How is China playing this?
a) Observing carefully as how the West is playing this crisis, how far they are willing to go when
China invades Taiwan Russia invades Ukraine. How powerful is the response, how far is the West willing to go.
b) Keeping a distance from both sides, but not "the same distance" from both sides:
China criticized the Washington's response on Wednesday, saying the new US sanctions amounted to throwing "fuel on the fire" and were "irresponsible and immoral."
In a joint statement, Russia and China called on NATO to "ideologized approaches of the Cold War" and "respect the diversity of civilizational and cultural-historical patterns" in other countries.
As you can see, China is nothing but happy about this, as they are watching two potential enemies erode themselves and testing their strength. Lots of lessons will be learnt on the handling of this crisis and I would not say that Europe and Democracies are playing a great role in terms of intimidation, yet at least is managing to stay reasonably united.
China is definitely trying to master the art of playing two sides. I think you are overlooking and have purposefully ignored the fact that China said the territorial integrity of Ukraine should not be violated and that they want peace. Even if it is only lip-service, they clearly had no qualms about talking badly about the Russian actions. War is bad for business and China is not as rich as they might want - this has the potential to drag the global economy down the toilet. Russia's actions have little benefit for China and Russia has little to offer China economically - most of their income comes from selling to the West. Russia is simply a partner of convenience and if China ever got to a position where they could neutralize Russian nuclear weapons, then they would invade and take over Russian land in a second. Ironically in the future it might be Russia that needs the support of the EU and the USA to defend their land from invasion from the biggest population in the world who are growing increasingly abrasive.