February 8, 2022 | Foreign Policy

Don’t Buy the Xi-Putin Hype

Beijing went out of its way to downplay the summit's significance, revealing a potential wedge for the West.
February 8, 2022 | Foreign Policy

Don’t Buy the Xi-Putin Hype

Beijing went out of its way to downplay the summit's significance, revealing a potential wedge for the West.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met before the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Olympics last Friday, it was their first face-to-face meeting in almost two years. Amid the standoff between Russia and the West over Putin’s apparent preparations to invade Ukraine, observers watched closely for signs that the two leaders would intensify their so-called axis of authoritarianism—what many have described as a nascent alliance of two revisionist, anti-Western powers. Expectations varied from Chinese economic support that would help Russia withstand Western sanctions should it invade Ukraine to joint statements on Taiwan, signaling a possible, albeit unlikely, two-front conflict that could see China move against the island nation at the same time.

But if you look a little closer at China’s readout from the summit, it becomes apparent that Putin left Beijing without having accomplished much at all. Sure, Russia and China announced a 30-year energy deal to deliver natural gas from Russia’s Far East to northeastern China, but it will be years before a proposed new pipeline becomes fully operational. Regarding Ukraine, a joint statement included a brief mention of support for Putin’s demands for new security guarantees from NATO.

But the summit also showed that Xi remains constrained by forces outside of his control. While offering his fellow autocrat some support, Xi does not want to risk damaging China’s already strained relations with Europe, particularly given growing concerns about China’s rapid economic slowdown. China’s exports to the European Union and Britain combined are almost 10 times those to Russia. With growing restrictions on technology transfers and Chinese investments as well as loud calls to reduce supply chain dependency on China, the last thing Xi wants is for China’s economy to face possible post-invasion sanctions should his support for Putin be too overt.

And therein lies an opportunity for the United States and its European partners to exploit the Sino-Russian relationship’s frictions—for example, by threatening to target China’s economic interests in Europe unless Beijing immediately dials back its support for Russia’s belligerence.

Although Xi and Putin are sometimes described as representing two sides of the same authoritarian coin, there are clear limits to the top-down relationship that has developed between their two countries. Even as Beijing and Moscow coordinate votes in the United Nations Security Council, build the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a regional bloc, hold a growing number of joint military exercises, and complete major arms deals, this has not yet translated into deeper economic or societal linkages between China and Russia. In other words, compared to Western alliances, their cooperation often looks transactional and opportunistic—and that did not change last week.

It should be abundantly clear: This is not how government news services celebrate a strategic partnership.

The relationship is very uneven: Russia depends far more on China than the other way around. Sure, China is staring down ever-growing energy demands amid widespread shortages, but Russia is even more desperate to find new customers for its oil and gas. In both Beijing and Moscow, some elites have expressed reservations about imbalances in the partnership. Chinese commentators, in particular, have pointed to the risk of alienating European business partners, whose economic importance to China’s development is immeasurably greater than that of Russian commodity suppliers.

The summit’s stakes could not have been higher for Xi. As Beijing remains laser-focused on avoiding negative media coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Xi has absolutely no desire for Putin to pull him into a faraway conflict. Bad enough that Beijing has had to endure a raft of negative publicity about its atrocities against Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans as well as recent economic data revealing serious cracks in China’s economic model—which suddenly makes China’s rise look a lot less inevitable.

Issues:

China Military and Political Power Russia