China and Russia already have a date to assess the margins and contours of the “limitless” friendship that their respective presidents, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, proclaimed in a meeting in Beijing 20 days before Moscow deployed its troops in Ukraine. Both leaders are scheduled to meet this Thursday in the mythical city of the Silk Road, Samarkand (Uzbekistan), during a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). For the Chinese leader, who has not left his country since the pandemic began and is one of the few world leaders to persevere with a strict zero-covid strategy, it is also the first trip abroad in more than two and a half years.
Xi’s journey started this Wednesday with a first stop in Nursultan (Kazakhstan), where he was received by the Kazakh president, Kasim-Yomart Tokáyev. The journey results, on the part of Beijing, a calculated displacement not only physical but also political: it arrives a month before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party is held, the great five-yearly event in which the Chinese leader is expected to renew the baton of I command a third five years, until 2027.
“This will be the most important event of the diplomacy of the Chinese head of state on the eve of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” said Mao Ning, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, during an appearance on Tuesday. The rest of the SCO partners, apart from Russia and China, will also be present at the Samarkand summit: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
The Russian leader, in need of international support and recognition as the Ukrainian lines advance in a recent counterattack launched by kyiv, already stated a week ago that he hoped to see Xi in Samarkand. The meeting, confirmed by the Kremlin although not explicitly by Beijing, will be the first confrontation between the two since the Russian invasion of Ukraine shook the geopolitical theater on February 24. And it will add one more to the long list of meetings between the two leaders: they have already reached 38, according to the Reuters count. And Moscow was in fact Xi’s first destination after taking over China in 2012.
Since the start of the war, Beijing has kept a calculated distance from Moscow, not giving military or material support to Russia, and not circumventing the wall of Western sanctions. But at the same time without condemning the invasion, and without mentioning the existence of a “war” with all its letters. This tilted neutrality towards Russia is marked by the last meeting in Beijing between Xi and Putin, on February 4, when they signed a powerful declaration in which they called for “a new type of relations between world powers” and consecrated a “friendship” that it “has no limits” or “prohibited areas of cooperation”; 20 days later Russian tanks entered Ukraine.
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The harmony has continued despite the conflict and the international sanctions adopted against Moscow. The two countries agreed a week ago to ditch the dollar and start paying in yuan and rubles for some of the gas Russia pumps into China from Siberia. The pact was sealed shortly after the Russian gas giant Gazprom decided to close the handle of the Nordstream tube, which carries fuel to Germany, citing technical reasons, in another episode of the tug-of-war between Moscow and Brussels.
Economic relations between China and Russia have not suffered since February, says Christoph Nedopil Wang, director of the Center for Finance and Green Development at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Economic ties between China and Russia appear to be stable if you look at trade between the two countries,” he argues via email. “Since Russia cannot fully trade with many Western countries, some Chinese suppliers have been able to benefit from trade opportunities with Russia, while China has also been able to absorb some of the Russian exports.”
In July, Nedopil Wang published a detailed report on the New Silk Road, the multibillion-dollar strategic plan with which Beijing has deployed and interconnected with the world in the last decade. In the analysis, however, the 100% drop in investments of this Chinese initiative in Russian territory during the first half of 2022 is surprising. But Nedopil Wang assures that the “data do not yet suggest a long-term disengagement trend.”
Xi’s choice to visit Kazakhstan, where he launched the idea of this New Silk Road in 2013, and Uzbekistan, through which four gas pipelines connect Central Asia with China, also marks the territory that Beijing considers key to its strategic interests. . In both countries, they woke up Tuesday with an article by President Xi extolling the ties that unite them. “In recent years, China has been solidly one of Kazakhstan’s main partners for trade and investment,” the Chinese president wrote in the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda. “Despite the repercussions of COVID-19”, he adds, “last year we were able to bring our bilateral trade back above 25,000 million dollars, which was a joint boost to the global economic recovery”.
The pandemic is the other key nod to President Xi’s trip. China is the only one of the great powers that maintains a strict zero covid policy, which implies massive tests and confinements as soon as a few cases are detected. The harsh closures of megacities such as Shanghai decreed in the spring, and which have continued during the summer, have left the second largest economy on the planet in a state of disrepair and a growing trace of social fatigue. The economic consequences are palpable in a year in which the Chinese government estimates economic growth at around 5.5%, a figure that some analysts have already narrowed to 3%.
“Covid-19 has been detrimental to some of China’s economic relations and, in particular, to its investments abroad,” notes Nedopil Wang. But Xi’s trip abroad, he concludes, “could be a signal not only of a strong political agenda, but also of a greater resurgence of economic engagement with these countries”.
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