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.
The Chinese leadership have no particular plan, they will stand behind whichever side looks like it has the upper hand. They use Russia for it's commodities and oil but would invade Russia for it's land in a second if they thought they could neutralize their nukes - they'd be successful too judging by the awful use of it's army in Ukraine. China got rich off selling products to the west and needs to continue doing so for some time if it wants to rule the world as the foremost economic power. It's not quite ready yet to self sustain especially with many bubbles, like property, waiting to burst at the seams. China will likely keep their language as neutral as possible.