Dual-use goods
Such goods are classified as dual-use, meaning they also have civilian purposes, allowing China to skirt international sanctions and claim that it conducts only legal trade with Russia
The “international sanctions” btw:
You can’t just unilaterally decree someone can’t be traded dual use goods
Those are pretty international, y’know. What would your criteria be for calling sanctions international?
A large majority of the world engaging in sanctions and not the usual suspects regularly framed in the press as the “international community.” It’s framed that way to imply that the entire world is doing it besides a few “rogue states” like China, North Korea or Venezuela, as if they were handed down by the UN or the world is united in agreement with the western sanctions regime. What would be far more accurate than “international sanctions” would be “western sanctions.”
For a more immediate example of how framing effects perception, look at all the people in this thread upset about China giving Russia weapons. No weapons are listed, just drones, helicopters, and metals. Upon opening the article you’ll see the drones arrived before the war and are presumably consumer electronics, and there are six undefined types of helicopters. Some posters even mentioned attack helicopters, as if the Telegraph would not be screaming about attack helicopters and not helicopters if that was the case.
It’s a complete nothingburger and like all nothingburgers it plays with language to let you fill in the gaps using the context they have provided. Russia is being “armed” with some consumer drones, six personal helicopters, and metal, and the whole world is in uproar about it.
But, this is about as international as sanctions get. These are among the largest sanctions in history, in fact. Under your definition, no such thing as international sanctions ever happened. And the word “international” doesn’t imply global, planetary or a majority.
For those interested, the dual use loophole is how the yanks supplied Saddam when he fought Iran and used chemical weapons against the Kurds. A conbination of dual use and swaps through intermediaries. Nowadays the US didn’t give as much of a fuck and instead manufactures reasons for why it’s okay to ship direct.
Although there is quite a gap between saying metals are dual use, and playing coy about specific chemicals that are most useful as precursors for advanced chemical weapons being dual use
