China meets Russia, what about the West?

On March 20, 2023, the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, arrived in Moscow. The Russian Federation was chosen by Xi as the first country to visit after his re-election, given a historical logic of an “alliance for strategic purposes”. The initiative also responds to the need to accredit China as a credible mediator for the conflict in Ukraine.

The bilateral summit between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is notable above all for one certainty: Ukraine has remained marginal in the talks between the two leaders. The bulk of the meeting focused on economic and geopolitical aspects, likely on strengthening cooperation between the two superpowers. The idea of a Chinese peace initiative was just illusory.

What are the foundations of the current alliance between China and Russia? Reflecting on the history of Russian-Chinese relations and their distant logic of geopolitics, what do they share?

The only common point that emerges when analyzing the current relationship, seems to be the hostility toward the West.

Considering their relationship history, starting from the Asian expansion of the Tsarist Empire in the 17th century, the two nations were put on a collision by sharing (and still retaining) an immense land border: Siberia, a landmass pressing on China’s northern borders. Russia and China were enemies, having their empires neighboring.

Therefore, in 1899 Moscow took part in the holy alliance of imperialism against China which was trying to emancipate itself from foreign powers[1].  Russia was the second largest contingent, after the Japanese, to invade China and soon after the victory, he took control of all of Manchuria, the northeastern region of China. The Chinese carnage is still commemorated in a museum in Heihe, where loudspeaker-recorded explanations admonishing “never forget history”.

Bilateral relations took a positive turn in the 20^th century. Indeed, Russian culture became an important point of reference for the cultured elite of China and a great influencer of the communist theory. This phenomenon was confirmed by the Bolshevik revolution, which brought a part of the Chinese intelligentsia into contact with Marxism. The undisputed leader of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong, had an attitude of respectful deference towards Lenin and above all Stalin. Moreover, military aid from Stalin’s USSR was decisive in the victory of the Chinese communists in the civil war and therefore in the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949.

But the relations between the “two churches” of world communism turned sour as soon as the death of Stalin in 1953, and especially the start of de-Stalinization by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, alienated Mao from the Soviet Union. Mao became the world leader of an alternative version of communism: more extremist, aimed at the peasant masses rather than at the working class, the “third world”.

In terms of ideological propaganda and support for armed revolutionary movements, China often entered into a collision with the USSR. But behind that increasingly heated rivalry there was a geopolitical and structural barrier even more important: as both Asian superpowers they had conflicting interests and territorial disputes.

One of the moments of greatest tension occurred in 1969, with the Sino-Soviet border conflict, a series of armed and diplomatic clashes that took place along the border (signed by the Ussuri River) without a formal declaration of war. From that moment on, Chinese intelligence feared a nuclear attack against them which led them to come closer to the United States to protect themselves from Moscow.

The year 1971 was a turning point in relations between the United States and China: for the first time since the Chinese Revolution nine U.S. Table Tennis team players took a trip to China following an official invitation to play exhibition matches against the Chinese team.  Their trip, the first delegation of Americans to visit the country in decades, was the start of what became known as “ping-pong diplomacy” and helped lay the groundwork for establishing official diplomatic relations between the two countries. In the same year, Henry Kissinger, President of the US National Security, made two secret trips to China to test the waters for the diplomatic blunder of President Nixon a year later, which started the normalization of relations between the USA and the People’s Republic of China.

At the same time, after Mao died in 1976, his successor Deng Xiaoping approached the US in the economic field, indeed it opened China to globalization letting their economy develop similarly to the principles of the US that culminates with the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

However, Russia and China share the same vision that the current world order is American-centric and should be dismantled. In this theory, we can individuate the ideological aspect of authoritarian regimes, but also a geopolitical aspect: Russia and China, each on their own, have an interest in expanding and consolidating their imperial spheres of influence, which conflict with the geography of American alliances (Russia wants to return to influence Europe of the East, China wants to subjugate Japan, Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam). This explains why Xi enthusiastically adhered to Putin’s idea of NATO’s encirclement of Russia as the real cause of the war in Ukraine.

The cement of the alliance between Xi and Putin seems to be precarious. Framing this relationship in the current historical period marked by the war in Ukraine, it’s evidently too unbalanced in favor of China, on economic, financial, and technological grounds.

First, it’s a huge advantage for China that the Ukrainian conflict absorbs American military resources, taking them away from the Asian theater and contemporary economically exploit Russia.

Moreover, while Russia has cut ties with the West, China continues to find its main outlet market there. Beijing imported 380 million dollars of soybeans from Russia but 19 billion from the United States. It is the great Chinese ambiguity that explains why, at least formally, Xi avoided supplying arms to Russian troops in Ukraine.

China’s ambiguity continues if we consider the issue of energy transition: for now, Xi is hoarding Russian oil and gas (at very discounted prices, thus speculating on Moscow’s difficulties) and the two states agreed on all parameters for the construction of the Power-of-Siberia 2 gas pipeline for the export of Russian gas to China. At the same time, the President of PCR is working to consolidate Chinese hegemony over renewable energies, which in the future it will reduce Russia’s energy income.

An even more evident link between China and the West is the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013. This infrastructural program aims to diversify Chinese trade routes and intensify its relationship with the EU through six transport corridors by land and by sea, creating in this way a Eurasian economic area. It is to mention that Italy was the first member of the G7 nations to join the BRI in March 2019. Russia finds itself completely excluded from this network.

In conclusion, it is easy to predict that sooner or later Russia and China will rediscover the reasons for antagonism and the dispute between Beijing and Moscow is destined to grow. Until this point, hostility towards the West prevails over everything.

[1] The so called “Boxer Rebellion”