Xu Qinduo

Chinese journalist and political commentator with CGTN, and senior fellow at the Pangoal Institution, a Beijing-based think tank. A frequent English-language voice on China’s foreign policy and international affairs.

On the Sinica panel Xu presents Beijing’s reading of the US–Ukraine minerals deal and of critical minerals as an instrument of statecraft, pushing back on Western framings of China’s role in the war.

Core positions

• China sides with Russia against the United States, not against Ukraine — the two huddle together under US pressure, not out of shared hostility to Kyiv.
• The ‘China arms Russia’ narrative is wrong: Chinese-made goods (such as DJI drones) reach Ukraine via third countries in an open market Beijing does not control.
• China’s rare-earth export licensing is dual-purpose leverage and a negotiating tool — best used narrowly (targeting US defence contractors over Taiwan) to avoid the overreach of the mismanaged 2010 restriction on exports to Japan, which spurred buyers to build alternatives.
• China avoids weaponising the deal as anti-colonial propaganda: unlike the unequal treaties of its own ‘century of humiliation’, Ukraine genuinely needs the US, so Beijing rests on respecting Ukraine’s sovereign choice — while arguing it is the one actor with the capacity to rebuild the country at scale.

In the wiki

• Ivan Us, Jim Mullinax, Grzegorz Stec, and Xu Qinduo on the Ukraine-US Minerals Deal, Critical Minerals, and Rebuilding Ukraine — the Beijing vantage on rare-earth leverage, the ‘poison pill’ clause, and reconstruction