What China wants from Russia

On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises. Last month, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers were spotted patrolling together near Alaska just days after joint live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea, the first such exercises since 2016.

Is China – with Russia, Iran and North Korea in tow – forging the same kind of axis that threatened world peace in the 1940s? Could Putin and Xi Jinping be ‘wondering if it is their historical mission to usher in a new age of what they may think of as necessary violence’, as the American historian and diplomat Philip Zelikow has recently warned? The reality of the new Sino-Russian pact may be less threatening – and more complex – than it appears.

First and foremost, Beijing’s economic ties with Russia remain small beer compared with the $1.5 trillion of annual trade China does with the US and Europe. China may be Russia’s largest economic partner, but Russia is only China’s 13th. Beijing has also been careful to avoid becoming entangled in western economic sanctions on Moscow, with a slew of Chinese companies quitting Russia after the invasion. Among them was Sinopec, one of the biggest investors in the Russian energy sector, which froze negotiations on a planned $500 million investment in a petrochemical factory in Russia.