Towards a Moral Realist Alternative Order: Comparing Chinese and Russian Approaches to the Syrian and Sudanese Civil Wars

How are Chinese and Russian foreign policies reflected in their contrasting engagement in the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars? In this paper, Sino-Russian dynamics and global perceptions are studied according to Yan Xuetong’s theory of Moral Realism. The civil war cases are selected based on their similarities. They represent dramatic humanitarian crises with regional spillovers, and displacements of populations. Further, they are strategically situated: one is in the Horn of Africa and the other in the path of the Belt and Road Initiative. The benefit of qualitative research in considering the global arena’s perceptions of China and Russia’s actions is to extract what they mean for the 21st-century international order. Two parts are articulated in this paper: first, the leaders' framing of their decisions and, second, the reactions of the rest of the world. Speeches are assessed through discourse analysis to categorize their respective leaderships. China tends to favor non-action or economic development, given its strategic interests in the natural resources. Moscow had a more hands-on approach in the conflicts, but its strategy evolved since the start of the post-Assad era. Moral realism explains the methods and goals of China and Russia abroad. However, they also have an increasingly divergent model of governance given their distinct governance styles and interests. Following the categorization provided in Professor Yan’s 2019 book, it is discovered that the novelty of Xi Jinping’s foreign policies and a new Chinese proactivity in the global order is “humane”: an economically consistent and trustworthy leadership. While Vladimir Putin’s military actions abroad are increasingly received negatively, they are consistent but untrustworthy, thus “tyrannical”. These findings challenge Western perspectives on China’s foreign policy.