Putin's China visit to forge close partnership

Photo: AFP

AT the invitation of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on October 11, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing and started his two-day official visit to China. This is Putin's first visit to a foreign country after his ruling party announced that he would be a candidate as President in March 2012. Prior to his trip to China, Putin said the two countries "have enjoyed an unparalleled partnership" and that he believes the meetings with the Chinese leaders will see "a positive development" in bilateral relations. Calling Putin "an old friend of China", President Hu Jintao said the Russian leader's visit "moved forward the Sino-Russian comprehensive strategic relationship." Putin's visit commemorated the 10th anniversary of a treaty of "Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation" between the two former communist allies.
During the visit Putin attended the 16th regular meeting between the two countries' prime ministers. The regular meetings between Chinese and Russian prime ministers, first established in 1996, have become an important platform for guiding and coordinating bilateral cooperation.After meeting Putin Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters that China wanted to push ahead a "comprehensive strategic partnership" with Russia that would safeguard world stability and development.Putin's official visit was another significant event in the development of bilateral relations following the exchange of visits between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Chinese President Hu Jintao and chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC) Wu Bangguo met Putin. They discussed bilateral relations and international and regional issues of common concern.
Putin has frequently tried to use Russia's burgeoning ties with Beijing as a counterbalance to U.S. global predominance. And Chinese leaders have reciprocated the gestures. In recent times, both Russia and China have vetoed UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Syria. They secured the stabilization there by vetoing UN resolutions on Syria and preventing NATO from intervening as it did in Libya. Their vetoes drew heavy criticism from Washington.In an interview with Chinese state media Putin praised cooperation with China and lashed out at the U.S., describing the dominance of the American dollar as parasitic."The U.S. is not a parasite for the world economy, but the U.S. dollar's monopoly is a parasite," Putin said, according to a report on the interview from Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency. Putin said he offered the criticism constructively in a search for common solutions to ease the turbulent world economy.
In a nearly two-hour discussion in Beijing on 10th October, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan and his Russian counterpart Alexander Zhukov expressed willingness to explore new directions for bilateral economic and trade cooperation.Zhukov said the two sides conducted candid and detailed discussions in economy and trade fields during the meeting, including bolstering bilateral customs cooperation, issues concerning Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO).Bilateral trade has been growing. The two countries have planned to further expand annual bilateral trade to 100 billion dollars in the next three years from 60 billion U.S. dollars in 2011. For Russia, it has also been trying to diversify its exports to China.Moscow looks toward China as it is preparing for a possible second wave of the financial crisis that looms over Europe. The first strike of the crisis in 2009 hit Russia badly and its GDP went down. With the global financial crisis at hand, the price of gas and oil goes down and will affect Russia, the country with the largest gas reserves in the world.Russia has learnt from that experience how important the flexibility of financial regulations was and began experiments to avoid depending too much on the volatile U.S. dollar. To guard against the impact of financial crisis, Russia needs to enhance close cooperation with China which has been the only country with robust economic growth. Besides cooperation in the UN Security Council, Russia and China have developed important interactions within BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the G20. While trade is boomingrising, by China's count, to more than 39 percent to $35.9 billion in the first half of the year from the same period last yearit's heavily geared toward Chinese purchases of Russian resources. Moscow wants more Chinese investment in Russia itself.
China looks toward Russia, awash in oil and gas. China's growing energy needs and in the background of rapidly shifting global energy business, Moscow can supply the energy through a pipeline to China. The leaders of both nations discussed about cooperation on gas and oil projects. A 30-year gas supply of 70 billion cubic meters of Russian gas sent to China annually could be worth up to US$1-trillion to help power Beijing's booming economy and allow Moscow to diversify its exports away from Europe. Russia prefers to link gas prices to oil prices, as it does in Europe, while China wants a lower price. Russia's OAO Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corp. failed to reach the deal during the visit. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said the two countries were "standing on the threshold of gas delivery agreements". China's foreign ministry said negotiations would continue to reach an agreement. Chinese state-backed firms also promised to invest $1.5 billion in a Siberian aluminum smelter and to put $1 billion into a joint investment fund, among agreements officials said were worth $7 billion.
In the last three years, as the number of Russian visitors to China has amounted to over 2 million, a new economic phenomenon has appearedsome Russian business started to mushroom in China in the form of joint ventures or independent small-sized companies. I think tourism inevitably contributes to the other areas of economy.Cooperation in aviation, space exploration, hi-tech industry, as well as the program of co-development of Russia's Far East and China's northeast regions were discussed.
Russia and China are equally concerned about the threats from Afghanistan such as drug trafficking and the possible overflowing of instability to Central Asian countries said.
China-Russia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership has been currently at its best time ever, which allows the two countries to conduct various joint projects ranging from technical to cultural areas.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin called the visit a "great success" that charted the way ahead for relations. With Putin at the helm in Russia in 2012, analysts have said that the change could see Russia tilt further toward China.
Finally the relationship between the two countries is complicated that it appears. Both countries, while supposedly close friends and allies in the face of perceived threat from the US and NATO in their backyard, are quite serious rivals militarily as they compete in selling arms and aircraft to developing countries. China has been selling military aircraft to countries which used to buy Russian fighters.
Russia does have an enormous land mass twice the size of China's plus vast natural resources of oil, gas and metals. But it also has a declining population (138 million if the CIA World Factbook is to be believed; 141 million according to Russia's official census figures). A radical shift in policy from Moscow now could buy enough time to build up the Far East economically and demographically.China has 10 times Russia's population, an economy five times Russia's and a growth rate of 10 percent amid a global slowdown. It also has a burgeoning military budget, which now outstrips Russia's. In other words, Russia's oil and gas wealth increasingly looks like a big prize to Beijing one with few people to guard it.
The writer is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.