Di s patche s | R ussia resurgent enthusiastically embraced than it might be otherwise, and the post-Soviet Central Asian “stans” have been eager to embrace the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, originally designed to secure the region’s post-Soviet borders, as an organization promoting economic development under the sponsorship of China. The One Belt- One Road (OBOR) or New Silk Road initiative promoted by Xi has further enhanced the prospects of economic cooperation with China to the relative detriment of Moscow’s patronage in the region. In the Middle East, while China and Russia have together vetoed UN resolutions condemning Syria, they are not entirely aligned. China has cultivated good ties with the Saudi monarchy, its largest supplier of oil. Russia’s patronage of Syria puts it alongside Iran in the great religious schism of Islam. One area of significant, but eroding, complementarity is the area of high technology weapons supplies and the supply of weapons technology. Following the imposition of weapons embargoes on China after June 1989, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, Russia became a major support for the modernization of the People’s Liberation air force and navy. That support continued under president Boris Yeltsin and an independent Russia. This included complete fighter aircraft, submarines, destroyers and ancillary weapons systems. However, Russia became increasingly wary of Chinese efforts to reverse-engineer Soviet weaponry and pirate Russian intellectual property. China’s J-11 and J-15 aircraft are near-clones of the Sukhoi Su-27 and Sukhoi Su-33s sold to China. Intellectual property became the major sticking point in negotiations to supply Sukhoi Su35s as an interim fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Today, China is emerging as a major weapons innovator on its own, just as it earlier perfected expertise in rocketry. Russia still maintains a lead in advanced jet engines on which China relies for some of its newest aircraft, but Russians have few illusions that they can maintain exports into the future. China-U.S. trade dwarfs China-Russia trade
Nuclear energy is another area of cooperation. Russia has supplied China with two reactors and plans have now been made for another two. Again, Chinese reliance on Russian technology is likely to decline over time, as China strengthens technical co-operation with France’s Areva and comes up with its own indigenous designs. 46
So, while Sino-Russian trade has grown almost 18 per cent per annum in recent years, total trade is still less than $100 billion US, with Russia taking only about two per cent of Chinese exports. While Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev pledged to more than double the RussiaChina trade volume to $200 billion by 2020, even this aspirational goal would represent less than 10 per cent of China’s total trade. Under any scenario, Sino-U.S. trade would dwarf trade with Russia. There is no prospect under which mutual trade could displace or replace respective trade with Europe or the U.S. China actively supports the UN and UN peacekeeping, forges ahead in bilatChin a h a s its si g hts on a stab l e g l oba l ord e r with its el f at its c e ntr e . R ussi a strive s to r e ta in a rol e as a gr e at pow e r throug h disruption.
eral and regional multilateral free-trade agreements, sponsors multilateral economic development banks, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank (where Russia is a joint sponsor). China has its sights on a stable global order with itself at its centre. Russia strives to retain a role as a great power through disruption. It is telling that while Russia openly celebrated the election of Trump, China’s reaction was muted, even sombre. The Chinese media did not cover the inauguration live. Not only was Trump’s challenge to China clear in his inauguration speech, China did not welcome either the prospect of confrontation or the prospect of a new Trump-Putin axis. Xi chose to have himself photographed with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko while attending the annual gathering at Davos. This was a less than subtle message that Russia and China’s interests are not congruent. In the transactional world that Trump has summoned up, it will take some time before future alignments settle down. China has long relished a warm relationship with Germany and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that is no less cherished than its relationship with Russia. It would be foolish and patently wrong to imagine a Russia-China alignment, still less an alliance, aimed at the west. Chinese dip-
lomats and senior officials have explicitly ruled out such a development. Limited Russia-China partnership
Ironically, the election of Trump has removed one of the major planks of China’s alignment with Russia. China has, with Russia, feared a hegemony of liberal values that would encourage civil society activists that threaten “colour revolutions.” By rejecting this kind of liberal interventionism himself, Trump removed one of the major factors underlining the cosiness between Beijing and Moscow. Furthermore, for strategic reasons and because of the environmental burden, China needs to wean itself from a fossil fuel-fed economy that Putin and Trump would like to see extended into the indefinite future. Thus, while the relationship between China and Russia is more than the “axis of convenience” — as the British academic Bobo Lo termed it — it is neither as intimate as some fear. Xi has met with Putin more often than with any other world leader, well over a dozen times since taking office in 2013, but limited economic complementarity and deep-seated suspicions bedevil the relationship. Many Russians are still fearful that China has designs on Russia’s sparsely populated Far East, most of it seized from China by 19th-Century “unequal” treaties. Chinese businesses and businessmen have regularly faced racially motivated harassment in major Russian cities and, in some cases, have had their goods confiscated. Still, polling shows Chinese and Russians maintaining favourable views of each other in international relations and there is a lively exchange of tourism, with Russian students making up one of the largest contingents of foreign students in China. This is a solid relationship, but not a feared anti-western bloc. Putin faces Xi as a self-professed Christian European, while Xi is an avowed Communist atheist who believes in Asia for the Asians. Where Russia noisily persecutes LGBT activities, China quietly tolerates depoliticized LGBT behaviour. China and Russia may see eye to eye on liberalism and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, but their hearts do not beat in unison. Russia and China may trade and even conduct yearly joint military exercises, but as the Chinese saying goes, “same bed, different dreams.” Jeremy Paltiel is professor of political science at Carleton University, specializing in Chinese politics and the politics of East Asia. SPRING 2017 | APR-MAY-JUN