During the three months leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on Feb. 24, the US had pleaded with China to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
About two weeks into the war, Washington is trying to persuade Beijing to broker a ceasefire.
In the eyes of Washington, and maybe the West as a whole, ties between China and Russia mean that the two countries share a great deal of strategic and tactical decisionmaking.
However, nothing could be further from reality.
How robust are these ties? Not as strong as they appear.
It is true that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Putin on Feb. 4 signed a number of agreements covering a wide range of areas from trade to defense.
This is the largest-scale cooperation between the two countries, but despite being a “no limits” friendship with “no forbidden areas of cooperation,” as Xi put it, this “great deal” falls short of being a formal alliance.
One must wonder why.
The biggest hurdle that blocks the formation of a committed political and military alliance is that each one holds deep-rooted suspicion toward the other.
CHINA’S VIEW OF RUSSIA
China’s relationship with Russia has evolved through two distinct eras: the Russian-dominated Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991, and post-Soviet Russia thereafter.
In the first era, China emerged from a junior partner to an ideological rival, and a friend that converted to an enemy.
This all happened in less than 20 years after the two communist regimes in 1950 signed the 30-year Sino-Soviet Treaty on Friendship, Union and Mutual Assistance.
The trigger of the divergence was that the orthodox Marxist-Leninist China, at the time led by Mao Zedong (毛澤東), could not tolerate a more peaceful “coexistence with the West” approach advocated by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev following Joseph Stalin’s death.
China despised this pro-Western approach and regarded it as the culprit for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Beijing has taken to heart the Soviet Union’s fall and has been on high alert to avoid similar events from happening in China.
In the second era, China and Russia found common ground when they began to feel threatened by Western influence. The old-time ideological rivalry was replaced by cooperation to dominate the regional economy and the geopolitical arena.
While Russia is trying to maintain the influence it inherited from the Soviet Union, China, as a rising economic power, sees Russia as a second-tier country with vast land and natural resources being its only source of wealth.
However, there are more factors that undermine the formation of a true alliance between the two.
One is that China has been extremely critical of Russia over its political and military support to Vietnam and India, China’s two major rivals in Asia.
Another factor is that the Russian Empire had taken millions of square kilometers of land from Qing Dynasty China via a series of treaties.
Although China and Russia in 2005 reached agreements on their mutual border in a series of new treaties, public opinion in China did not let go of its irredentist desires for very long.
RUSSIA’S VIEW OF CHINA
China has been regarded by its giant northern neighbor as a hardline socialist state with relentless resolve under the disguise of a pragmatic approach.
Beijing would not hesitate to sign treaties that bring benefits or minimize damage to itself. Conversely, it would not hesitate to denounce any existing treaty whenever it sees fit.
This view is supported by the fate of plenty of treaties China signed over decades, such as the short-lived 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the 19th-century Sino-Russian treaties, and the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, among others.
Even when such treaties remain in effect, Russia has not received China’s full commitment.
Events in Ukraine are an example. On Wednesday last week, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, but China abstained instead of vetoing the motion.
This happened merely one month after Putin and Xi’s joint statement.
China’s half-hearted expression of friendship with Russia — also seen following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia in 2008 — must have irritated Moscow to no end.
Either out of instinctive distrust of China or its experience of dealing with the country, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia refrained from providing China with cutting-edge technology, even when their relationship was at its best.
Geopolitical competition also contributes to suspicion between the two countries.
Since China launched its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, Moscow has been increasingly viewing heavy-spending Beijing as a vicious competitor for regional influence.
The tension is particularly high in central Asia, where Russia until 2013 had enormous influence over former Soviet states.
A completion of the Belt and Road Initiative would divert loyalty of central Asian countries toward China, a prospect that makes Russia profoundly ambivalent toward the initiative and its own possible involvement.
Economic frictions with China in the post-Soviet era also make Russia uneasy.
Although trade volume between the countries has grown about 20 percent annually in the past decade, the volume comprises mainly Russia’s imports of consumer products and its exports of raw materials.
Moscow has failed in its initial goal of exporting technology and industrial equipment to China.
GROWING HOSTILITIES
The influx of a large number of Chinese migrants to Russia has caused problems. The migrants’ lack of respect to their host culture and a resulting rise in crime contribute to rising tensions between the two countries. This has led Russian authorities and residents to grow hostile toward Chinese society.
The shutting down of a large Chinese-dominated market in Moscow in 2009, a failed attempt to purchase Russian oil company Vankorneft by China National Petroleum Corp in 2017 and the expulsion of a Chinese bottling business from the Baikal lake shore in 2019 are just a few examples of a string of anti-China actions in the past few years.
The China-Russia partnership is more like a marriage of convenience than of strategic and political resonance.
Neither side really wants to sever its ties with the West and form a long-term alliance with the other, because neither one could maintain its current status of international importance without the influx of capital, technology and ideas from the West.
The world will be much safer if the distrust between China and Russia remains high.
Daniel Jia is founder of the consulting firm DJ LLC Integral Services in Spain.
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