President Xi Jinping of China and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have hailed Beijing-Moscow relations as the new center of a multipolar world, but their alliance is uneven and their future far from clear.
Xi and Putin held a bilateral meeting in Uzbekistan on Thursday on the sidelines of a regional security summit, in a highly iconic encounter in the shadow of Moscow’s war with Ukraine that has resulted in Russia being turned into a pariah state by the West.
China, too, is seeing a rise in tensions with the West as its treatment of the Uyghur minority comes under increasing scrutiny and concerns that it may attempt to retake the island of Taiwan in the future.
In Samarkand, a city forever associated with one of history’s greatest conquerors, medieval ruler Timur the Great, Putin was eager to speak out about the importance of the relationship.
“The world is changing rapidly, but one thing remains the same: the friendship between China and Russia,” Putin said, describing the relationship as a “full strategic partnership.”
But with a GDP and population both about 10 times that of its neighbor, Beijing has every right to be the senior partner in an unbalanced relationship.
“China is the stronger power than Russia. And his interests are more global — and multi-faceted,” said Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Beijing’s goal is certainly to maintain its entente with Russia at a strategic level to balance American power and the growing Western economic pressure on China. But it wants to do this without having to support Moscow at the tactical level,” he added.
– ‘marriage of convenience’? –
China has been relatively reticent about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, never condemning the attack but reluctant to voice support for it.
At their meeting, Putin appeared to nod to Chinese unease about the invasion, saying that while he appreciated Beijing’s “balanced position” he also understood “your questions and concerns.”
Yet both sides share ideological similarities, economic, strategic and military interests, and a desire to move beyond a Western-dominated world order.
“It’s not just a marriage of convenience,” said Alice Ekman, Asia analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS). “There are many points of convergence” between them, particularly regarding tensions with the West and NATO.
“Against the backdrop of very high and persistent tensions between Beijing and Washington,” China “believes it has an interest in accelerating its rapprochement with Russia,” she added.
Putin and Xi’s meeting took place on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, a security group whose kingpins are China and Russia but also includes some Central Asian states, India and Pakistan, and has been described as an Eastern response to NATO.
Xi on Friday called on SCO leaders to “work together to promote the development of the international order in a more just and rational direction.”
Beyond the formal symbolism of the Putin-Xi meeting, “this rapprochement has a strategic reality,” including an increasing number of joint military exercises, said Emmanuel Dupuy, president of the Paris-based IPSE Peace Institute.
– ‘pan to the east’ –
But analysts caution against labeling the two countries as allies, as both sides have well-defined interests that don’t always overlap.
China’s main foreign policy concern is to prevent full international recognition of the self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing regards as its own territory and has vowed to one day take.
At the meeting with Xi, to reassure Beijing, Putin made every effort to demonstrate Russia’s adherence to the “one China” principle and condemned the “US and its satellites’ provocations” around Taiwan.
But relations between the two countries are bound to be complex, as they share a 4,300-kilometer border that separates sparsely populated areas of Russia’s Far East from fast-growing boom Chinese cities at its eastern end.
Tensions ran high in Soviet times when both Beijing and Moscow were supposed to be communist allies, with a border dispute over islands in the Amur River bringing the two sides to the brink of war in 1969.
Isolated and sanctioned by the West, “Russia needs to turn east and it doesn’t have a thousand options,” said Cyrille Bret of the Jacques Delors Institute.
