An analysis piece on the BBC after Putin’s visit to Beijing suggests that Putin is very much a junior partner in the relationship and that Xi may not want to upset the West too much.
Russian and Chinese state media focused heavily on the camaraderie between the two leaders. But in truth, this is no longer a partnership of equals.
Mr Putin came to China cap in hand, eager for Beijing to continue trading with a heavily sanctioned and isolated Russia. His statements were filled with honeyed tones and flattering phrases.
He said that his family were learning Mandarin – this was particularly noteworthy because he very rarely talks about his children in public.
He declared that he and Mr Xi were “as close as brothers” and went on to praise China’s economy, saying it was “developing in leaps and bounds, at a fast pace”. This will likely play well with Beijing officials worried by a sluggish economy.
But Mr Xi himself did not echo the tone of these lofty compliments. Instead, his remarks were more perfunctory – even bland. Mr Putin, he said, was a “good friend and a good neighbour”. For China, the welcome ceremony and show of unity is in its interests, but lavishing its guest with praise is not.
I would be interest to see the SD consensus on this.
Makes sense - Putin couldn’t continue his war without China’s support - and his ability to maintain power would be severely compromised if he ends the war without victory
China’s need of Russia is as a supplier of energy and access to critical minerals but it is not highly dependent upon it. Russia’s need of China is critical technology that Russia’s domestic industry cannot produce at scale (microchips, high tech materials, complex chemical precursors for munitions and composites) which it can no longer purchase on the open market because of sanctions and its dwindling hard cash reserves. China is doubtless pressing Russia for concessions and mineral rights as well as cheap oil and gas (although there is no way to deliver those by pipeline the way they do to Europe, so it is all tankers).
It has become fashionable to prognosticate the impending collapse of the PRC, and while the nation certainly does have both serious financial and demographic issues, they have a real industrial base and access to many resources including a huge labor pool and a vast skillbase including the ability to transition to automation as the worker pool decreases. Once Xi kicks the bucket and assuming nobody else takes over the cult of personality that he has developed around his leadership, the country might actually address those issues.
Russia, on the other hand, is in severe demographic collapse, has hemorrhaged most of its technical skillbase over waves of emigration, has little domestic industry aside from building armaments that are increasingly obsolescent, and can’t seem to process or even develop most of its vast resources without outside assistance. Under Putin’s leadership it is increasingly becoming a ‘hermit kingdom’ that other nations don’t want to so business with despite its expansive energy reserves, and the ranks of leaders are so purged of actual experience or talent that it is likely that who ever replaces Putin will be just as venal and authoritarian but not as shrewd.
Russia is the disadvantaged partner in this relationship, and will become moreso, likely fragmenting in the not-too-distant future. I doubt Russia will even exist as currently constituted in the next couple of decades, while China will likely weather its crises and potentially become the dominant regional hegemony that it aspires to be over the Southeast Asian region. Assuming, of course, that there still a viable world for nation-states to exist within.
Although I agree with much of the above, I note there are several countries in Africa, Asia and South America which seem at least somewhat open to doing business with Russia. Although 131 countries do not support Russia, they only account for 36% of global population.
When states - and/or the people who claim the represent the state - create a public portrait of themselves as infallibly right and always looking out for the best interests of their publics, they can never take the chance of failure, even small perceived failures. Yet no state’s actions are always perfect, and even long-term positive successes must be relentlessly reinforced.
We in America are horrified by foreign propaganda infiltrating our social media yet those are minor bits of noise compared to the internal propaganda that the average Russian or Chinese consumer of media is subject to every day. They have no avail to a “mainstream” media that, comparatively speaking, issues facts and truths about reality. Reality is always malleable in the favor of the state.
Putin continues to lose and fail in every endeavor except that of increasing ties with the scum of the earth. Even with the tremendous advantage of controlling most media while shutting down and jailing the few dissenters, reality is increasingly difficult to shield from peoples’ minds. (It helps that he games the system so that most Ukraine casualties are from outside the protected area around Moscow.) To compensate, he must seek out those still willing to back his madness, like a gambler dealing with ever-shadier loan sharks with higher interest and bigger goons. (Any parallels this might raise with one DJT are justified, as the Don is an apt pupil of the art of turning losses into wins by shouting WINNER! louder and louder.)
China has had the luxury during most of Xi’s reign of being on a winning streak. Until Covid. The system’s many weaknesses were publicly exposed and too many citizens felt the effects personally to pretend they never happened. Like those loan sharks mentioned above, China will still for many years attrack the desperate, the yearning, and the small-timers needing to convince others that they are themselves big. Roaring economies with one-and-a-half billion people do not suddenly lose their power just because of a long series of snake eyes.
Disreputable loan sharks do not rule the economy, obviously; cautious bankers do. No matter how many legs you break, you soon run out of money if nobody pays you back. (See: 2008) Putin, to change metaphors in mid stream, is like one of those plate spinners on Ed Sullivan. If they are at the top of their game the plates tantalizingly wobble but never fall down. I’m sure more people wanted to see a cascade of exploding plates, though. What will Putin do to avoid the prospect; what wouldn’t he do if the worst occurred? China is more concerned about that than the mere disdain of the West. Dismal as the thought is, let’s hope that doesn’t change.
But not the wealth. Syria, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Venezuela are among the poorest half of nations in terms of GDP, and even less in terms of per capita earnings or international influence.
China wants Siberia, but also influence over the Central Asian ‘stans’ for their mineral resources. And without Russian competition or Western involvement, China can draw those countries and their resources into their sphere of influence.
Taiwan is strategically irrelevant to Chinese hegemony but Xi has a genuine hard-on for reunification. It may ultimately be a red herring but it also may be the fulcrum that becomes the catalyst for strategic conflict.
I’m puzzled by this statement. China has long-term ambitions that it consistently telegraphs. Just think of the Belt-and-Road Initiative, or everything that Beijing has said and done – for decades! – in preparation for trying to take Taiwan. What evidence is there that China wants to occupy Siberia?
So Russia will implode and Russian nukes will cease to be an issue?
So this age-old cornerstone of PRC geopolitics is a fakeout?
It wouldn’t make it all that difficult. Taiwan’s Navy has a quarter of the rated vessels the PRC Navy, and is primarily oriented toward coastal defense with little ability to strike at range. As a peer competitor in the economic realm, Taiwan has an edge in manufacturing high performance microchips (and a few other items) but doesn’t have the kind of capacity to expand or pivot that the PRC has demonstrated repeatedly. Taiwan is an embarassment for the PRC because they’ve claimed for decades of their intent to reign it back into the fold but the ability of Taiwan to challenge the PRC either economically or militarily is barely more than negligable.
The real threats to a Chinese Hegemony are Japan and South Korea to the northeast (which have their own substantial demographic problems), and India to the west, but nobody is positioned to challenge China in the South China Sea region. (No, not even AUKUS.)
China and Russia have actually had a number of conflicts over their shared border, and while the last actual fighting was over fifty years ago China has never formally renounced their claim to the Russian portions of what used to be Outer Mongolia (now the Russian republic of Tuva). Siberia has not only vast open spaces, some of which are reasonably habitable, but also an enormous wealth of natural resources that neither the Soviet Union or modern Russia have the industrial might to extract and harvest, but which China desperately needs. I do not think that China will enter into naked conflict with Russia to get them, but it may well use its superior position to get access, use rights, and eventually even concessions on sovereignty as Russia’s influence contracts even further.
I don’t think people realize just how hollow Russia is (and the Soviet Union largely was) from both an economic and social coherence standpoint. Russia was a superpower by virtue of having developed nuclear weapons early, and they put enormous resources into advancing some aspects of military and aerospace technology, but they’ve never had much of any other industry. Much of the purpose of the Warsaw Pact, aside from being a buffer zone from largely imagined Western aggression, was to bolster the Soviet economy with goods and labor that could be imported cheaply, and today they do not have either that buffer or ‘trade partners’ whom they can bully with military and political might. Russia is coasting on its reserves of materiel from the Soviet era and its economic value as a petrostate, but in all ways that are essential to the sustainability of a modern industrial nation it is essentially in apocalyptic collapse with no foreseeable way of ever recovering or even maintaining its realm as currently constituted. It has lost and continues to lose educated workers and their skillbase, it has failed to maintain any real manufacturing infrastructure even sufficient to extract the resources it has, and aside from the recent and flailing invasion of Ukraine is almost completely irrelevant on the international stage. It is hollowed it from within by corruption and a population that is top heavy with retirees and few at the bottom of the demographic pile to support them, and Putin has crafted a governance structure that is so fragile and inept that it probably wouldn’t take much to devolve into civil unrest without a strong hand as the top. It’s a real mess, and it is difficult to not imagine that the Chinese are looking at that situation and counting the ways to advantage their nation from it.