Could China get sucked into war in Ukraine?

If war in Ukraine is to end any time soon, the relationship between Moscow and Beijing will prove crucial. A relatively benign scenario is that China might become increasingly frustrated by the protracted war, and by the obvious incompetence and spectacular inhumanity of Putin’s military offensive. It would be rational for president Xi Jinping to tell the Russian autocrat that he has to stop. But there is a much darker, more frightening, scenario in the history books that could point to what happens next.

That precedent is the story of the development, and increasing belligerence, of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II before 1914. Like modern China, the German Empire was an autocracy trying to modernise, very well connected with the world economy and with a powerful export industry that would suffer from long drawn out conflict or a collapse of world trade. It was at the same time trying to find an alternative to what it perceived as an illegitimate and hypocritical British domination of the world, achieved by means of a control of finance.