even further.

China isn't just propping up its friend. It's offering Russia help that it cannot refuse with the full knowledge that accepting that help today will make Russia dependent on China for decades to come. China is pushing into the Arctic, despite having no Arctic territory to speak of.

It's growing its influence with the former Soviet states, and it's moving rapidly into the void in the global arms export business that Russia is leaving behind. According to documents that were leaked in 2025, Russian intelligence even fears that China could invade and annex parts of Russia outright within the next few decades.

But even knowing that China is working overtime to increase its own power, and to make Russia into the junior partner in their relationship, Russia stays.

After all, what's the alternative? The same could be said for Iran, which considers China its primary economic partner and its most important diplomatic ally to the extent that China is essentially propping up Iran's regime single-handedly.

China is happy to consume as much Iranian oil and natural gas as can be provided, including around 90% of all Iranian crude, and it's both Iran's largest import partner and its largest export partner.

Iran depends on China for all kinds of goods that it otherwise couldn't get due to sanctions, and China is pouring vast amounts of money into Iranian ports, railways, refineries, and all sorts of other infrastructure projects that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

But unlike the relationships between the other world nations, where there would be some expectation that such a highly dependent partner would be protected, China's answer to Iran in its time of need has been a simple one. Don't even think about it.

When Israel and Iran engaged in 12 days of devastating hostilities, and Israel leveraged its support from the United States to bomb deeply buried Iranian nuclear sites, China sat by and didn't lift a finger. Nor, it seems, did Iran seriously expect much help. But again, what's Iran to do?

It can be a global pariah state and depend on China to help it avoid total collapse, or it can be a pariah state without anyone to save it from total collapse. Really, the choice is simple.

Compare those relationships to the dynamics that China shares with its adversaries, like the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and... there are more similarities than you might expect.

China is the largest trading partner to both South Korea and Japan and is the United States' third largest trading partner behind only Canada and Mexico. China works to maintain good relations with each of those countries, typically avoiding the sorts of large, destabilizing escalations that could risk those relationships collapsing.

But it's happy to act in ways that push and test the relationship in order to preserve and expand its own interests.

The same is true for the nations of the BRICS collective.

China and India could hardly call themselves allies, but they tolerate each other well enough in the short and medium term, even as they fight border skirmishers, watch as advanced Chinese military kit flows into Pakistan, and size each other up for what will one day be a new great power rivalry in a few decades' time.

BRICS nations like Ethiopia or Egypt work closely with China and accept large-scale investment, even as they also accept large-scale debts in the process, and in the case of regional rivals, Egypt and Ethiopia specifically, they've got to tolerate the fact that China works relatively equally with both sides.

And while none of this is all that different from the relationships that nations have with other major powers, like the US or the European Union, the really weird thing is the lack of contrast.

Using the example of US ally Israel, again, in comparison to a country like, say, Panama, that has a more strictly transactional relationship, and the difference between Israel and Panama's experiences with the US is fairly profound.

But compare the relationship that China has with, let's say, North Korea or Russia to its relationships with Japan or Australia, and they really aren't that different.

China incentivizes Japan to maintain a mostly positive relationship differently than it incentivizes Russia, but the fundamental approach is the same. And for China, nowhere is that cookie-cutter approach more obvious than in its Belt and Road Initiative, the massive international infrastructure campaign that China has been working on since 2013.

Whether it's in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Indo-Pacific, China's approach is highly consistent.

Approach developing nations with ambitious, expansive infrastructure projects, offer to allow these countries to place themselves in debt or surrender control of resources instead of paying outright, and then use those relationships as an entry point for China to expand its economic, diplomatic, and at times military profile across the globe.

The benefits for Beijing are plentiful. For one thing, the Belt and Road Initiative allows China to invest in the infrastructure to harvest mineral and natural wealth, refine it, and then transport it back to China as part of a massive worldwide infrastructure that China's building all at once.

For another, it becomes really easy to get other nations to do what China wants if those other nations also know that they're developing and their leaders and elites are growing wealthier because of China's initiatives.

Again, the question isn't whether China can offer those nations some kind of rhetorical partnership, but whether it can ensure that it's in those nations' interests to align with China. with china instead of opposing it and in fairness to beijing the belt and road initiative goes far beyond simple debt trap diplomacy the bri is quite popular in many parts of

The world it's resulted in major tangible improvements in the lives of millions of people and leaders and national elites are getting richer on the periphery it just happens that there's also a debt trap involved now at this point we'd imagine that the answer to the title question of this episode of does china have allies is fairly clear there's a semantic

Discussion of course about how we define the idea of an ally and if we take a rather expansive view of what that might mean then sure certain nations could fit certain definitions but ultimately china does not have allies in the traditional sense and china knows it after all if china wanted alliances in the traditional sense then china would create alliances

In the traditional sense especially with nations like pakistan russia and iran that would love to have more guarantees from a nation as powerful as china compared to the more one-sided relationship that they have today instead they exist within the system that china has designed for itself and that begs a more important question from china's perspective is

This working in the court of global public opinion the answer is far from straightforward in 2025 polling across 25 nations by the pew research center revealed something of a mixed bag when asking people in those nations to rank the greatest allies and adversaries to their home nations in a rather poetic finding china often showed up at the top of both lists

At once meaning that respondents agree that china was an important ally but also a very potent threat perceptions of china as an ally were especially high in places like latin america and sub-saharan africa where it often beat out the united states or came very close and perceptions of china as an enemy were especially high in the indo-pacific region but

Even in latin america where it was seen as a top ally it also made the list of top three enemies in every nation polls now far be it from us here on war fronts to put words into those respondents mouths but it's not all that hard to suppose what their logical connective tissue might be stay in beijing's good graces and beijing can be a very generous friend

But dare to cross china and hell will soon follow beijing has gotten a similarly mixed reception in places like the united nations where the un is becoming more reliant on china but un leaders remain broadly skeptical of china's long-term intentions in governments across the globe especially in places that china's looking to engage with through the belt and

Road initiative the idea of substantial chinese involvement is often a matter of intense debate with contingents arguing forcefully in favor and in opposition but all of that is only important to the extent that china cares about the court of public opinion and again if that were something that china did really care about we'd expect to see it operate rather

Differently than it does today when china succeeds in connection convincing a nation that its interests align with Beijing.

It could respond by ironing out a handful of important programs that enrich Beijing to an acceptable degree, and then pivot the rest of its efforts into the kinds of initiatives that would better the lives of its international partners as quickly as possible.

Perhaps that means focusing on ordinary people, perhaps it means focusing on national elites. But if China's objectives were to make a given nation and its people like China, it has more than enough spare economic capacity to make itself a beloved foreign partner.

Instead, China approaches its relationships with extraction in mind, whether it's extracting resources, financial capital, diplomatic compliance, military partnership, labor, or anything else.

China convinces another nation that their interests are aligned, and then moves on to tackle two subsequent questions. How can China lock a partner nation into those mutually beneficial relationships for as long as possible, and how much can China ratchet up its extractive efforts without running the risk that a partner nation would decide to disengage?

That's China's modus operandi, whether it's working alongside Russia and Iran, operating in a delicate balance with Japan and Australia, or expanding into Burundi and Bolivia.

Regardless of the international partner, Beijing seeks hard, long-term commitments that only go one way. Military support from China, provided to a partner nation, is not on the table.

If you want China to protect you, then you should host some interests that China wants to protect, and then take care that nobody overthrows you and offers China a better deal.

Indefinite alliances with China are not on the table. China will lock into a relationship for however long it takes to pay back a loan, but when everything's settled up, those other nations had better have a pitch ready to keep China engaged. Whenever it can be avoided, clear, firm, publicly announced arrangements with China are not on the table.

Instead, China will refer vaguely to your partnership as having no limits, or being very important, or representing an eternal springtime for the rest of the world to hear, but the actual details of that partnership will be hammered out behind the scenes with the express stipulation that those details are not to be shared. So, what does China want?

Judging by its actions, it wants international relationships that it knows are stable, in which it can improve its own lot as much as possible without breaking the relationship entirely.

Again, everybody is acting in their own self-interest, and as part of that understanding of the world, everybody should expect China to act in its own self-interest too.

China wants partnerships that are primarily economic, maybe with diplomatic dimensions or the ability to expand China's military footprints, but that don't involve China getting its hands dirty, and that never involve China committing to fight on somebody else's behalf.

China wants relationships that it can build and maintain in private, so that they become harder for foreign actors to interfere with, and easier to change as needed.

It wants imbalanced relationships, where the balance of power quite clearly favours Beijing, because when other nations depend on Beijing, they are strongly disincentivised against Beijing. against considering a betrayal. And so, long as all that's true, does Beijing really care about what foreign presidents and dictators say about China behind closed doors?

If those foreign leaders would spit on the portrait of Xi Jinping, where Beijing would never find out, but they keep sending Beijing all the resources, grant Beijing all the compliance, and show Beijing all the public respect that it expects, then did they really spit on Xi's portrait after all?

As we conclude today, we should be clear that our intention here isn't to say that China is engaged in some kind of radical departure from international systems.

China is a bit more brazen in how it manages its foreign affairs, it's a bit more transparent about the transactional nature of things, but this is what nations do, and it's what they've always done.

Every time a person in Taiwan questions whether the United States would intervene and save it from China, or every time a person in Armenia displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh curses Russia for not showing up, or every time a Polish soldier complains to his fellow troops that the French or the Spanish or the British will let Poland do all the fighting to protect

Europe, they're all talking about the same fundamental reality.

All nations will operate in their own self-interest, and when it really counts, fanciful ideas like alliances, security guarantees, diplomatic commitments, and grand economic projects turn out to be just little more than window dressing. So does China have allies?

No, they don't, but as Beijing seems to see it, China isn't rewriting the rules of international diplomacy, China's just acknowledging what the real rules of the game are, have always been, and it's going to act accordingly.

Thank you for watching.