On his first foray abroad as China’s new leader, Xi Jinping’s first stop last week was in Moscow, giving the impression that the giant Asian neighbors were friends intent on broadening their “strategic partnership.”
But for all the handshakes and cultural agreements, the relationship between China and Russia remains at its core a “strategic competition” — one in which rising China has a distinctly better hand.
On the surface, Chinese-Russian relations are as good as they’ve ever been. Border disputes have been put to rest (for the time being), and Xi helped kick off a “Year of Chinese Tourism.”
But the fact that after so many summits the two countries have not moved anywhere near a formal alliance is telling. The reality is that the national interests of China and Russia mostly diverge — except for a shared desire to change the current U.S.-dominated world order, explicit in Russia, implicit in China’s rise.
Consider China’s interests. Its west is landlocked and poor, but Russia has little to offer there. China has assiduously cultivated Burma, investing in outsize infrastructure projects that would afford direct access to the Indian Ocean. But China squeezed Burma too hard, and the Burmese are now seeking to counterbalance China’s power by drawing closer to the United States.
To the east, Beijing’s longstanding policy has been to keep Russia as much as possible out of Far Eastern affairs. Beijing seeks no assistance from Russia in the South China Sea, or in its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Russia, for its part, seeks improved relations with Japan.
Russia also offers no help on China’s dilemma over North Korea, where Pyongyang flouts Beijing’s directives with impunity on the presumption that China is too fearful of precipitous unification under South Korean-American auspices to do anything about it.
Even in the realm of hydrocarbons, Chinese interest in Russian oil and gas amounts largely to an insurance policy, given China’s access to African and Gulf oil and Central Asian gas — not to mention shale gas, which China possesses in abundance.
In the aftermath of Tiananmen, Moscow supplied 95 percent of Chinese weapons systems, and Russian arms continue to be of major interest to Beijing. But Moscow has become wary of China’s copying through reverse engineering. Sales nosedived.
Where Russia could potentially make a strategic difference for China is in the supply of water. But by the time Russia discovers a practicable way to send Siberian water flowing southward into parched regions of China, cost-effective desalinization may have achieved scale.
Some Chinese conservatives welcome close ties with Russia not just for a counterbalance to the United States, but as a kind of authoritarian mutual admiration. Still, very few Chinese pay Russia much heed.
On a personal level, Xi Jinping, like all Chinese Communists of his generation, studied a bit of Russian in school. But for him, the Soviet Union, whose collapse is assiduously studied by Chinese elites, provides only a bracing negative example.
As for Russia, Vladimir Putin’s attention is fixed on Europe and the United States. For him, the “strategic partnership” with Beijing largely means satisfying his obsession with Washington.
A shared affirmation of “sovereignty” — when it means blocking universal human rights and democracy promotion, which China and Russia view as pretext for advancing U.S. state interests — does impart a certain emotional bond. Xi’s sovereignty-über-alles speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations generated goodwill.
But such psychological salve for the loss of global stature comes at a high price for Russia. China gets all sorts of goodies in exchange — including oil, evidently at below world market prices (the gas lobby in Russia refuses to go along); Russian acquiescence in China’s Central Asian expansionism; and Russian noninvolvement in East Asia.
The touted extension on this visit of Chinese loans for Russian oil, or a still-pending gas deal, only confirm Moscow’s real status as largely a supplier of raw materials.
When “strategic partnership” comes down to mutually constraining U.S. power, it in effect also entails Russia facilitating China’s spreading power in Eurasia.
This imbalance is not lost on some officials in Moscow, who whisper that by playing up to Russia’s great-power nostalgia, China conceals its aggrandizement at Russia’s expense, particularly in Central Asia. But that is not something the Russians can publicly say.
There is one more way the two powers diverge. Russia is faking democracy, and China is faking communism, yet both share the condition of “partial-reform equilibrium” — the phenomenon wherein major liberalizing reforms produce winners who in turn form into powerful interest groups that stymie further reforms.
Xi has raised hopes of being willing, and able, to deliver a further reform advance. Putin stirs no such hopes.
Stephen Kotkin teaches history at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and recently co-edited Beijing’s Power and China’s Borders: Twenty Neighbors in Asia.