Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet his Russian counterpart and ally Vladimir Putin in his first trip outside China since the global Covid pandemic began, it was confirmed on Monday.
Xi is due to make a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday, then he will meet Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan.
The trip, Xi’s first abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, shows he is confident about both his grip on power as he heads for a third term in office and about his role as a world leader at a time of renewed great power friction.
The meeting will give Xi an opportunity to underscore his clout, while Putin can demonstrate Russia’s tilt towards Asia – both leaders can show their opposition to the United States just as the West seeks to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
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Deepening Ties
“It is all about Xi in my view, he wants to show just how confident he is domestically and to be seen as the international leader of nations opposed to Western hegemony,” said George Magnus, author of Red Flags, a book about Xi’s challenges.
The deepening “no limits” partnership between the rising superpower of China and the natural resources titan of Russia is a geopolitical development the West is watching with anxiety.
There is no sign that Xi is ready to drop support for Putin in Russia’s most serious confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War.
Instead, the two 69-year-old leaders are deepening ties. Trade soared by nearly a third between Russia and China in the first seven months of 2022.
The visit “shows that China is willing to not only continue ‘business as usual’ with Russia but even show explicit support and accelerate the formation of a stronger China-Russia alignment,” said Alexander Korolev, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of NSW in Sydney.
“Beijing is reluctant to distance itself from Moscow even when facing serious reputational costs and the risks of becoming a target of secondary economic sanctions.”
Xi Set to Secure Third Term
Xi is widely expected to break with precedent at a Communist Party congress that starts on October 16 and secure his third five-year leadership term.
While Xi has met Putin in person 38 times since becoming China’s president in 2013, he has yet to meet Joe Biden in person since the latter became US President in 2021.
Xi last met Putin in February just weeks before the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine, which has left tens of thousands of people dead and sown chaos through the global economy.
At that meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin declared their no-limits partnership, backing each other over stand-offs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.
China has refrained from condemning Russia’s operation against Ukraine or calling it an “invasion” in line with the Kremlin, which casts the war as “a special military operation”.
“The bigger message really isn’t that Xi is supporting Putin, because it’s been pretty clear that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
“The bigger signal is that he, Xi Jinping, is going out of China for the first time since the pandemic in the run-up to the party congress. If there were going to be plottings against him this is when the plottings would happen. And he’s clearly confident that the plottings are not going to take place because he is out of the country.”
Putin World View Chimes With Xi
Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary, last left China in January 2020, before the world went into Covid lockdown.
After the West imposed on Moscow the most severe sanctions in modern history due to the war in Ukraine, Putin says Russia is turning towards Asia after centuries of looking to the West as the crucible of economic growth, technology and war.
Casting the West as a declining, US-dominated coalition which aims to shackle – or even destroy – Russia, Putin’s worldview chimes with that of Xi, who presents China as an alternative to the US-led, post-World War Two order.
As Europe seeks to turn away from Russian energy imports, Putin will seek to boost energy exports to China and Asia.
Putin said last week that a major gas export route to China via Mongolia had been agreed. Gazprom has for years been studying the possibility for a major new gas pipeline – the Power of Siberia 2 – to travel through Mongolia taking Russian gas to China.
It will carry 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year, around a third of what Russia usually sells Europe – or equivalent to the Nord Stream 1 annual volumes.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states, is due to admit Iran, one of Moscow’s key allies in the Middle East.
- Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara
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