A member of the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force stands guard as a Chinese national flag flies over Tiananmen Square along with other red flags ahead of the fifth plenary session of the First Session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, China, on Sunday, March 12, 2023. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
RIGA, Latvia — As Russian President Vladimir Putin flies to Beijing to meet his strongest, most crucial ally — Chinese President Xi Jinping — the leaders are each hobbled by crises of their own making: Russia’s disastrous war on Ukraine; and China’s economic stumbles that have frayed confidence in Xi’s management.
But their meeting, at China’s third Belt and Road summit, is also an opportunity to showcase their alliance and partnership against the United States and the West at a moment of global tumult. While Western leaders have firmly backed Israel, Russia and China have carefully avoided describing the Hamas attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis as terrorism.
Instead they called for an end to the violence and the revival of efforts to forge a two-state solution, a decades-old concept that Israelis and Palestinians have never managed to implement.
Moscow and Beijing each habitually accuse Washington of a cold war mentality and of trying to split the world into geopolitical blocs. Putin’s deepening relationship with Xi is evidence of hardening of global fault lines, as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran line up on one side, against the United States and its NATO and Pacific allies on the other. Meanwhile, numerous Global South nations are reluctant to take a side.
For Putin, increasingly isolated and tarnished by the war on Ukraine, the trip to Beijing is a key moment to project the image of a leader with powerful friends, although he is increasingly perceived as a junior partner reliant on Xi’s favor.
“This relationship is actually deeper and more robust now two years after the war, than it was before the war. And it is happening much more on Chinese terms,” said Alexander Gabuev, a China and Russia expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Gabuev said Russia and China are growing closer amid Putin’s war-related problems and Xi’s economic difficulties, as both confront the United States.
“China is having some significant headwinds, both due to some domestic circumstances and also its competition with the United States, but this set of issues has also provided certain boost to the bilateral relationship,” he said. “Russia has nowhere else to go for a large new market for its commodities.”
Putin, quite literally, has very few other places he can go.
The Russian president’s travel has been curbed by an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, and the trip this week is just his second visit abroad since his March indictment, following a trip last week to the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek.
Putin’s major diplomatic showpieces this year, including a visit by Xi in March and a Russia-Africa summit in July, were both on Russian soil.
The two will hold one-on-one meetings on Wednesday, according to Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov. Putin is also due to address the Belt and Road summit, which is marking 10 years of Xi’s massive global infrastructure project.
A “no-limits friendship” agreement that the two leaders signed early last year — when Putin attended the Olympics in Beijing just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — has quietly grown stronger. Putin is increasingly dependent on Beijing’s support to weather a war which led to unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia and exposed the Kremlin’s military weakness.
Wary of Western sanctions, China has been careful to avoid tacitly supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine, touting itself as a potential peacemaker and releasing a set of principles that called for peace in Ukraine. But the Chinese plan left the major issues unaddressed and predictably has gained no traction.
Meanwhile, Putin and other senior officials have put Russia forward as a potential peace mediator in the Middle East — a role that seems a bit far-fetched — both because of Russia’s continued bombing of Ukrainian civilians and because of the recent failure of Russian peacekeepers to uphold a cease-fire between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Still, Russia and China see themselves as “civilizational” states, with China boasting of 5,000 years of civilization, and Russia trumpeting a “millennium-old civilization” — even as it denies Ukraine’s history and condemns Western nations’ colonial pasts. Both China and Russia employ rhetoric to appeal to leaders in the Global South who often seem content to play big powers against each other.
On the most practical level, the Russia-China trade relationship has become increasingly important.
Recent trade figures show a decline in Chinese exports to the United States, Europe and ASEAN nations, while Russia has emerged as an important export market, showing a 56 percent increase in the first nine months of the year.
But China’s exports to Russia of critical semiconductors “exploded” after the invasion of Ukraine according to an analysis in May by Free Russia Foundation. The products are crucial in the manufacturing of many weapons systems.
Beijing’s trade relations with Moscow are the brightest spot in its trade statistics, amid tumbling exports to other important markets. Western sanctions, meanwhile, destroyed Russia’s main oil and gas market, forcing a massive pivot to China, India and others, a switch that boosted Russia-China trade by 32 percent last year.
Putin predicted on Monday that Russian trade with China would reach $200 billion by the end of the year, in an interview with China Media Group published on the Kremlin website Monday.
“In the field of energy, which occupies a special place in our relations, Russia now ranks first among Chinese partners in the supply of energy resources to China in value terms. First place!” Putin boasted. He also extolled the growth of Chinese car sales in Russia, the main replacement for cars made by Western firms that pulled out of Russia after the invasion.
China’s share in Russian vehicle imports for the first eight months of 2023 rose to 92 percent, compared to 10 percent in 2021, according to Ruslan Davydov, acting head of the Federal Customs Service of Russia. Sales are expected to increase to at least 380,000 vehicles by the end of the year, according to China’s Xinhua News Agency.
In addition to China, Putin has been forced to turn to Iran and North Korea for drones, artillery shells, rockets and other weapons.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday that North Korea had provided 1,000 containers of ammunition and military equipment to Russia for its war on Ukraine, releasing images that he said depicted hundreds of North Korean containers headed for Russia.
In August, Russia and China teamed up in the U.N. Security Council to block a unified response to North Korea’s spate of ballistic missile tests, as Washington warned of a growing nuclear threat from Pyongyang.
Pro-Kremlin media has trumpeted the Beijing visit as a sign of Putin’s global clout, reporting that he will be the Belt and Road summit’s “guest of honor.”
The Pro-Kremlin Pravda news site predicted that Putin’s strong anti-Western position would have “a decisive effect” on Xi’s willingness to confront the United States.
But while Russia and China often highlight their close cooperation in upending Washington’s global dominance and forging a multipolar world, each is focused primarily on national interests as they seek to expand their own clout. In practical terms, Gabuev pointed to a 40 percent increase in bilateral trade this year, after last year’s 32 percent rise.
