The other thing that is playing in the background but was not mentioned in the article is that Xi thinks longer term. He will want China to take advantage of Ukraine's economically busted down state after the war and get in on the rebuilding of Ukraine- allegedly under the guise of being humanitarian and all of that. Maybe rebuild the steel mills at Mariupol. Yeh. that would work fine.
So Xi is not interested in all the dark, ugly, genocide, and demonizing of the Ukranians. That's bad for business. I mean, he does plenty of it and runs a full set of concentration camps himself but he keeps that as low key as he can and pretty much gets away with it.
Putin is sort of a nightmare for Xi. He wanted Putin to be the model of how a country can reclaim what it alleges is a historical part of its country and people, and have a tidy little 3-day invasion and then everyone is back to normal again six months later. Because that is what he wants to do in Taiwan. Instead, Putin has offered him up an example of the worst case scenario and given the game of reclaiming and allegedly re-uniting separated peoples a bad name. Xi is not interested in acquiring Taiwan with most of the cities looking like a parking lot in New Jersey, per the Putin model.
