In the current Russia-Ukraine war, China has professed neutrality but articles like this and this suggest that support for Russia is high amongst its citizens along with soft support from the Chinese government as shown here.
Are there any major individuals or organizations in China which have expressed an explicity pro-Ukranian stance in the conflict?
Chinese government's official position is neutrality. From a strategic standpoint there is no way they would assist Western Sanction of Russia. They would trade with Russia as usual with anything that is not weapon (but not including those that could be weaponized). In a way, China not selling weapon to Russia is already a big help to Ukriane.
Due to anti-US sentiment, there is a lot of Chinese netizen in Weibo and Bilibili supporting Russia and the sentiment that the Euromaiden in 2014 is a CIA-backed coup. However, if you go to ZhiHu and other Chinese Social Media or website, you can see lots of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia voices too. These posts exists and have existed for a while, and the state censor did nothing.
But you won't see any major public figure publicly support Russia's war (just promoting Russian culture and scenery in Russia doesn't count) or denouce it and support Ukriane. All public figure must obey the Party Line, which is neutrality.
Xi Jinping have congratulated Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
On July 13, 2021 President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a phone conversation with President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping. The leaders exchanged congratulations on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of a strategic partnership between Ukraine and China and reaffirmed their mutual commitment to its development and deepening.
During the war, the Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held telephone conversations in March and April 2022 during which they agreed that ending the war against Ukraine is in the interests of peace, food security and international trade (source).
Chinese proposal on the settlement of Ukrainian crisis can be found here. It calls for respect of territorial integrity of all countries.
China is keeping the neutral stance. USA is incomparably more important consumer of they production than Russia is (source), hence there are things to lose for them by annoying USA too much.
Tsinghua University recently released a survey purportedly showing that more than 80 percent of Chinese people believe the West is responsible for the war, which is equivalent to supporting Russia. Less than 10 percent agreed with Ukraine’s position.
From a few [anecdotal] interviews generally Chinese with otherwise pro-Western views or who e.g. had visited Ukraine before were those who thought differently. But even among the more pro-Russian majority, there was the view that the war had shown Russia to be weaker than they had expected. So, even those Chinese who mostly side with Russia appear to disparage it on some level, sometimes with an interesting twist like
When Hou first heard that Russian forces had entered Ukraine, he saw it as retaliatory action by Moscow designed to decisively and swiftly strike back at NATO and the United States. After all, NATO had wanted to encircle China and Russia, and Putin ”has been one of the few leaders that have fought back against this”, he said.
But Russia’s lack of success in Ukraine has made him re-evaluate whether the threat from NATO was as pressing and as imminent as he had thought.
“If NATO is such a big threat to their country’s survival, then why aren’t the Russians fighting harder?” he asked.
Activist and Demosisto founder Nathan Law stated that he stands with Ukraine. Law praised the courage of Ukrainians that changed the world attitude toward Putin.
Nathan Law Kwun-chung (Chinese: 羅冠聰; born 13 July 1993) is a mainland-Chinese-born activist and politician from Hong Kong. As a former student leader, he has been chairman of the Representative Council of the Lingnan University Students' Union (LUSU), acting president of the LUSU, and secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS). He was one of the student leaders during the 79-day Umbrella Movement in 2014. He is the founding and former chairman of Demosistō, a new political party derived from the 2014 protests.
Nathan was a politician who was in office between 10 April 2016 – 16 May 2018. He was not in office when he made those statements though.
