Xi is thumping Putin in the Great Game
Xi is thumping Putin in the Great Game
Former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby takes a deep dive into the “Chussia” partnership. His conclusions about a rising Sinostan would not please the Kremlin.
By Geoff Raby
Nov 7, 2024 – 5.00am
Since 2012, when Putin announced his “pivot to the East” and Xi Jinping ascended to the top of Beijing’s leadership, China and Russia have uneasily accommodated each other.
With these closer relations, a school of thought – which has found support in the White House – has emerged that there is a single theatre of strategic competition: liberal democracies versus autocracies. It is easy to see the appeal of this formulation, both in its simplicity and its powerful invocation of the binary ideological struggle of the Cold War.
But viewing the world order as a struggle between might and right, without acknowledging the nuances and subtleties between different countries, runs the risk of increasing the chances of conflict. This “new Cold War” is giving rise to the very same kind of reductionist geopolitical thinking as its predecessor.
Beijing essentially sees Russia as an inherently expansionist power, and racist in its attitudes and reflexes towards China. Moscow has existential anxieties over vast numbers of Chinese occupying the expansive, productive but empty lands of the Russian Far East.
Their respective approaches to achieving security – Russia’s buffer states versus China’s client states – are also at odds.
Yet recent geopolitical realities have drawn China and Russia closer together – especially in their desire to push back against the US and reshape the liberal international order.
Bilateral cooperation has been extended and expanded across many spheres, including joint military and naval exercises, and extensive training and exchanges between internal security services. Outside these areas, Russia has grudgingly accepted something of a junior-partner role, recognising the size of the Chinese economy, and China’s importance as a market for Russian energy exports, and as a source of investment in the energy and transport sectors.
These trends were well under way when in February 2022, 20 days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin was in the Chinese capital for the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics. But also, much more importantly, he was there for a bilateral meeting with Xi. The Chinese leader would not haven realised quite how historically significant that meeting would become.
In the West, the 4 February Putin–Xi statement that the relationship between Russia and China knew “no limits” was widely misinterpreted.
The surprise and dismay with which their statement was met ignored the fact that China and Russia, like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, are strategic competitors. Putin was seeking China’s complicity in his intended criminality in Ukraine, and, if needed, the security to cut his massive forces in the East, directed at China. He achieved both, but the price has been that Russia, over time, has assumed the role of junior partner to China.
China and Russia’s embrace is both opportunistic – involving trade, investment, energy and arms – and strategic, to refashion the international order to make it accommodate authoritarian states. Regime security is paramount for both Beijing and Moscow. They share an existential fear of “colour revolutions” such as the democratic movements in some former Soviet republics after the collapse of the USSR, which they see as US-sponsored attempts at regime change. Their obsession with regime security binds them together, despite many differences.
“Chussia anxiety”
The West is alarmed at the prospect of authoritarian China and Russia working in concert against it. This is what I call the “Chussia anxiety” in the West: China and Russia working hand in glove against liberal democracies. To whatever extent the current leadership also believes this to be possible, it is the triumph of hope over experience in the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai compound that’s home to CCP leadership.
Just over a decade ago, in view of the history of mistrust, populist nationalist territorial ambitions on both sides, and China’s deep engagement with the West, Beijing required a narrative to explain the new frothiness in its relationship with Russia, but one that would not alarm the West.
This was supplied by former senior diplomat Fu Ying, then-chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the 12th National People’s Congress, a ministerial-level appointment. In a Foreign Affairs article in 2016 – which would have been personally approved by Xi Jinping – she explained that the relationship between China, Russia and the US was that of a “scalene triangle” of great powers, but that the side connecting China and Russia was shorter than the one connecting either the US and China, or the US and Russia.
So, in this official world view, China and Russia were closer to each other than either was to the US. Fu argued that China and Russia would “work together on areas of agreement in ways that supported global order and decreased the chance that the world would descend into great power conflict and war”.
This official account sought to position China as something of a balancing element between Russia and the US. The West was unconvinced by this; moreover, when the time came, China’s failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made its position of being a “friend to all and enemy of none” much harder to sustain.
Fu’s conclusion that Beijing and Moscow’s relationship provided a model ofhow the world can avoid descending into great power conflict looks especially hollow following the invasion. Putin’s tanks rolled over the cornerstone of China’s security and foreign policy: non-interference.
With this, Putin has seriously harmed the trust that is essential to building a close relationship. Just as the Brezhnev Doctrine justified Soviet military intervention in communist states, including Afghanistan in the Cold War era, so Putin’s imperial ambitions alarm former Soviet republics and challenge China today.
Fu’s scalene triangle was intended to present a benign world view, to salve anxieties in the West about an emerging authoritarian Chussia. It also posited China and Russia as co-equal powers, which, by 2015, was already no longer the case: Russia faced increasing sanctions and isolation from the West, and its economy massively underperformed China’s. Moreover, Chussia becoming a stable reality in great power relations would require high levels of trust between China and Russia and a strong convergence of interests. The former is tenuous at best, while the latter is fractured.
China plays a long game
Rather than stand side by side with its comrade against Western sanctions following the Ukraine invasion, China has, in fact, adopted a cautious approach, distancing itself from Putin’s actions, especially after Russia’s early military setbacks. Beijing is extremely wary of being sanctioned by the West for undermining its actions against Russia. Chinese firms that were suspected of contributing, albeit indirectly, to Russia’s war effort were quickly identified, and punished or threatened with sanctions.
Although the West is upset that China has not done more to put pressure on Moscow, which it could clearly do, as could India and other major states such as Turkey, Beijing’s actions have been far less than Putin would have expected from his closest friend, Xi Jinping.
A third, but seldom discussed, perspective on Chussia’s prospects is that China’s ambitions far exceed managing a stable relationship with Russia in support of a more authoritarian world order. China is a Eurasian power and, historically, Eurasia has mostly been dominated by a single major power – Beijing will seek its security by becoming the pre-eminent Eurasian power.
China’s land frontiers have been its key vulnerability. Its history of territorial loss to Russia and the domestic pressure that will mount to recover lost territories mean that Chussia is structurally inherently unstable: equilibrium then becomes the exception rather than the norm.
China is playing a long game with Russia, which has nowhere else to go. Russia’s recent dealings with North Korea only highlight its isolation (and that of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)) – and China has all the forward momentum in the relationship, with its relative economic performance, technological advancement and military catchup.
The Ukraine invasion has changed Beijing’s calculus in its favour. With thewar continuing to deplete Russia economically and in manpower, China need do no more than bide its time. It is emerging as the dominant power in Eurasia by Russia’s own hand.
Beijing cannot base its long-term security on Putin’s Russia. As an Eurasian power, it must consolidate its position to ensure that Russia can never again become the dominant power in Eurasia. In this way, Beijing not only achieves long-term security of its borders, which it feels it has been denied by foreign powers for centuries, but also refashions the global order in its own interests, if not image.
Structural stability
British historian Philip Snow’s magisterial study of 400 years of the Russia–China relationship is the most recent word on the subject. While avoiding firm judgements, the weight of his conclusion after 500 pages is that, on balance, these two historically competing great powers are likely to enter an extended period of geopolitical comity.
This view is based largely on his understanding that following the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the Manchurian and Mongolian borders were largely undisturbed for the next 200 years. This overlooks the ongoing instability on the Qing’s western borders; Russia’s involvement in repeated attempts to provoke Xinjiang’s secession, and the elevated insecurity this caused the Manchu court; and the loss of some 300,000 hectares of territory along the western frontier, besides land lost to Russia in Manchuria.
For much of this period, the lands to the north and north-east of China were so remote from Moscow and Beijing as to lack strategic value for either empire. Yet when the relative power balance changed in the second half of the 19th century, following the Opium Wars, Moscow moved decisively to stake its claims from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Taking a long-term view, temporary equilibria, rather than structural stability, characterised the relationship.
Structural stability is, however, the premise of the current public presentation of Chinese policy towards Russia. The policy seeks to set aside historical differences and identify explicitly common interests of Russia and China in opposition to the West while seeking to calm fears that Russia and China might craft an alliance relationship where mutual obligations, especially in defence, would be involved.
China wants to amplify its common interests with Russia while seeking not to alarm the West that it is facing an “alliance of autocracies”. China also wants to avoid taking on possible military obligations that could entail commitments to a potentially unstable or unreliable partner. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would only have reinforced these anxieties.
In his book Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, Odd Arne Westad argues:
“China condoning Putin’s war of aggression … will create a Russia evermore dependent on China, as will Western sanctions. By saying very little and blaming the West, Beijing expects a positive outcome for itself.”
Far from being an “axis of authoritarians” then, the relationship is best understood as a “traditional great power relationship” based on strategic calculations of national self-interest. Both empires, which for so long were outside the Westphalian system of power balancing, are now deeply engaged with it. In this system, alliances shift and change according to alterations in relative power.
As the old cliché has it, there are no permanent friendships, only permanent interests. Rather than China dissolving itself in Eurasia, it is more likely Eurasia will be sinizised.
Russia’s regional influence fades
Russia used to stride across Central Asia with seven-league boots, and, under the USSR, Moscow’s iron heel pressed down heavily. A major geostrategic consequence of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a pivot by the five Central Asian states away from Russia. China is not yet the main beneficiary, as the states seek to involve multiple actors – including Turkey, the European Union, Iran, Japan, South Korea, India and also the US – in regional affairs.
Russia is now a minor investor in the region and eclipsed by China as the largest trading partner. The EU also has a significant presence, as a source of foreign direct investment, as the third-largest trading partner, and as a backer of cooperative infrastructure projects such as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route.Russia’s influence in Central Asia has been on a course of long-run decline, while China has increasingly turned its attention to the region as a key strategic priority. It also has a powerful security imperative regarding its western frontier between Xinjiang and three of the Central Asian states.
The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan further complicates Beijing’s security challenges along this frontier and draws it further into Central Asian security concerns by sharpening their identity of interests.
Sinostan is an advanced work in progress. But Russia and China will continue to look to each other for support in their contests with the US, and this will remain a strong point of convergence in their relationship.
The fiction of a “division of labour” or “cooperative hegemony” served its purpose well until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russia’s greater dependence on China has opened up a bigger space for China to advance its interests.
Putin’s invasion has become a defining moment in great power relations in Central Asia. Not only has it weakened, possibly fatally, Russia’s role as the guarantor of the region’s security – by loss of capacity, intent and trust– it has also accelerated public discussion in these lands about Russian colonialism, with a rethinking of the Soviet past that will invariably change.
Central Asia’s relations with Russia for the long term.
The European Policy Centre observes: “The Kremlin is unhappy about China’s success, but it cannot be vocal about it. The importance of Chinese aid and indirect support for [its war in] Ukraine takes precedence for Moscow and will shape its approach to Beijing as long as the confrontation with the West continues.”
China has time on its side to complete the Sinostan project. Meanwhile, the trends in geopolitics are running in its favour. China will be happy to play mainly to its strengths through the power of its market, investments and, increasingly, technology, while opportunistically but consistently expanding its activities in the security area of the region.
Sinostan has been a deliberate project for Beijing for a long time, with complex interlocking policies involving trade and, especially, infrastructure investment; crisscrossing transport corridors; a mesh of regional institutional arrangements involving the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the China–Europe Railway.
Express, and, more recently, a C+C5 Summit mechanism and parallel foreign ministers’ meetings; together with an ever-thickening network of bilateral relations that tie elites more closely to China, even while popular opinion ranges from ambivalent to antagonistic, depending on the country.
Meanwhile, the invasion of Ukraine challenges both Russia’s capacity for and commitment to regional security and raises suspicions about its future behaviour towards former Soviet republics, including in Central Asia.
In ‘Sovietstan: ‘A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan’ (2014) Erika Fatland emphasised their shared Soviet heritage and autocratic governments. She concludes: “It is impossible to understand the five new countries of Central Asia without taking into consideration the way in which their past as Soviet republics has shaped them. During the seventy years of Soviet rule, Central Asia was forced to leave the Middle Ages and step into the twentieth century … Internal borders were drawn up, external borders were sealed with barbed wire fences, and five nations were born.”
But, almost 35 years since then – and with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan having each managed leadership transitions, and a representative system of government having been sustained in Kyrgyzstan – the outlook for political stability and economic development appears somewhat better than it did when Fatland made her trip more than a decade ago.
The Stans have since moved out of Russia’s shadow and into China’s, a process accelerated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In Central Asia, the future looks more and more like it will belong to China.
‘Great Game On:
The contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy’ by Geoff Raby, published by Melbourne University Publishing, is out next week.
Is this another horrible “international relations” zero-sum take on the world? Why is it so difficult to understand “win-win” and the feasibility of overcoming the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
IR is my least favourite academic discipline, it has achieved nothing but conflict and insecurity in the world. Please do better.