16 BriefingRussia and China The EconomistJuly 27th 2019
21the ministry restaurant’s wall. The chef can
be seen in his entourage.
Military posturing in this remote region
provides a rare glimpse of the tension that
underlies the official friendship between
Russia and China, a friendship Vladimir
Putin, Russia’s president, has done much
to foster since the mid 2000s. It is one in
which he places much public store. “In re-
cent years, thanks to your direct participa-
tion, the relationship between Russia and
China has reached an unprecedentedly
high level,” Mr Putin told Mr Xi on June 5th,
when the Chinese president and a thou-
sand-strong delegation flew in for the St
Petersburg Economic Forum that Mr Putin
holds every year.
“Russia is the country that I have visited
the most times, and President Putin is my
best friend and colleague,” said Mr Xi. They
strolled around Moscow Zoo, inspected
two pandas lent by China as a sign of great
trust and were greeted in Mandarin by Rus-
sian children. No one actually sang “Rus-
sian and Chinese—Brothers for ever”, writ-
ten 70 years ago to celebrate the unending
friendship between Joseph Stalin and Mao
Zedong:The voice of the Yangtze is heard on
the Volga
The Chinese see the brightness of the
Kremlin;
We are not afraid of a military stormBut it felt as if they might have.
Like those butchers of yesteryear, Mr
Putin and Mr Xi are brought together by a
shared adversary, America. But there are
crucial differences between today’s resent-
ments and the mortal combat of the past.
One is that the cold war was a struggle over
which side’s model represented the future
for the world. Today’s confrontation rejects
the idea of any singular future. Russia and
China justify their authoritarianism on the
basis of civilisational difference. They do
not claim their values are universal; they
do not accept Western values as such.
More practically, in 1949 Mao was a ju-
nior partner Stalin felt he could control. To-day Mr Xi holds most of the cards. As late as
1989, the Soviet Union’s gdpwas more than
twice the size of China’s. Today China’s gdp
is six times larger than Russia’s, measured
at purchasing-power parity. Russia ranks
tenth among China’s export markets, a lit-
tle above the Philippines but well below In-
dia. China is Russia’s second-largest export
market after the eu. It buys more Russian
oil than any other country.
Such economic asymmetry plays into
foreign policy. When a Western diplomat
asked a Chinese official whether China’s
military presence in Tajikistan had been
cleared with Russia, he was told “We also
trade with Russia” in a tone that suggested
that Russia would do well to keep that in
mind. But the changed dynamic of the rela-
tionship goes beyond this. Mr Putin’s ap-
proach to China is making Russia techno-
logically and politically dependent on its
neighbour. As Alexei Navalny, an opposi-
tion leader, puts it: “What Mr Putin is doing
today will almost certainly make the next
leader of Russia hostage to his China poli-
cy...It would be very difficult for a future
leader to bring co-operation with China
into a format that would be beneficial for
Russia and supported by the population.”
The question of support by the popula-
tion shows up a second asymmetry in the
two countries’ dealings. For China, a rela-
tionship with Russia is a foreign relation-
ship like others—an important one, a com-
plex one, but a matter of statecraft. For
Russia, the new closeness strikes at ques-
tions of national identity. Russia’s elites
have defined themselves by looking west
for centuries. Becoming the first European
power to fall into China’s orbit is a rever-
sal—even a rejection—of that history.Raskolnikov’s dream
From the late-17th century on, those ruling
Russia were determined that it be a Euro-
pean power—St Petersburg was the physi-
cal manifestation of the choice—and re-
jected its Asian traditions with a fervour of
the convert. Catherine the Great, of Ger-
man descent, swore to drive the Turks from
Europe, tame China and open trade with
India. In the 19th century, Russian Wester-
nisers perceived China as an example of
stagnation, bureaucracy, corruption and
despotism. When Russia expanded into
the east, subjugating the states of Central
Asia, it saw itself doing so as a modernis-
ing, European power.
Communist ideology complicated mat-
ters. Karl Marx had identified what he
called the “Asiatic mode of production”,
distinguished by a lack of private property
rights and a centralised despotic state. Rev-
olutionary Russia, true believers felt, had
the opportunity to sweep away that system
as well as the capitalist one. It could be to
Asia what Europe had long been to Russia:
an exemplar of progress in the west. Stalinhad no problem with centralised despotic
states per se, but still saw Asian commu-
nism as a force to support. He helped Mao
take Tibet and Xinjiang and brought him
into an alliance. After Stalin’s death, rela-
tions deteriorated. In the Khrushchev
thaw, China was the unreconstructed past;
Mao proclaimed Russia revisionist. By the
late 1960s there were clashes between Sovi-
et and Chinese troops along the border.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the
dream of Russia as a fully Western power
was revived in full force. “Our principles
are clear and simple: supremacy of democ-
racy, human rights and freedoms, legal and
moral standards,” Russia’s president, Boris
Yeltsin, told the unin 1992, aligning the
country with America and Europe. No such
comity for the East. “Ideology differen-
tiates us from China, but we are neigh-
bours and must co-operate.”
During the 1990s things soured. Russia’s
introduction to capitalism saw economic
decline and the rise of oligarchs; nato’s
bombing of Serbia over Russia’s objections
was a deep blow to its Slavic pride. But
when Mr Putin—by no means a believer in
the common values of which Mr Yeltsin
had spoken—rose to power he still saw the
West as a model for Russia’s modernisation
and made appropriate efforts to get along.
He did not object to the Baltic states joining
natoand said all the right things after the
attacks of September 11th 2001.
In return, say Russian critics of the West
like Alexander Lukin of the Higher School
of Economics in Moscow, he got nothing
but aggravation: encroachment on Russia’s
sphere of influence through “colour revo-
lutions” in Ukraine and other machina-
tions and criticism of human-rights
abuses. In a book on Russia-China rela-
tions, Mr Lukin writes: “It was...the West
that destroyed the idea of creating a new
system of global politics based on interna-Closer companionsSources: Datastream from Refinitiv; UN ComtradeRussia, goods trade with China, $bn0204060801001201992 95 2000 05 10 15 18Total bilateral tradeOil exports