Sergey Radchenko, an expert on Russia’s foreign relations, writes on its evolving friendship with China
Opposing the expansion of NATO together is easy. Navigating geopolitics is not
By Sergey Radchenko
Feb 15th 2022
PRONOUNS MATTER to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. He likes to demonstrate his closeness to some world leaders by calling them ty, instead of the more formal Vy. Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Silvio Berlusconi and Victor Orban are all referred to in this amicable way. But Mr Putin has always maintained formality with his “dear friend” Chairman Xi Jinping. They have met 38 times, with the most recent encounter in Beijing on February 4th. Yet for all the etiquette, Mr Putin and Mr Xi are political twins. They share an autocratic outlook on world affairs and a deep commitment to the Sino-Russian relationship, which, they both have claimed, is at its warmest in history.
The relationship is one of equals because Mr Xi allows it to be. It is true that economically China and Russia are not in the same league. China’s economy is roughly six times the size of Russia’s. China is Russia’s top trading partner but Russia is not even among China’s top ten. Yet Mr Xi indulges Mr Putin because Russia’s amity is a valuable asset for China. Russia is one of China’s very few true friends, and one of considerable international influence. This gives Mr Putin a degree of leverage in the Sino-Russian relationship that is rather out of proportion to Russia’s economic clout.
Russia’s nuclear status, its role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and, most of all, its willingness to flex its military muscle—as it has done with the build-up of Russian troops around Ukraine and its recent lightning deployment of “peacekeepers” to Kazakhstan—are reminders to Beijing that Russia will not easily accept the role of China’s junior partner.
Any effort to enforce a hierarchy would be counterproductive. This was, after all, how the Sino-Soviet alliance forged by Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin crumbled in the 1950s: Moscow expected deference to its global strategy and Beijing proved unwilling to bow. Now Beijing does not—and cannot—expect Moscow’s deference. That means their friendship probably will endure for longer than the alliance built by Stalin and Mao.
China and Russia do not call their relationship an alliance. They have not offered one another security guarantees like those covered by NATO’s Article 5. They are aligned, not allied, and this arrangement allows each a degree of flexibility, permitting their interests to converge and diverge as the situation requires.
In recent months Beijing and Moscow have converged frequently. They have even begun to construct an ideological frame of reference for their relationship, grounded in similar values and in a shared view of long-term historical trends. Intriguingly, Mr Putin and Mr Xi continue to claim that the Sino-Russian partnership is unconstrained by a shared ideology, in contrast to what they see as the ideological rigidity of the collective West. They challenge its definitions of “democracy” and “human rights”, most recently in a joint statement from Beijing. Using anti-colonial rhetoric, they assert that the West represents an overbearing “minority” and that its politics is “rejected by the international community”.
Despite the bold assertions, the evidence suggests that Mr Xi and Mr Putin wish to reform, but not to replace, the global order. Their vision is fundamentally conservative. One of Mr Putin’s treasured talking points shows as much. He says he wants to expand the role of the United Nations Security Council, and in particular that of its five permanent members, in global policymaking. It is ironic that a leader who lambasts the West for its outdated cold-war mentality seeks to boost institutions that hark to even earlier times, and that by no means reflect the current distribution of power in international politics.
Mr Putin’s preoccupation with forestalling further enlargement of NATO—a motive behind his threats to Ukraine—is another element of his conservative vision that harks back decades. It reflects conceptions of European security favoured by Leonid Brezhnev, a former Soviet leader. Mr Brezhnev feared China, and on his watch the two neighbours even fought a brief border war. By contrast, Mr Putin has enlisted Beijing in the effort to oppose NATO enlargement.
Prompted by his own troubles in Hong Kong, Mr Xi has also helpfully endorsed one of Mr Putin’s old fixations: stern opposition to supposedly Western-inspired “colour revolutions”. This showed recently in China’s quick approval of Russia’s response to rioting in Kazakhstan. Mr Xi agreed even though he can hardly have liked troops being dispatched through the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a Russia-led military alliance, in which China has no voice.
The biggest question about the Sino-Russian alignment is whether it will endure in a rapidly changing geopolitical environment. It is one thing for China to back Russia in opposing NATO enlargement as it costs it nothing to do so. It’s quite another for China to help Russia evade the economic sanctions it would face should it decide to invade Ukraine. It is also one thing for Russia to back China in its opposition to AUKUS, a trilateral defence pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and America unveiled last year, but quite another for it to support China in the event of conflict in the South China Sea or in a clash with India, with which Moscow maintains cordial ties.
The closer Russia and China become, the more the two assume they can count on each other in times of need. But with old geopolitical rivalries re-emerging in Europe and Asia, it may not be long before Mr Putin and Mr Xi find themselves in the uncomfortable position of unpicking the difference between an alignment and a formal alliance.
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Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Kissinger Center, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University in Bologna.