China’s leaders may be watching Ukraine with an eye on Taiwan
 As the world's attention focuses on the escalating crisis between Russia and Ukraine, a spotlight has also been turned on an island halfway around the world — self-governing Taiwan.
On the surface, there may be parallels: both Taiwan and Ukraine are Western-friendly democracies whose status quo could be upended by powerful autocracies.
In Taiwan's case, China's Communist Party seeks eventual "reunification" with the island it claims as its territory despite having never governed it — and has not ruled out doing so by force. For Ukraine, that threat is unfolding: Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he considers Russians and Ukrainians as "one people," and it's yet unclear how far he'll go to realize that claim — on Monday he declared two breakaway, Moscow-backed territories in Ukraine as independent republics.
World leaders themselves have implied connections between the fates of Ukraine and Taiwan in recent weeks.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has said Taiwan could "empathize" with Ukraine's situation given its experience with "military threats and intimidation from China."
In the West, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday said "echoes" of what happens in Ukraine "will be heard in Taiwan," while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a trip to Australia earlier this month obliquely said "others are watching" the Western response to Russia, "even if it's half a world away in Europe."
Concerns have been rising in recent years that a confident China under leader Xi Jinping may make a bold move to take control of Taiwan, and Beijing will likely be carefully monitoring the situation in Ukraine for signs of how Western powers respond — and just how severe those responses are.
The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Japan have all announced economic sanctions to punish Moscow following Putin's moves earlier this week.
But there are limits to the parallels, and to how much Beijing could glean from the spiraling crisis in Ukraine when it comes any future actions toward Taiwan.
"How the US responds to Ukraine is not going to be the same as Taiwan because the way the US has constructed its relationship with Taiwan over decades is different than its responsibilities to Ukraine, the European Union, or NATO," said Lev Nachman, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
"Even though (Beijing) will still be watching closely to see how the world reacts to invasion and a potential redrawing of borders, which will likely factor into Beijing's own geopolitical calculus, it is highly unlikely that Beijing is going to drastically alter its strategy towards Taiwan over Ukraine," said Nachman, who focuses on Taiwan politics.
Similarly, experts have pushed back at the notion that the US' focus on Europe could provide a potential opening for China to make a move on Taiwan. These fears are seemingly compounded by Moscow's increasingly close ties to Beijing.
"I don't believe the Chinese would use force against Taiwan this year ... (Xi) doesn't really want to take any risk," said Steve Tsang, director of SOAS China Institute at the University of London, pointing to the Communist Party National Congress, due to be held in October, in which Xi is widely expected to to secure a historic third term in power.
"A military adventure that is not successful will not do his third term of office much good, and a failure could potentially derail it," Tsang added.
The unique US-China dynamic also complicates any attempt at comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan. China is the US' most formidable long-term rival and the only country that can challenge US interests across domains and around the world, said David Sacks, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"If China were to gain control of Taiwan, this more than anything else would help it establish regional hegemony. Chinese leaders understand that to the United States the stakes are different and its response would likely be very different," he said.
The 'people's republics'
China also finds itself in an uncomfortable position following Russia's recognition on Monday of two breakaway Moscow-backed territories in Ukraine as independent states, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.
The move was roundly criticized by the United Nations and other world leaders as a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty, with Putin firing back that the situation "is different" than with other former Soviet states since Ukraine was "being used" by foreign nations to threaten Russia.
China has been sympathetic to Russian concerns about the security threat from NATO — as both countries have presented an increasingly united front in the face of what they view as Western interference into their domestic affairs and threats to their security. That partnership was very publicly bolstered only weeks ago at a Xi-Putin summit.
But China has long based its foreign policy on staunchly defending state sovereignty and denouncing what it views as outside interference inside its own borders. Beijing has also taken sweeping steps, including those decried by the international community as major human rights violations, to combat what it sees as separatist threats — be it in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Tibet.
Hua Chunying, China's assistant minister of foreign affairs, on Wednesday denied Beijing had taken a position on Ukraine that contradicted its principle of respecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Any such claims had "an ulterior motive or (were) deliberately distorting matters," she said at a regular press briefing.
In comments the previous day, the ministry was quick to draw a distinction between the situation in Ukraine and Taiwan, when asked if there were any parallels.
"I would like to stress that there is but one China, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory. This is an indisputable historical and legal fact. The one-China principle is a universally-recognized norm governing international relations," spokesman Wang Wenbin said, referring to Beijing's tenet that there is only one China on either side of the Taiwan Strait.
Mainland China and Taiwan have been governed separately since the end of the Chinese civil war more than 70 years ago, when the defeated Nationalists retreated to the island.
Beijing has so far urged restraint and called for dialogue in response to developments in Ukraine this week, while saying "the legitimate security concerns of any country should be respected."
With its own agendas and current relationship with Russia, how China reacts to Ukraine will be a difficult balancing act, and one where its leaders will likely tread carefully, Harvard's Nachman said.
"China is trying its best to not take a firm stance in support of Russia while also pushing for peace and diplomacy (in Ukraine)," he said. This tells us that China is not going to match Russia's level of aggression (in Taiwan) — at least right now."
— CNN's Eric Cheung and Beijing bureau contributed reporting.   Testing a city of 7.5 million Hong Kong authorities announced on Tuesday that all 7.5 million residents will undergo three rounds of mandatory Covid-19 testing, as the city battles its most severe outbreak yet with thousands of cases each day. Other restrictions, including travel bans and the closure of public spaces, have been extended until at least April.
"In this wartime environment, this emergency, we cannot let existing laws stop us from doing something we should do. This is not the mentality for fighting a war," said the city's leader, Carrie Lam, on Tuesday.  Chinese authorities have fined another popular live-streamer for tax evasion, as Beijing intensifies its crackdown on the entertainment industry.
Ping Rong, a Guangzhou-based live-streamer with 24 million fans on the video platform Kuaishou, was ordered to pay 62 million yuan ($9.8 million) in back taxes, late fees, and fines, the Guangdong Province Tax Service said in a statement on Tuesday.
From 2019 to 2020, Ping Rong evaded more than 33 million yuan in taxes by "concealing the commission income she earned from live-streaming platforms" and "failing to declare other business income," the statement said.
The authorities also pledged to continue to strengthen big data analysis to discover tax-related irregularities.
In recent times, President Xi Jinping's government has been tightening screws on China's rich under the "common prosperity" campaign, which aims to promote economic quality and reduce the income gap in the world's second biggest economy.
Authorities have cracked down on not just the country's powerful tech and entertainment sector, but also what the government describes as a "toxic" celebrity fan culture.
In December, Viya, dubbed "China's "live-streaming queen," was fined a record $210 million in tax evasion penalty by authorities in Hangzhou.  Laura He is a reporter and digital producer for CNN Business. She covers news about Asian business and markets from Hong Kong. Around Asia
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