World politics have undergone a transformation since the mid-1970s, when the United States used China as a junior partner to counteract and threaten the USSR, while China welcomed America’s economic and military assistance in building up its security against the Soviet threat. Now China is a superpower in the making and competes with the United States. The Chinese factor dominates Russian calculations in its Far Eastern policy, and Moscow views China as a helpful counterweight to America’s global ambitions.
For years Russia’s former prime minister Yevgeni Primakov had dwelt on the danger that America and China might strive to achieve a global condominium.1 The obvious preventive measure, as he saw it, was for Russia to seal some kind of partnership with China. As well as seeking a counterbalance to America, this would neutralize the potential menace of the Chinese, who are Asia’s greatest economic power and have nuclear weaponry. Putin’s adviser Sergei Glazev puts the case most bluntly: Russia need not fear Western sanctions, because cooperation with China and the other BRICS countries offers a route to salvation and prosperity.2 Russia has remained of importance to the Chinese because no other state in Eurasia matches its military power and natural resources.
Moscow’s chances of a warm reception from the Chinese leadership only improved on America’s announcement in 2011–12 of its strategic pivot towards the Pacific Rim, which resulted in a brief period of concern for the Beijing administration lasting at least until spring 2012, when American policy was redirected back to the Middle East and away from East Asia. Then the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 focused Obama’s attention again on Europe, with the unplanned consequence of making Russia’s need for partnership with China more imperative than China’s quest for cooperation with Russia. The high bargaining cards had fallen to Xi Jinping, who had ascended to the Chinese presidency in November 2012 just months after Putin came back to the Kremlin for his third presidential term.
Xi reacted cautiously. The Chinese were far from happy about what the Russians had done to Crimea, and stated unequivocally that Ukrainian independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected. But they did this without direct criticism of Russia;3 and when the Americans put forward a motion at the United Nations Security Council castigating the Russian land grab, China abstained. Russian leaders saw this as a signal that the Chinese were open to further overtures.
Moscow and Beijing had for a long time been united in annoyance at Washington’s foreign-policy penchant for ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’, with both Putin and successive Chinese leaders criticizing American military campaigns in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Although the Russians have usually been the more vociferous, both start from the same premise that the United States should cease to behave like a global policeman. They saw only danger in the calls by American leaders for foreign politicians to respect human rights in their countries. For Putin and Xi, America’s ideas about democratization were a cover for its designs on global hegemony, and both Beijing and Moscow were alarmed at the possibility, however distant, that Washington might seek to interfere in their methods of running public affairs. It is of no concern to Xi Jinping that Putin maintains an authoritarian order: Xi’s own order is politically even more repressive, and the Chinese communist ruling elite is unlikely to complain about fraudulent elections or economic corruption in Russia. Putin and Xi are comrades in an international authoritarian cause. In 2014 Xi Jinping had to deal with noisy street protests in Hong Kong at a time when Putin was handling the consequences of his policy towards Crimea. In Beijing and Moscow there was a shared ambition to restrict the opportunities for American interference.4
The official cordiality between Russia and China was signalled by the decision of newly elected President Xi to make Moscow the destination of his first foreign visit in 2013. Even though Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao had done the same in 2003, Putin appreciated this initiative: in the intervening years China had become one of the greatest economic powers, and Putin was effusive in praise of Xi, affirming that they had established ‘very trusting, good relations’ and adding that he thought he could say that they were friendly. This showed his fervour to build diplomatic bridges to the Chinese. It was not something he had ever done for Barack Obama or Angela Merkel – or even for George W. Bush or Tony Blair in the years when Putin’s relationship with Western powers was at its warmest.5 Neither Xi nor Putin has met any other national leader more often.6
They formed a close tie on first meeting. Their ease in each other’s company was manifest in Putin’s invitation to Xi to join his birthday party in Indonesia in 2013. It is said they swapped stories about the Second World War, as Putin described his father’s experiences in the struggle against the Third Reich and Xi told of his father’s part in the fight against Imperial Japan. In 2015 Xi was guest of honour at Moscow’s seventieth-anniversary parade to commemorate the Soviet victory over the Third Reich, and several months later Putin went to Beijing’s celebration of the defeat of Japan. Western powers boycotted both events in disapproval of the Crimean annexation and of China’s growing military assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region – South Korean President Park Geun-Hye was the only American ally to show up in Beijing.
The terms of the courtship between Moscow and Beijing have changed since the late Stalin and early Khrushchëv years. Back then, the Soviet Union helped Mao Zedong by shipping its manufactured products and technical specialists to a People’s Republic in ruins after years of civil war. The reforms begun after Mao’s death in 1976 – and the help rendered by an America that sought to build up Chinese industry and military strength as a counterweight to the USSR – have resulted in China’s emergence as the world’s largest industrial producer. Chinese factories churn out every kind of product with advanced technology. Long gone are the days when Soviet Party General Secretary Gorbachëv could say with inflated self-confidence that his Chinese counterpart Deng’s reforms were a chimera. Now everyone knows China is an economic colossus. When Putin talks to Xi, he can offer few manufactured goods apart from equipment for the armed forces and civil nuclear technology, but what the Chinese want from Russia are its oil, gas and other natural resources. Putin’s budgetary constraints have tightened since the collapse of the oil and gas prices in 2014: for the moment, there is a consonance between Chinese and Russian interests.
In May 2014 a deal was done between Gazprom and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation to supply gas to the value of $400 billion. The pipelines running south into China were being completed, and the deal was touted in Moscow as the Russian government’s triumph over Western aggressive foreign policy. If America and Germany refused to play along with Russia, China offered an alternative foreign market.
While pleased about the export success for Gazprom, however, the Kremlin was disappointed by the size of Chinese investment in Russia. The exact figures are unknown, since finance can be channelled through places such as Hong Kong which are secretive about financial transactions. According to the Chinese Global Investment Tracker, though, the figure is only around 3 per cent of China’s total overseas investments.7 Nor are Chinese businessmen shy about entering markets at Russia’s expense: in Ukraine, they have financed the dredging of the Black Sea coast near Odessa.8 There was also, it is true, an encouraging willingness to support the modernization of Russia’s railways and telecommunication sectors.9 But this, noted the Ministry of Finances in Moscow, was the exception rather than the rule. Russian assurances did not dispel the wariness of China’s banks and investment funds about legal trouble in the United States for breaching economic sanctions. BRICS countries, including even China, were not as invulnerable to American pressure as they liked to pretend. This was not the only reason for Chinese reluctance, however. Russia is a notoriously difficult place for foreign companies to set up business, and it would seem Chinese entrepreneurs know where their finance can be more productively employed. Russian bureaucracy and Russian corruption frustrated even the Chinese.10
Russia remains only sixteenth in the ranking of China’s trading partners, whereas China’s trade is easily the most important for the Russian economy after the European Union as a whole. If Putin ever aimed to make the Chinese dependent on oil and gas from Siberia, he was soon disappointed: Beijing has been careful to avoid reliance on a single supplier, so there is little prospect of Russia becoming able to use its hydrocarbon resources as a lever to constrain Beijing’s activity in international relations.
China takes account of the Russian factor in its foreign policy, but not with the same intensity that Moscow looks on Beijing, and Xi Jinping makes a virtue of appearing calm and confident about his country’s future. Yet the Moscow–Beijing ties have undeniably grown closer – Putin and Xi Jinping met five times in 2016 alone. Despite their divergent interests and ambitions, the Russians and Chinese have a common rival – even enemy – in the Americans. The map of geopolitics makes it obvious why the two leaderships think this way. China views with disquiet America’s alliances with countries like Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, while Russia suspects American intentions as leader of NATO. But there is certainly a difference in their diplomatic behaviour. Xi, like his recent predecessors, aims at putting pressure on the United States without undue public acrimony; Putin revels in increasing friction between Moscow and Washington. Both leaders see advantage in keeping friendly ties while each of them charts his chosen course towards a more powerful future for his country.
Russia and China head economic and security blocs they have built with countries around their borders. Each can use its regional influence as an incentive to the other to strengthen the Moscow–Beijing axis, a policy politicians and diplomats on both sides advocate as a sure route to bilateral progress. Currently the Eurasian Economic Union brings together Russia with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Russia can offer this as an enticement to China and the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in 2001, whose other members include Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as well as Russia itself, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Such has been the attraction of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in fact, that in June 2017 both India and Pakistan opted to join. What initially brought them together were considerations of national security, and there was a notable desire in each to find ways to stabilize and protect its border regions.11 China wanted to go further, and create a free-trade zone among the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but Russia, nervous about Chinese economic might, has turned down the suggestion.12 Security and controllable commerce are one thing, but the idea of unconditional exposure to China’s capitalist expansiveness terrifies the Kremlin.
Nevertheless, Chinese ambitions are unquenched. In 2013 Xi announced his Belt and Road Initiative to link China directly with Europe, hailing it as the successor to the Silk Road of past centuries that would traverse the length of central Asia. Two years earlier American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had made the same kind of suggestion, but the idea stirred little enthusiasm in the United States. Xi, however, was able to provide the political will and material resources, and China’s success was impressive.
The Russians could do nothing to prevent the Belt and Road Initiative, since it was the Chinese authorities who were paying for it. At the turn of the millennium, China’s trade with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan had been a mere twentieth of Russia’s. In little more than a decade it became the leading commercial partner for all of them except Kazakhstan, and the leading foreign investor in ex-Soviet central Asia.13 Putin tried to deal with the challenge by wrapping China in a collaborative relationship – better an embrace than a conflict. At their meeting in Moscow on 3–4 July 2017, Putin and Xi agreed to set about forming a ‘broad Eurasian partnership’ that would involve linking China’s Belt and Road initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, something Putin had spoken keenly about at the Belt and Road Summit two months earlier. It means he has given up his aim of keeping the ex-Soviet republics of central Asia away from Chinese influence: even before the Crimean crisis of 2014 China had greater financial resources than Russia could muster. Now the plan is to create a vast economic space out of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.14
As the Russian budgetary crisis continued, the Kremlin decided to drop some of its restrictions on military technological transfer, even though Russia maintained nuclear forces, tanks and air bases near to the long border with China, and Beijing remained a dangerous potential enemy. Now the Russian leadership accepted China’s request to buy some of Russia’s advanced military hardware, and in late 2016 it delivered the first four of two dozen Su-35 fighter jets to the Chinese. Moscow’s financial concerns and geopolitical aims trumped security worries.15
Following discussions about military cooperation, Russia and China held joint exercises in September 2016, including a massive naval operation in the South China Sea involving submarines and fixed-wing aircraft as well as surface ships, and culminating in a simulated seizure of an island.16 In July 2017 the Chinese navy joined a Russian military exercise in the Baltic. The two countries were giving a signal that NATO should no longer assume only Russia was willing to confront it. The Russians were pleased that an Asian power had agreed to deliver a joint challenge to American ambitions. Cooperation continued in summer 2018 when China accepted the Russian Defence Ministry’s invitation to join its gigantic Vostok-2018 exercise in Siberia: 300,000 Russian troops were involved with 3,500 Chinese, as well as Mongolian forces. It was the biggest exercise on Russian territory since 1981, when the Chinese were among the USSR’s enemies. Russia invited the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to Vladivostok to allay his worries. The exercise demonstrated Russian military might and the Chinese rapprochement, and had the additional advantage of mitigating anxiety about China’s intentions inside Russia’s General Staff at a time when its main resources were focused on Ukraine.17 Perhaps Moscow also wanted to show Beijing it could still, if necessary, cope with military action in its Asian territories. Times, the exercise proclaimed, had changed.
The warm embrace continued in other security sectors, and in his conversations with Oliver Stone Putin sternly denies that Russia spies on its Chinese ally. He presents this as though a code of honour, but it is hard to believe the Russian or the Chinese intelligence agencies behave with the self-restraint the Russians describe. What is more, not all Russians are comfortable about their Chinese neighbour. Russian companies show little enthusiasm for working with the Chinese, often finding them tricky and unfair in negotiations and deals. Some of Russia’s commentators on national security have expressed alarm about China’s purchases of advanced military hardware.18
There was also trepidation among many in Russia about the number of Chinese traders and workers coming over the border into southern Siberia. The newcomers’ entrepreneurial prowess was feared to be pushing out existing local businesses, and the thought spread that such colonization by stealth could perhaps lead to war.19 A poll conducted by Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation in 2008 suggested about three-fifths of Russian people worried that the migration of Chinese to the Sino-Russian borderlands in eastern Siberia posed a menace to the country’s territorial integrity. Two-fifths took the view that China’s rise as a great power would injure Russia’s interests. Russian people also felt some alarm about the spread of Chinese influence in the countries of ‘the near abroad’. It was an attitude shared by the Kremlin authorities, who were reluctant to support Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative until 2014, when the clash with the West over Ukraine made Russia eager to make a closer friend of China.20
Putin dealt quietly with the latent threat China posed along the long Russian border in Siberia, knowing the Chinese had not forgotten about the ‘unequal treaties’ they had reluctantly signed in the nineteenth century. The Beijing communist leadership knew the Russian Empire had forced the cession of 600,000 square miles in the Siberian regions of Lake Baikal and the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Even if Putin had failed to read what Sinologists in Moscow’s research institutes had written on the subject, ex-Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, by then living in Georgia, had told him about it in person. When Shevardnadze had travelled to China in early 1989, the focus had been on what needed to be done to improve Sino-Soviet relations, and barring some outbursts of rancour from Deng Xiao-Ping the visit had gone tolerably well. Shevardnadze had never forgotten Deng’s words to the effect that when China fully recovered its strength, it would return to the question of the ‘unequal treaties’ and seek territorial revisions. ‘There’ll come a time,’ Deng had casually remarked, ‘when China will perhaps restore them to itself.’21
In public Putin brushes aside any suggestion that Russia has reason to worry about China’s territorial aspirations. China and the USSR had had an unresolved dispute over the contested islands in the middle of the Ussuri river where it forms the border of the two countries, but instead of bristling with national assertiveness, Putin saw the sense in making concessions. A settlement was agreed in 2004 and ratified four years later by China’s People’s Congress and Russia’s State Duma. Putin wants everyone to think he has eliminated all the tension that once existed, and that only a few small matters of disagreement remain, mainly pertaining to border management.22 Apparently the Russian authorities have continued to have a problem with illegal fishing and migration as well as smuggling, but nobody in the Kremlin is inclined to make a fuss. Russia’s leaders cannot afford a clash with Beijing. They can live with a degree of disorder across the long frontier.
The situation would be more reassuring for Russia if only China stopped bringing up the question of frontiers. In 2016 Chinese Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Fu Ying remarked that some Chinese people think there is unfinished business in the ‘Russian’ Far East because of the territorial losses that the tsars forced on the ailing Chinese Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.23 This was no idle comment: China’s history textbooks, she knew, had taught the same lesson for decades.24 When the Beijing media revealed that Putin had agreed to adjusting the border by two square miles, tens of thousands of Chinese wrote accusing the Chinese government of failing to demand the restoration of all the ‘lost territories’. This was not a passing phenomenon. On the occasion of President Xi’s visit to Moscow in 2013, there was a flurry of demands by ordinary citizens for the frontier question to be raised with Putin and settled in China’s favour.25 But the Chinese authorities prefer to take their time – so long as the textbooks stress that China suffered unconscionable harm and humiliation at the hands of the Russian Empire, it is unlikely the Beijing leadership will forget. They can return to the matter in due course and be sure public opinion will be on their side.
In Russia over the past few decades there has appeared a profusion of books and articles on nineteenth-century history, but hardly any have discussed the importance and territorial details of those old treaties.26 It is not hard to guess why public figures and historians are so chary of raising the subject: in the current state of world politics, Moscow has to keep Beijing sweet. In earlier decades the approved Soviet accounts held that the ministers of the tsars had negotiated with the Chinese on friendly terms and the Sino-Russian treaties were untainted by the threat of force or by imperialist intent, but if the Putin administration were to endorse such an analysis, it would find doors closed to it in Beijing. Acknowledging the unfairness underpinning the treaties, on the other hand, would present its own danger. Kremlin leaders have chosen reticence as the path of prudence.
Russia advertises the current diplomatic, economic and military deals with the People’s Republic of China as proof that Russia can cope without America. In 2001 Putin and the then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin had signed a Treaty of Good Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation, followed by a number of agreements between the two great Asian powers, which the Russian authorities had presented as a story of triumph and resilience, avoiding mentioning that the Chinese treated the Russians as mere providers of natural resources. The net result of Moscow’s diplomacy, however, served only to escalate the reliance on gas and oil exports. Russia’s trump card is military power, but that has to be played with caution so as not to scare off the Chinese. Talks continued on economic diversification by means of a partnership with China, but remained just that: talk. In reality Russia was accepting a subordinate position in relation to its mighty neighbour across the long Siberian border. As the third decade of the twenty-first century draws nigh this seems unlikely to change.