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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow this week
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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow earlier this week to discuss the conflict in Ukraine and relations between their countries.
The two nations have grown closer in recent years in a partnership that was defined as “without borders” by the two governments in a joint statement released shortly before the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian forces.
On Monday (March 20th) the two bosses called each other “dear friends” and exchanged compliments and handshakes.
But what connects these two countries?
BBC News Brasil spoke to specialists in Chinese and Russian politics from different parts of the world, who see the current moment from different perspectives, to find out what common interests and visions bring Moscow and Beijing closer.
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The ideology and strategy behind ChinaRussia relations
economic and security interests
According to analysts, this is primarily a pragmatic partnership that strives for mutual benefit.
After invading Ukraine, the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and other allied nations imposed severe sanctions on Russia banning the import of oil and the export of hightech products.
As a result, these countries’ trade with the Russians declined exponentially throughout 2022, and China solidified as Russia’s top trading partner.
Bilateral trade between the two partners reached a record high of US$190 billion in 2022. This is an increase of 30% compared to the previous year.
In addition, nearly half of the Russian government’s annual revenue comes from oil and gas, and sanctions have slumped sales to EU countries.
But a sizeable chunk of that deficit has been offset by increased sales to Asia and to China.
Credit, Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images
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Construction site for a new gas pipeline between China and Russia in the eastern Chinese city of Qutang
Russia exported twice as much cooking gas and 50% more natural gas to China in 2022 than the year before. There are also longterm projects to expand ties and build a new gas pipeline to connect the two areas.
According to analysts, in addition to the economy, there is also cooperation in matters of security.
Not only does China share a more than 4,000kilometer border with Russia, but it also borders other former Soviet republics under Moscow’s influence, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And strategically, Beijing does not want instability on its borders.
But the big question in the Ukraine conflict right now is whether China, the world’s fourth largest arms exporter, will send war aid to Russia.
So far, the Chinese government has not provided lethal equipment to Russia, but the United States believes it may in the future.
Siemon Wezeman of the Stockholm International Institute for Peace Studies told the BBC that China is making increasingly sophisticated war equipment, such as drones, that could be of interest to Russia. However, so far there is no evidence of the delivery of weapons.
Weltanschauung and opposition to the West
But the connection doesn’t stop there. According to the experts interviewed by the report, the two powers share similar world views as well as a similar position on the West and the future of the world order.
For them there is a vague similarity in the values proclaimed by both governments and to some extent by societies.
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At the Moscow meeting, Xi and Putin described each other as “dear friends”
American University researcher and professor Joseph Torigian examines the political development of these two countries and the strategies of their governments. According to him, both “have a different worldview that places more emphasis on state power and conservative societal values”.
Both governments also have autocratic tendencies, in contrast to the Western model of democracy, says Torigian.
But these values or ideologies have different origins in the two countries and are disseminated and applied in different ways and with different intensities. In the past, even China and the Soviet Union had conflicts over their models of communism.
Chinese professor and researcher Yingjie Guo from the University of Sydney explains that the Chinese government claims to be guided by the ideologies of Communism and Marxism, but in practice economic development often comes first.
“The Communist Party sets itself the goal of communism and continues to say that it is guided by Marxism (…). However, she is in no hurry to approach communism or even more advanced stages of socialism. On the contrary, Chinese socialism has returned to an early stage where nonsocialist relations of production, including private property, are permissible.”
In addition, according to Oxford University political scientist and historian Rana Mitter, current Chinese political thought also has many influences from Confucianism, a doctrine picked up by Xi Jinping.
“This traditional Chinese philosophy brings elements about hierarchy and the relationship between people and countries,” he explains.
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Contradictory past: Former Chinese Premier Li Peng meets former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing in 1989
In the case of Russia, despite the communist Soviet past, the current ideological influences are completely different, in addition to being more scattered and difficult to identify.
“Today’s philosophy of the Putin government is directly linked to nationalism, but even more so to imperialism and a sense of superiority (coupled with a sense of resentment) of the Russian nation. (…) It’s basically a complete set of classic Russian farright ideologies,” explained Russian researcher and journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.
The researcher and professor at the Federal University of the South in Russia, Victor Apryshchenko, also notes that this nationalist discourse is present not only in the pronouncements of government officials, but also in schools, in statecontrolled cultural production and in social networks .
“I believe that the main explanation for this revival of nationalism today is the trauma that Russia and the Russian people suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It seems to me that since 1991 there have been internal and external efforts to try to resume the previous position,” he says.
But the point that unites the two countries is precisely how their values go against Western proverbs, particularly when it comes to defending democracy as the best model of government and defining human rights and other concepts.
“Resistance to the Western model certainly helps bring the two countries together,” says Andrew Mertha, director of the China Studies program at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
According to analysts, Russia and China aren’t necessarily trying to impose their view of reality on the rest of the world like they did during the Cold War, but they fear exactly what they say is an attempt by the West to do with their own values.
According to Vicente Ferraro Jr., a political scientist and researcher at the Asian Studies Laboratory at the University of São Paulo (USP), this is one of the most important political components of the relationship today.
“Both partially deny political liberalism and accuse the West of inappropriately trying to ‘export’ its political models to other societies and cultural contexts. Political liberalism and, indirectly, representative democracy are not exploited as universal values by either of them, but as constructions of the West for geopolitical purposes,” he says.
For example, there are voices that defend the idea that the concepts of democracy and rights proposed by the United States and Europe are really just a way of manipulating other countries in their interests.
In other words, Moscow and Beijing share the notion that the Westernled international order and its rules pose a threat to both China and Russia.
According to experts, this becomes clear both in speeches in which Putin accuses NATO of expanding its interests beyond its own territory and when Xi Jinping criticizes the United States’ search for allies in the AsiaPacific region.
“This is an alliance against a common adversary, based primarily on the idea that the United States is using its military power freely and extensively around the world, and this cannot continue,” said Mikhail Alexseev, a Russian professor at the University of San Diego State.
In his opinion, without this common perception of the West, the partnership structure between Russia and China could collapse.
A “borderless” partnership?
But there are those who question whether this alliance is in fact unlimited, as defined by the two governments in a joint communiqué issued just before the invasion of Ukraine.
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China could pull out of the partnership if Russia goes too far in its push into Ukraine, experts say
Ideological differences that exist despite similar worldviews could eventually become a problem, according to BBC Brasil experts.
Past precedents aren’t the best either. In March 1969, troops from China and the former Soviet Union (USSR) faced each other in a monthlong battle that shaped relations between the two countries for more than two decades.
Analysts also claim that China could abandon the partnership if Russia goes too far in its efforts in Ukraine, such as using nuclear weapons. Or whether an economically more advantageous cooperation would be possible in the future.
Professor Alexandra Vacroux of Harvard University defined it this way: “It’s a kind of marriage of convenience, but there is no such thing as real love.”