Historically, the Chinese Communist Party fretted about other powers seizing territory, fearing that someone could encroach on its own sovereignty. But, under Xi, it has become increasingly brazen about pursuing its territorial ambitions in the South and East China Seas; along the Indian border; and with regard to Taiwan, the democratically ruled archipelago that has become an object of rising threats. With those clashes in mind, Manoj Kewalramani, a China specialist at the Takshashila Institution, a think tank in Bengaluru, India, sees the current China-Russia relationship as a worrying indicator of a growing tolerance for disruptive confrontations. “It’s clear that both sides believe that force and coercion, to varying degrees, and through various tools, are necessary to shape this new order,” he said, at the C.S.I.S. forum on Wednesday. When Putin visited Xi in Beijing earlier this month, they released a major new statement of common purpose, which, notably, included China’s backing of Russia’s objections to nato expansion. Kewalramani regards that statement as “China stepping much further than it did in 2014.” He said, “This is a fundamental shift.”

That shift has inspired concern that Chinese leaders may be watching the invasion of Ukraine as a test case for their own long-held ambition to conquer Taiwan. “We empathize with Ukraine’s situation,” Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s President, said last month, as she announced a task force to study the tensions in Ukraine. On Wednesday, Tsai ordered Taiwan’s security forces to step up surveillance and defenses. But, although Beijing often dispatches warplanes toward Taiwan, there is no sign that an invasion is in the offing. The more immediate risk, in the eyes of some in Taiwan and Washington, is that China will see Putin’s venture as a step toward the normalizing of more aggressive pressure tactics, including what Tsai called “cognitive warfare”—a mix of disinformation, political meddling, and incitement, intended to pry open internal divisions in Taiwan and make its people despair at their vulnerability.