Dusseldorf, Berlin, Beijing When Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 using soldiers without insignia, Beijing remained silent. Currently, however, hardly a day goes by without top Chinese politicians or diplomats supporting Moscow while Russia is massing more and more troops on the border with Ukraine. Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” must be taken into account, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi jumps to Moscow’s side.
After a phone call with Vladimir Putin in December, head of state and party leader Xi Jinping supported Moscow’s demand that Ukraine should never join the western defense alliance NATO.
This Friday, Xi will receive Putin as the first foreign head of state from a major economy in the Chinese capital since the outbreak of the corona pandemic. The Kremlin chief will also be the most powerful foreign leader attending Beijing’s opening of the Winter Olympics. Putin says he and Xi are ‘friends’
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Their conversation will focus on the development of an alliance that has intensified since Western sanctions were imposed in the course of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which is now getting a new boost in the Ukraine crisis – and which is becoming a problem for Europe and the USA. “Russia on the side of the economic power China – that is a very dangerous combination,” judges the new director of the German Society for Foreign Policy, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook.
If both states agree on joint military exercises or territorial claims in the Arctic, they could “become a fundamental threat” to the West.
The common adversary USA welds Moscow and Beijing closer together. And the political and military rapprochement between the two states, which also includes arms deliveries from Moscow to Beijing, has also brought them closer together economically. China is now by far Russia’s most important trading partner. The resource-rich country conducts more than 18 percent of its trade with China. As the second most important partner, Germany comes in at just 7.4 percent.
Trade between Russia and China is higher than ever.
(Photo: imago images/Fotoagentur Nordlicht)
China-Russia trade rose 35.8 percent to a record $147 billion last year, according to data from China Customs. For the year after next, Putin has announced a volume of 200 billion dollars. More than 15 contracts signed at the meeting between Putin and Xi should contribute to this. An alternative payment system to become more independent of the international Swift system, which may be threatened with sanctions, will also be an issue, as will a new gas pipeline, announced Putin’s security adviser Yuri Ushakov.
It is about an even closer energy partnership that is in direct competition with Russia’s previous orientation of its oil and gas supplies to Europe. The state-dominated Russian gas company Gazprom is already supplying natural gas to the Middle Kingdom via the “Sila Sibirii” (Power of Siberia) pipeline, which was agreed upon in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea. A second tube is under construction. And Gazprom boss Alexei Miller announced on Wednesday a possible third gas pipeline via Mongolia.
The two economies are complementary
In addition, China is the most important partner in Yamal LNG, the liquefied natural gas company on the Arctic Ocean managed by Putin confidante and head of the Russian-Chinese Economic Council Gennady Tim‧chenko. Russian companies, in turn, are investing in agricultural production in China.
Europe’s energy transition and the “conflict with the West is forcing Moscow to look for new markets for its hydrocarbon exports and technology imports, especially in China,” says Alexander Gabuyev, director of the Russia in Asia-Pacific program at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. He sees the “complementarity of the two economies” and the quasi-compulsion to close ranks – also because of the “parallel confrontation of Russia and China with the United States and their allies”.
China, which imports a large part of its natural resources from abroad, needs a key raw material supplier that can deliver its materials via reliably protected land routes and “not via the vulnerable arteries of the oceans, where the American fleet still dominates”. Western sanctions against Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and the threat of export embargoes for technical products to Russia in the event of a Russian attack on Ukraine are also forging the two autocracies together.
But the relationship between the world’s second and eleventh largest economies is not that simple, argues Kadri Liik, Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. The characteristics of the authoritarian systems in the two countries are very different. Political and academic circles in Moscow are also discussing the danger that Russia, which is ten times smaller economically, could become too dependent on China. Sergey Karaganov of the Foreign and Security Policy Council in Russia therefore describes the relationship as a “semi-alliance” and warns that Russia must not “sell” its sovereignty to China, thereby repeating Europe’s mistake in its close relationship with Washington.
The pro-Kremlin newspaper “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” even refers to “a colonial character”: China sells high-tech goods to Russia, but Russia to China primarily raw materials. “In the 1950s, the Chinese referred to the USSR as an older brother. Today China becomes the older brother.”
There are also setbacks in relationships
In addition, there are also political and economic setbacks: Moscow has repeatedly caught Chinese secret services spying on Russian armaments manufacturers. Authorities in Siberia halted a China-funded project to bottle Baikal drinking water in 2019 over local opposition. In August 2020, the state-controlled Russian energy company Rosneft had to withdraw from drilling off the coast of Vietnam – due to demands from Beijing.
Despite the mutual affirmation of their friendship, both sides act in reality rather pragmatically along the common border with a length of 4209 kilometers, according to the formula: not always together, but never against each other.
It is an irony of history that the danger of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is so great at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Because it was at the Summer Games in Beijing in 2008 that Putin had his troops deployed in Georgia on the very day the sporting event opened in China’s capital, thereby stealing the international show from Xi.
In the run-up to the Winter Games, a report by the Bloomberg news agency made the rounds in Beijing diplomatic circles, according to which Xi may have asked Putin in a telephone call not to attack Ukraine during the Winter Games, which begin on Friday. The Chinese Foreign Ministry denied this. Nevertheless, the ever-closer Chinese-Russian friendship, like the former relationship between Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, is spiced with a good deal of distrust.
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