Building security within China – Russian relations Introduction In April 1996, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, signed documentation formally establishing a “strategic partnership” between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The formation of this partnership was “sustained upward trend” in bilateral relations and was symbolically significant in illustrating just how far these two nations had come in their ties with one another. A relationship based on economic dependence and military alliance that began in 1950 ultimately broke down over ideological disputes between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, culminating in a messy divorce of the two Communist giants in 1960. Ties remained frosty for the next three decades before finally being normalized in 1989. In the intervening years, the China-Soviet relationship could best be characterized as one of minimal interactions and mutual hostility. Today these ideological disputes of the past are a distant memory. Thirteen years after it was established, the China - Russian strategic partnership not only is alive but appears to lie taking on some practical manifestations. During the first decade of the partnership, Russia became a major source of arms for the PRC, although sales have slowed in recent years. Bilateral trade volume, albeit small, is increasing and Russia has become a growing source of energy for China. The two cooperate on the development of China’s space program and civil aviation sector, and they have conducted joint military exercises under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). China and Russia have similar views on a number of international and regional security issues and have worked together on occasions where their respective interests are aligned. In late 2008, the two nations finally resolved the last stretch of their long-standing border dispute, which had led to armed conflict in the past. The two states also created mechanisms for holding annual meetings between the countries’ presidents and prime ministers. Apart from a brief stop in Kazakhstan, the first overseas trip by new Russian president Dmitri Medvedev was a visit to the PRC. At first glance, such interactions may not be surprising, given how much China and Russia seem to have in common. Prior to the onset of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, both countries were experiencing robust economic growth fueled by their exports—Russia of oil and gas, and China of just about everything else. At the same time, both nations characterize themselves as “developing countries,” with China still struggling to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and Russia trying to diversify its economy away from a heavy dependence on raw material exports. The governments of both nations are stable, authoritarian, and administratively centralized, yet both are challenged to keep their distant regions under control. China and Russia are both proud, sensitive countries, eminently conscious of their global position, status, and degree of influence. They are equally conscious of their impact on global affairs and often vote the same at the UN Security Council, where, both are permanent members with a veto. A closer look, however, reveals a number of key differences. China is clearly a rising power, while Russia appears to be gradually declining in terms of its interaction with the rest of the world. The PRC has become a major player in global trade, is more integrated into the global economic system, and has better ties with the rest of the world. Beijing comes to the developing world, for instance, armed with preferential loans and infrastructure projects in the hopes of locking up energy resources and other raw materials to aid its economic development. In contrast, Russia’s efforts to reach out to the rest of the world are hindered by the fact that it has little to sell besides oil, gas, chemicals, and metals. Politically, China remains a one-party state, while Russia chooses its leaders through popular, yet often stage-managed, elections. Russia has made efforts to keep its business elites out of the political process, while the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to bring them in. In terms of demographics, China is the world’s most populous nation and is still growing, while Russia’s population is shrinking at an alarming rate of 700,000 a year. Richard Lolspeich points out that Russia’s population is only slightly more than 10 percent of China’s, and the gap is widening. The two are also culturally distant. Geographically, although Russia is the largest country by territory in continental Asia, its population centers are situated in the west—i.e., European Russia. The country is thus culturally oriented toward Europe and has minimal links to East Asia. China, by comparison, is oriented to the Asia-Pacific. Despite top-down efforts at promoting cultural exchanges, such as the “Year of China in Russia” and vice versa, few would characterize Chinese and Russian cultures as complementary, and ordinary citizens have little in common with one another. Overarching Themes In a marked contrast to Sino-Soviet ties during the Cold War, ideological factors arc now largely absent from the China-Russia relationship. Only with the possible exception of shared suspicions over perceived U.S. domination of the international order does a shared ideological affinity still play a role in bilateral ties. Today it is primarily pragmatic considerations on issues of common ground that ultimately drive the Sino-Russian relationship forward. This common ground can be found in both countries’ views on regional security issues, their growing economic interactions, their shared benefits from sales of military armaments, and their similar approaches to energy diversification. Nonetheless, it is also important to keep in mind the equally numerous areas in which China’s and Russia’s interests conflict. For each area of common ground listed above, there are also divergent interests at play that often prevent cooperation from reaching its true potential. In Rozman’s words, these “overlapping but not identical” interests play a significant role in hindering efforts by the two countries to fully develop a stable and predictable relationship.

International Affairs Beijing and Moscow share broadly similar views of the world, and neither is particularly comfortable with perceived U.S. leadership of the international order. Both are suspicious of Washington’s intentions, and they have worked together on occasion in an effort to balance U.S. interests. Both are also highly sensitive to issues of sovereignty, possibly because they have their own independence-minded regions to worry about. Shared outlooks such as these have given rise to practical cooperation between the two nations. Not only are they both veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council with similar voting patterns, but they have also worked in concert at other multilateral forums and have adopted similar stances on a range of international issues. These include the role of the UN, opposition to missile defense and the weaponization of space, and the problematic situations in Sudan, Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Nonetheless, there are clearly limits to this cooperation, particularly when the two countries’ interests are not aligned. During the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia, for example, China and Russia clearly did not see eye to eye. Beijing refused to endorse Moscow’s conduct at the August 2008 SCO summit in Dushanbe. As Charles Ziegler observes, this stood in contrast to the views of the four Central Asian states in the SCO, which, one month later at a session of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Moscow, sided with Russia in the dispute, although all four nations stopped short of endorsing independence for the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It should be pointed out that China’s neutrality on the issue was not altogether surprising; Beijing often tries to stay out of disputes in which it feels it has no interests. Moreover, Russia’s conduct vis-a-vis Georgia violated one of Beijing’s core foreign policy priorities —noninterference in the sovereign affairs of another state. China has its own secession-minded regions (Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang) and has always been unlikely to support any action that might set a precedent in that regard. For its part, although Russia may very well lend rhetorical support for China in the event of a similar conflict erupting over Taiwan, it is doubtful that Russian involvement would manifest in more practical or substantive actions (beyond weapons sales, of course). As Jeanne Wilson argues in this book, Russia is unwilling to be dragged into a conflict where it has virtually no national interests and where there is a very real risk of a military confrontation with the United States.

Central Asia The two nations have similar priorities with regard to the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia. China and Russia each share long borders with the region and have an interest in its stability. Countering terrorism is a critical concern for both Beijing and Moscow, both of which support U.S.-led efforts to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan. At the same time, both countries also hope to balance U.S. influence in the region and neither was particularly sad to see the United States evicted from air bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In terms of energy resources, China and Russia have been keen to develop the region’s sizeable oil and gas fields in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. However, these similar strategic objectives have resulted in competition as much as in cooperation. The two countries disagree, for example, on their preferred multilateral institution for engaging the region. Although Russia is a member of the SCO, it views the body as a Chinese invention and has sought to work around it. Moscow’s preferred medium for engaging the region is the CSTO, a regional security bloc that is composed of seven former Soviet republics and excludes China. Additionally, China and Russia directly compete for access to and development of the region’s energy resources. Russia is highly dependent on natural gas from Central Asia to meet its export commitments. Moscow, therefore, hopes to retain a monopoly on the region’s pipelines and keep them heading west. For its part, China wants access to the oil and gas resources of Central Asia, and is already building pipelines heading east out of the region in cooperation with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Arms Sales Until recently, Russian sales of armaments to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were a major component of the partnership. An embargo on U.S. and EU weapons sales to China, imposed in the wake of the bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, forced Beijing to turn to Moscow to help modernize the PLA. Moscow has also benefited, as the exports to China have helped keep Russia’s sizeable military- industrial complex afloat in the difficult post-Cold War economic climate. Kevin Ryan writes that in 2005 China accounted for 40 percent of all Russian military exports. Although the sale of military armaments might appear to be a natural area of cooperation, further sales have been hampered by Russia’s concerns that it is actively aiding the military development of a country that may one day constitute a challenge to its national security. Jing-dong Yuan observes that arms sales have slowed substantially, with no significant orders being placed since 2006. This may stem from Chinese aspirations of producing the equipment themselves once they obtain the designs or the possibility that the PLA is already saturated with Russian hardware imports. Nonetheless, China likely wishes to buy more products from Russia to aid the PLA’s modernization, such as advanced military technology. However, Russia’s concerns that its own technology could someday be used against it, coupled with the prospect of Beijing’s gaining access to Russian proprietary information or learning to reengineer its technology for domestic production, may be contributing to Moscow’s unwillingness to make such sales. It is interesting to note that while Russia has refused to supply the PLA with certain types of military equipment, such as the Tu-22M Backfire supersonic tactical strike bomber, it has been willing to sell them to India. One conference participant suggested that this largely reflects the fact that the Russian General Staff, which has to approve all weapons sales, views Beijing as a potential threat while holding no such suspicions about New Delhi. be the case, then Russia might be forced into an overreliance on China as an energy-export destination, and thus be subjected to pressure from Beijing on the price and volume of any oil or gas it supplied. An alternative Japanese proposal to extend the pipeline to the Pacific Ocean has also delayed progress, as, until recently, Moscow seemed unable to decide between the two. As a result, what appear to be promising opportunities for cooperation in the energy sector have gone largely unfulfilled.