Since the Chinese Communist Party regime derives much of what it parades as “legitimacy” from these revanchist campaigns, paying Putin for Siberian resources feels like buying family silver back from a robber. This area includes parts of Siberia, from which Putin’s much-vaunted pipeline deal would extract resources to sell to China. He has imposed Communist authority on Hong Kong, seeks to do so in Taiwan, and undoubtedly has the same ambition for the 600,000 square kilometres – three times the area of Great Britain – which Tsarist Russia wrested from Opium War-weakened Manchu control in 1858-60 under the Treaties of Aigun and Peking. Xi’s revisionist goals entail wiping out the shame of historical territorial losses. The harder Xi focuses his efforts on realising the “China Dream”, the more implacably will his political and economic coercion be directed at Putin and Russia, and the weaker and more dependent both will become. This will not include sharing power with a chaotic Russian kleptocracy. China watchers have been poring over these words for every last nuance, but it’s pretty clear that Xi was framing himself as leader, with Putin nominally by his side, of a revisionist assault on the liberal world order.īeijing’s vision for the People’s Republic of China’s centenary in 2049 is the global triumph of a “fully developed, rich and powerful China”. It is in this context that we should read Xi’s parting words to Putin – oracular and ominous – that referred to “changes coming, such as haven’t been seen for a century”, which “we can push forward together”. In the final joint communiqué, all a disappointed Putin could comment was that more work still had to be done “on study and approval”. No mention whatsoever of POS2 appears in the official statements Xi made during the meetings. But Xi, unmoved by such excessive zeal, declined to sign anything. It is not good news for Moscow.Īhead of Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Russia, Putin boldly announced that the pipeline deal was ready to be signed off, prematurely labelling it “the deal of the century”. The long-debated agreement on “Power of Siberia 2” (POS2) – a massive pipeline project to pump gas from Western Siberia to China via Mongolia – has become emblematic of the one-sided and slightly abusive relationship between China and Russia since the start of the Ukraine war.
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