Much has changed since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin last stood together atop Tiananmen Square in 2015. When they did so again this week, it was supposedly as equal partners. Of course, the reality is far more complex.
The conventional wisdom is that China has cemented its position as the dominant partner, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. After all, it is now Russia’s biggest trading partner, accounting for more than half of Russian imports in 2023, whereas Russia does not even make China’s top five. While Russia relies on China to buy roughly half of its crude oil exports, these purchases account for only 17.5 percent of China’s total oil imports. Simply put, Russia needs China to keep its own economy going.
Yet for all this dependence, China is not dictating outcomes, and the Kremlin is not acting like a junior partner. Consider the war in Ukraine. While it has some significant upsides for China — not least by diverting US resources from the Pacific theater — there is no doubt that Putin is calling the shots on the timing, scope and endgame.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
On paper, China might have the leverage to influence Russia’s policy, but it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Ukraine could compel China to use it. Doing so would not only jeopardize China’s relations with a key partner, but also contravene its own core foreign-policy principle of “non-interference.” Putin knows that better than anyone.
Although China has consistently pitched itself as a “peacemaker,” that role has been filled by other countries, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia; and now, US President Donald Trump and Putin have proved capable of engaging each other without a broker.
The limits of Chinese influence are even more striking around its own borders, where Russia’s deepening partnership with North Korea is raising alarms. China might welcome Russian meddling in Europe, but potentially destabilizing the Korean Peninsula is quite another matter.
If China is unwilling to influence outcomes in Ukraine and unable to deter potential instability in its own neighborhood, that suggests there is more to China-Russia relations than a simple junior-senior partnership. Although the economic relationship might have changed, the politics have yet to catch up.
Historically, China was long its northern neighbor’s junior partner — and sometimes its victim. Czarist Russia was among the imperial powers that carved up Chinese territory in the 19th century, seizing roughly 1.5 million square kilometers in China’s northeast — an area roughly one-sixth of China’s current territory. Later, in 1969, disputes over the same border sparked a seven-month conflict with the Soviet Union.
Thus, the view in Beijing is that the last 30-odd years of strong relations are an exception, not the norm. Chinese leaders remain reluctant to redefine the relationship, especially when the current posture brings valuable benefits such as cheap energy. Given this potent combination of economic gain and political anxiety, they are unlikely to put meaningful pressure on the Kremlin.
Russia, for its part, is struggling to accept the idea of Chinese dominance. It is still holding out in negotiations over the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, refusing China’s demands that it sell gas at its heavily subsidized domestic price level. Russia has also imposed significant “recycling fees” — which function similarly to tariffs — to counter the sevenfold surge in imported Chinese autos that followed Western carmakers leaving the country.
Meanwhile, the Russian right has been increasingly vocal in urging the Kremlin to resist dependence on China. Noting that Russia’s sparsely populated Far East sits uneasily beside China’s vast population, nationalist commentators warn that the Chinese have not forgotten their “lost territories,” and surely covet Russia’s endowments of cheap energy and raw materials. Their arguments draw on history and identity, not just economics, to bolster a politics that rejects the role of supplicant.
Russia also appears to be keeping China at arm’s length in the Arctic, where China aspires to assert itself as a “near-arctic state.” In North Korea, the more that Russia provides fuel, food and technical assistance, the less leverage that China would have over North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Still, there are some areas where China is growing bolder. It is increasingly stepping into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia, pledging more than US$25 billion in investment in the region just in the first half of this year. Xi also recently attended the second China-Central Asia Summit in Astana — a clear signal of Chinese priorities, given that he had been limiting his international engagements.
These realities, not hand-on-heart declarations of “no-limits” partnership, offer the best gauge of bilateral ties. China-Russia relations are by no means on the verge of collapse, but their evolution would reflect political, historical and geographical constraints, not trade volumes.
China still harbors a deep-seated fear of instability along its borders, informed in part by Russia’s own history of territorial aggression. That is why neighboring North Korea, not Ukraine, has more potential to serve as a wedge between the two. It is also why China views the fall of Putin’s regime, and the chaos that could ensue along its border, as an intolerable outcome.
For Russia, the same mindset that drove the invasion of Ukraine also shapes its view of China. The Kremlin is struggling to reconcile growing economic dependency with its self-image as an enduring great power. The nationalist right argues that Western sanctions have forced Russia to become more self-reliant and that this hard-won “autonomy” must not be surrendered. The idea that Russia’s future could be dictated on Chinese terms is anathema to the country’s political elite as well.
That makes Russia’s own vision of the future unpalatable to China, which wants to cement itself as a technological powerhouse and lynchpin of the global economy, not join an alliance of isolated, willfully destabilizing rogue actors.
Ten years after Xi and Putin’s previous Tiananmen meet-up, the images depicting unity cannot hide their countries’ historical mistrust and diverging long-term interests.
Ruby Osman is senior policy adviser on China at the Tony Blair Institute. Dan Sleat is senior policy adviser on Russia and Ukraine at the Tony Blair Institute.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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