 "Putin’s visit to Beijing, the story of a hug and why Russia will never become China’s ‘vassal’ state")
The Chinese don’t do ‘spontaneous’. And definitely not Xi Jinping. Especially when he is interacting with a world leader before the cameras. Every move, including the places to stand, seating arrangement, way of greeting, nay even the angle of a hand wave or the intensity of a handshake would be deliberate and purposeful.
So, when Xi caught visiting Russian president Vladimir Putin in a rare embrace while seeing him off last Friday it became global news, prompting even the White House to respond. The hug, seemingly awkward and even robotic, was meant to convey a certain message. What was the message?
Before we come to it, let’s understand one thing. China places a lot of importance on symbolism and optics. Almost nothing is left to chance. A certain gesture or body language could be as important, even more than a 7000-word statement.
For example, recall how the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was banished to one side while Xi, his host, was seated at the head of the table in an unusual seating arrangement during their recent meeting in Beijing. Blinken had called on Xi to ‘stabilize’ bilateral ties but returned home empty-handed on his chief aim, persuading the general secretary of the Communist Party of China to resume high-level military-to-military communication. He received vibes colder than a winter evening at Lake Baikal.
Xi’s power move, that made Blinken resemble a low-ranked official from a tributary state seeking a favour from the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, was designed to convey China’s displeasure with the US and mirrored the rebuff that was handed out to America’s top diplomat. This was in stark contrast to, for example, Xi’s treatment of Bill Gates last year when the visiting Microsoft co-founder and Xi sat side by side with just a small table between them, suggesting warmth and equanimity.
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More ShortsOr, take Olaf Scholz. The German chancellor was in Beijing last month to curry favour with the Chinese president to ensure better market access for German firms in China, and also to press Xi on Russia. One of the frames released by the Chinese state media, incidentally, had both leaders walking through a park in Beijing where Scholz, hands clasped, is looking apologetic while Xi is exuding authority and control. It is not a coincidence that China continues to enjoy deep leverage over Germany that has appeared weak and unable to tackle the security and economic challenges posed by Beijing.
That brings us to the Xi-Putin hug initiated by the Chinese president. As I have mentioned before, it is a calculated move by Xi – not known for cutting through protocols by such physical demonstrations – that appeared to have taken even Putin by surprise ( see the clip) and the Russian president reciprocated with a gesture of his own, waiting for Xi to sit down first.
These highly unusual and symbolic gestures indicate underlying trust and deepening bond between the two leaders, but more than that these moves are meant to show to the primary audience in the West that China and Russia are joined at the hip, and it won’t be easy to drive a wedge between them as Nixon and Kissinger did in the 1970s. That was then. Now the winds have changed.
One measure of the closeness is the remarkable continuity in Xi-Putin’s messaging. On February 2022, exactly 20 days before Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, both nations declared a ‘no limits’ partnership. The West is still debating what it means. Roughly a year later in Moscow, Xi clasped Putin’s hands at the doorsteps of Kremlin before departure and delivered comments that are pregnant with everlasting import: “Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together…”
The attachment between the two seems reciprocal and genuine.
The earnestness on display during Putin’s recent visit to China was self-explanatory, beyond the choreographed 21-gun salute, reception at the Great Hall of the People or the curious spectacle of overexcited children jumping up and down at the sight of Putin.
The pomp and pageantry may appear theatrical, but it is just another indication of the fact that the Ukraine war has brought two revisionist powers closer, their tighter alignment driven by an existential need to develop ties as a bulwark against Western efforts at containment and a neat dovetailing of interests. Just the fact that the May 16th meeting was the 43rd between the two leaders and Putin’s 19th visit to Beijing since he came president should mean something.
But we should be careful not to draw wrong conclusions from this alignment.
If the trajectory of Russia-China relationship at a time of great turbulence in world politics is any indication, as well as the personal equation between Putin and Xi who seem to be driven by mutual trust and a sense of shared injury over the US-led global order, the consensus view that Putin is turning Moscow into a vassalage of Beijing, is shallow and bogus.
Russia is too important, too independent, too resourceful and too proud a civilization to become China’s vassal. Western sanctions post-Ukraine invasion, and a highly militarized economy may have increased Russia’s dependency on China, which has an economy 10 times bigger than Russia’s, but it is worth noting that the dependency cuts both ways even if the degree varies.
Narratives of a compliant Russia beholden to China not only animates discussions in Washington and in the western capitals, but also in New Delhi where it is taken as axiomatic and drives a paranoid discourse. It has become accepted wisdom in Indian strategic circles that a China-dependent Russia is fundamentally unreliable given India’s adversarial relationship with Beijing and there’s nothing to sustain the relationship except India’s buying of energy and arms and the latter is already showing a sharp downward trend.
Except that this overtly simplistic narrative misdiagnoses the India-Russia relationship which has stood the test of time and relies on more pillars than just a buyer-seller association. Seeing the ties solely through the China-Russia prism – when that lens itself is corrupted – just adds to the misdiagnosis.
It is my contention that despite not being natural allies and regardless of the historical and geopolitical suspicions that exist, China is as dependent on Russia as Moscow is on Beijing. To assess that Putin is going all in on China to ensure regime survival is a reckless miscalculation, and therefore all the conclusions drawn downstream from that assumption – including the terms of India-Russia relationship – should be fundamentally reassessed.
What Xi did in initiating an embrace of Putin ought to give pause to those who contend that the Russian president has overstretched his friendship with Xi in attacking Ukraine. We have seen this working assumption take root in the West that Xi was duped by Putin when both leaders had declared a ‘no limits’ partnership, and that China at best gritted its teeth and went along with supporting Russia.
For example, a Chatham House analysis on Putin’s recent trip to Beijing observes that since the joint communique released by both leaders makes no mention of the word “no limits” and China stresses that their relationship is based on a ‘confluence of interests’, the “removal of the no limits partnership almost certainly displays some sense of agonizing on Beijing’s part about its bilateral ties with Moscow.”
That is a giant leap of faith. Even if the Chinese president is not entirely sold on the idea of a greater Russia that does not acknowledge the right of a sovereign Ukraine to exist – which is strange since Xi Jinping’s China has territorial disputes with nearly all its neighbours and uses a combination of brute power, grey zone tactics and cartographic aggression to extend its maximalist claims – Beijing will back Moscow to the bitter end because without Russia, its grand strategy of providing an alternative to the US-led “rules-based order”, especially to countries in Global South falls flat.
The Moscow-Beijing split of the Nixon-Kissinger years would have taught both XI and Putin that any rift would ultimately be detrimental for both sides and a weakened Russia, which remains America’s overwhelming strategic aim, will eventually allow Washington to focus its full attention on Beijing.
As Gideon Rachman writes in Financial Times quoting a Chinese diplomat, “America’s proposition to Beijing could be summarised as: ‘Please help us to defeat your closest ally, so that we can turn on you next.’ In a similar way, Putin knows that Chinese support is completely indispensable to the Russian war effort in Ukraine… This mutual reliance means that Moscow and Beijing will remain bound together, whatever the underlying tensions in their relationship.”
Similarly, the contention that China is wary of antagonizing the West in backing Russia lacks logical rigor. Hyper-realist China is convinced that its rivalry with the US is structural, irreversible and inevitable – Thucydides’s Trap if you will – and nothing that it does with regard to Russia will have a bearing on the outcome.
Xi would’ve been further convinced of the trajectory, if he needed more convincing, as the Joe Biden administration last week imposed eye-watering tariffs on Chinese imports worth $18 billion, including up to 100% tariff on Chinese EVs that triggered a sharp response and countermeasures from China.
As far as Europe is concerned, Xi is worried enough about the looming trade war and EU’s efforts at “de-risking” to undertake a trip to the continent and attempt at driving a wedge between the key actors to prevent further hardening of stances.
Just as the Russian economy is dependent on Chinese purchase of hydrocarbon and raw materials to keep its wheels moving, similarly, China, which is now the biggest buyer of Russian oil, finds Russian economy vital for its high-end manufacturing goods at a time when its own economy is weakening and limp domestic demands, along with geopolitical rivalry with the West, are adding to the pressure.
As Alexander Gabuev writes in Foreign Affairs, bilateral trade between the two nations grew to a massive $240 billion, surpassing the 2025 deadline set by Xi and Putin, and data indicates “China has imported energy commodities worth $129 billion—mostly oil, pipeline gas, liquefied natural gas, and coal—that account for 73 percent of Russian exports to China, as well as metals, agricultural products, and wood. At the same time, China has exported to Russia goods worth $111 billion, dominated by industrial equipment (around 23 percent of exports), cars (20 percent), and consumer electronics (15 percent).”
This interdependence is as much economic and geopolitical. While Russia sells oil and imports electric vehicles in return, their economies are also de-dollarising aggressively to blunt a crucial weapon in America’s quiver. As Putin stated to the media post his meeting with Xi in Beijing, “the enhancement of trade and investment ties was greatly aided by the coordinated measures implemented to shift payments between our countries into national currencies. Currently, the ruble and yuan comprise over 90 per cent of Russian-Chinese commercial transactions, with this proportion steadily increasing. This trend signifies that our mutual trade and investment are securely protected from the influence of third countries and adverse developments on global currency markets.”
As Russia gets embroiled in Ukraine war, it is also in China’s interest to see how Putin is navigating western sanctions, how Russia’s economy is booming by adapting to changed circumstances, and how its weapons stack is performing against the combined might of western weaponry. The last point is of particular interest to Beijing that has been an important customer for Russian military equipment and prototypes. For instance, Russian jamming system has played havoc with America’s sophisticated GPS-guided weapons, rendering a large number of precision weaponry, including GMLRS rockets and Excalibur artillery shells totally useless, as Business Insider observes in a report. China would have taken copious notes.
Finally, as Economist points out, “were war to break out between China and America, Russia could keep China supplied with at least some of the energy it needs, bypassing American-controlled maritime choke-points by using pipelines and overland routes.”
The Russia-China relationship is underwritten by a web of intricate interdependencies that is prompting both leaders to solidify their partnership and making is structurally more secure. The weightage may not be equal but in terms of economic, military and security cooperation, the trajectory is pointing firmly north. An understanding of this reality is vital to getting the policies right.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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