1/20/2018 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of buddies - Unlikely partners

Unlikely partners
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of
buddies
But suspicion between Russia and China runs deep

Print edition | China Jul 27th 2017 | BEIJING, MOSCOW AND VLADIVOSTOK

ON JULY 21st three Chinese warships sailed into the Baltic Sea for China’s first war
games in those waters with Russia’s fleet. The two powers wanted to send a
message to America and to audiences at home: we are united in opposing the
West’s domination, and we are not afraid to show off our muscle in NATO’s
backyard. The war games were also intended to show how close the friendship
between China and Russia has become—so much has changed since the days of
bitter cold-war enmity that endured between them from the 1960s to the 1980s.

There has been an abundance of such symbolism in recent weeks. On his way to
this month’s meeting in Germany of leaders from the G20 group of countries,

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1/20/2018 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of buddies - Unlikely partners

China’s president, Xi Jinping, stopped off in Moscow. There his Russian

counterpart, Vladimir Putin, hung an elaborate medallion around his neck: the
Order of St Andrew, Russia’s highest state award. At the G20 (where they are
pictured), “only two leaders in the world exuded calm confidence,” Dmitry Kiselev,
a cheerleader for the Kremlin, said on his television show in reference to Mr Putin
and Mr Xi. “Russia is pivoting to the east. China is turning to the west—towards
Russia,” he crowed.

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Latest updates Since he became China’s leader in 2012, Mr

America’s federal government shuts down Xi has visited Moscow more than any other
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
capital city. In 2013, during a meeting in
Tracking America in the age of Trump
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Indonesia of leaders from the Asia-Pacific
region, he even attended a private birthday
President Trump’s first year, through The
Economist’s covers party for Mr Putin. Over vodka and
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sandwiches they talked about their fathers’
See all updates experiences in the second world war—Mr
Putin’s against Germany and Mr Xi’s against
Japan. In 2015 Mr Xi was the guest of honour at a military parade in Moscow that

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1/20/2018 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of buddies - Unlikely partners

was held to mark the 70th anniversary of the war’s end, and was boycotted by
Western leaders because of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Four months later Mr Putin
attended a parade in Beijing celebrating China’s victory in the war against Japan.
South Korea’s then president, Park Geun-hye, was the only leader of an American
ally who showed up.

Fellow autocrats
Mr Xi and Mr Putin take comfort in each other’s authoritarian bent. China has
copied Russia’s harsh laws on NGOs; the Kremlin has been trying to learn how
China censors the internet. During Mr Xi’s recent visit to Moscow, the two leaders
listened to a speech by Margarita Symonyan, the boss of Russia Today, the
Kremlin’s foreign-language television channel. Ms Symonyan told them that Russia
and China were victims of “information terrorism” by the Western media. She said
the two countries must help each other because “we alone stand up to the mighty
army of Western mainstream journalism.”

Mr Xi has been obliging. Russia’s Channel One—its main television channel, which
has been whipping up anti-American fervour and support for Russia’s land-grab in
Ukraine—has obtained permission to launch a cable service in China, called
Katyusha, with subtitles in Chinese. Appropriately for the propaganda counter-
attack that the two leaders see themselves as waging, Katyusha is the name of a
Soviet rocket-launcher.

The breakdown of Russia’s relationship with the West as a result of the conflict in
Ukraine has driven it further towards China. But the camaraderie masks
fundamental differences. Russia needs China far more than China needs Russia.
And Russia feels uncomfortable about such an unbalanced relationship that
highlights a flaw in the Kremlin’s claim of Russian greatness. Russia is wary of its
far more populous and economically potent neighbour, which is rapidly gaining in
military power.

For its part, China worries about Russia’s willingness to challenge the post-cold war
order. It has benefited from globalisation far more than Russia, and so is less
inclined to disrupt the status quo.

Take China’s response to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Leaders in Beijing have

turned a blind eye to it (just as Russia has to China’s seizing of disputed shoals in
the South China Sea). But China has not formally recognised Russia’s annexation of
Crimea. Chinese officials are fearful of how some people in China might interpret
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1/20/2018 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of buddies - Unlikely partners

events there. After Crimea voted in a bogus referendum to join Russia, censors in
China ordered media to play down the event. They did not want people in Taiwan,
Tibet or the far western region of Xinjiang to think about determining their own
future through such means. They also did not want Chinese nationalists to clamour
for bolder moves to annex Taiwan.

For China, economic ties with America, and therefore political ones, are hugely
important. By comparison, Russian trade with America is negligible (see chart). In
its trade with Russia, China is mostly interested in Russian oil and gas. Last year
Russia overtook Angola and Saudi Arabia as the country’s biggest supplier of crude
oil. In 2014 Russia and China signed a deal worth an estimated $400bn to pump
natural gas to China from two fields in eastern Siberia via a new pipeline. The
deliveries are set to start in December 2019. But negotiations over energy supplies
are often bitter. Russia would like to divert to China oil and gas that is currently
piped to Europe from western Siberia. But the two countries have not agreed on the
funding of new pipelines that would be needed. Given the current low price of
natural gas, China is reluctant to invest in building them.

The only other exports from Russia that matter to

China are arms. Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, Russia has sold China $32bn worth
of them, amounting to nearly 80% of all China’s
arms imports. It has recently supplied China with
advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile systems,
and state-of-the-art Sukhoi SU-35 fighter jets. The
Kremlin used to worry about China’s efforts to
reverse-engineer them. But Alexander Gabuev of
the Carnegie Moscow Centre says that Russia now Ready to play with Russia

recognises that China’s technological advance is

unstoppable. Russia might as well make money from selling arms to China while
China still has an interest in buying them from abroad rather than making them
itself. Russia’s interests are mercenary rather than strategic: it also sells arms to
China’s rivals, India and Vietnam.

The allure of silk

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As Chinese leaders see it, helping such people is a price worth paying in order to
keep the supplies of energy and weapons flowing. But they see little prospect of
Russia’s economy yielding any more than that. “For China, Russia matters first and
foremost as a security issue, not as an economic one,” says a Chinese expert.

For that to change would require fundamental economic reform in Russia. Under
Mr Putin, there is no prospect of that. Private investors in China shy away from
Russia for the same reasons that their Western counterparts do: the lack of a robust
legal system and clearly defined property rights. A senior Russian banker in China
says a deep-rooted contempt for China in the Kremlin also gets in the way. “Russia’s
biggest problem is that it does not know what it wants from this relationship. Our
government wants Chinese money without the Chinese,” he says.

China has no illusions about Russian power. It sees it as weak and in decline.
Successive American governments have reached the same conclusion. But whereas
American leaders have tended to react by ignoring Russia, Chinese ones have done
the opposite. They believe that an angry, declining power with nuclear arms
requires more, not less, attention. Having watched Russia become a growing
problem for the West, they do not want it to become a headache for China, too.

They know from history what a problem Russia can be for China. The “unbreakable
friendship” between Russia and China that was declared by Stalin and Mao in 1950
nearly ended in a war between the two countries less than 20 years later. Fu Ying, a
former Chinese diplomat who is now a legislator, remembers her fear as a teenager
living close to China’s 4,200km (2,600-mile) border with Russia where hundreds of
thousands of Soviet and Chinese troops faced off and the risk of war seemed very
real. “The fact that we can be friends and no longer fear each other is significant in
itself,” says Ms Fu.

Russia is also nervous of China. Despite this week’s war games in the Baltic Sea (and
other joint ones in the past two years in the South China Sea and the
Mediterranean), Russia stages exercises in preparation for a possible conflict with
China. It fears that its densely populated neighbour may one day decide to grab
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1/20/2018 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin behave like the best of buddies - Unlikely partners

sparsely populated lands in Russia’s east. Russian military planners are conscious
of history: although China’s government is too polite to say so, ordinary Chinese
recall that parts of that region, including Vladivostok, were China’s until the 19th
century.

The two countries spar for influence in Central

Asia, where China has become the leading trading
partner for all the former Soviet republics (apart
from Uzbekistan), as well as the region’s largest
investor. Russia likes to think of itself as being the
paramount military and political power in Central Ready to play with Russia

Asia, while China focuses on the economy. Yet as

Bobo Lo, an Australian expert on the relationship, argues in a recent book, this
arrangement is unsustainable. Mr Xi’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, aimed at linking
China with Central Asia and countries beyond through infrastructure and energy
projects, will give China much political clout in the region.

The asymmetry between Russia and China is particularly evident in Russia’s east. A
few years ago residents there were spending their fast-rising incomes in China. But
the rouble has become much weaker, and so has Russia’s economy. They now look
to high-spending Chinese as their saviours. The numbers of such visitors are
rapidly growing (though few venture there a second time). In Vladivostok, a travel
agent says the city does not have enough decent rooms to accommodate them. On
the streets, young Russians try to sell them old Soviet coins and banknotes.

Residents’ sense of shame at their country’s decline relative to China is palpable. In

one hotel, Chinese visitors fill a stuffy restaurant where they watch scantily dressed
dancers and women singing Russian folk songs. A performer walks out for some
fresh air. Her face shows pain and humiliation. Chinese ships in the Baltic Sea (one
is pictured), eight time zones away, will not make her feel any better.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Unlikely partners"

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