Why are China-Russia relations strengthening? | Politics News

A few weeks after navigating warships around the main island of Japan, Chinese and Russian armies sent bombing flights to Japanese and South Korean air defense sites, forcing Seoul to shuffle its fighter jets in response.

In Tokyo on Tuesday, Japanese Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo met with reporters to express “serious concern” over the joint patrols held last week, saying the Beijing and Moscow movements make it clear that “the security situation around Japan is more serious.”

As he spoke, his Chinese and Russian counterparts were conducting virtual talks, where they praised air and naval exercises as “major events” and made a new pact to deepen defense ties even further.

The roadmap signed by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe limited the year of unprecedented growth in military cooperation, including the Chinese Ningxia war games in August, when Russian troops were the first foreign forces. To enter a traditional drilling in China, as well as advertisements for the joint development of military helicopters, missile attack warning systems and even a lunar research station.

“It’s the strongest, closest and best relationship the two countries have had in at least the mid-1950s. And probably never, ”said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Russia and Eurasia.

Emphasizing that relations between China and Russia have historically been mutually exclusive, including the border conflict that pushed Beijing and Moscow to the brink of nuclear war in the 1960s, Gould-Davies said the current situation is an “exception”. Relations have “developed very rapidly, really in the last 10 years,” he said, accelerating Russia’s accession to Crimea in 2014 as a result of Western sanctions.

Diplomatic, economic ties

Not only in defense, but also in diplomacy and economics.

In terms of foreign policy, Beijing and Moscow share similar views on Iran, Syria and Venezuela, and have recently regained the impetus for the United Nations to lift sanctions against North Korea.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin also have a personal relationship, having met more than 30 times since 2013. The Chinese leader has also called Putin “best friend”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a video conference with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Moscow (Russia) in the Kremlin on June 28, 2021. [File: Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin, Sputnik via Reuters]

For China, Russia is its largest supplier of arms and the second largest source of oil imports. And for Russia, China is a major trading partner in the country and a key source of investment in its energy projects, including the Yamal LNG plant in the Arctic Circle and the Power of Siberia gas pipeline, the largest $ 55 billion gas project in Russian history. .

GISS-Davies of the IISS said that the main driver behind all this is China and Russia’s hostility to liberal democratic values.

“Both countries are governed by anti-democratic regimes with a strong common interest in combating the influence of Western liberal values ​​in their countries,” he told Al Jazeera. “They also have a strong shared interest in weakening states and alliances that embrace liberal values, beyond their borders. So their main common interest is ideological: they want to weaken the democratic and liberal West. ”

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

The deepening of ties has worried the West, as U.S. intelligence assessments list China, Russia and their alignments as major security threats to the United States and NATO, with Western security alliances set up in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. broadening its focus to address both countries.

In an interview with the Financial Times in London last month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he did not see China and Russia as two separate threats.

“China and Russia are working together,” he said. “This idea of ​​separating China, Russia, Asia-Pacific or Europe so much is a big security environment and we all need to address it together.”

But some say this assessment is too simple and could lead to “serious mistakes”.

“There is no big conspiracy against the West,” Bobo Lo, a former Australian diplomat and independent international relations analyst, said last month. “What this is is a classic, high-power relationship, driven by common interests, rather than shared values,” he said in a virtual conference hosted by the U.S.-based Center for Global Security Research.

By helping each other, China and Russia achieve “critical dividends,” Lo said, including strengthening “the legitimacy and stability of their respective regimes”. Defense cooperation allows Moscow to project its Russian influence on the world stage, he added, while Beijing is able to gain access to Russia’s advanced military technology and operational experience.

This relationship also allows Moscow to “fill the technological gap left by the withdrawal of Western companies in Russia,” following sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea. “And the investment in Chinese technology has been absolutely significant for the implementation of Russia’s Arctic LNG projects,” Lok said.

Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Center in Moscow agrees.

He said the ties between Russia and China were “driven by fundamental factors beyond Western control,” and in a speech in March said the two countries also shared a 4,300-kilometer (2,672-mile) border. Because of the 1969 border clashes, “they know how dangerous and expensive it is to be an enemy,” he said.

That’s why, he said last month on Twitter, NATO’s claims are a challenge for China and Russia, “the cooperation and nuance between China-Russia exceeds the current level.”

Both countries are “religious about their strategic autonomy,” he said. And “as a near-alliance to unite China and Russia through a unified instrument, the West risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy when double standards lead to further deepening China-Russia cooperation, which further puts pressure on the United States.”

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– Alexander Gabuev Chen Hanshi (@AlexGabuev) October 18, 2021

“Hypocritical Attacker”

For some, the pressure from the US is the starting point.

“China and Russia believe that the US is a hypocritical aggressor who intends to reduce it with the intention of maintaining hegemony,” said Einar Tangen, a Beijing-based political analyst who also works as a commentator for China’s state-run CGTN.

In this regard, US actions include the two countries’ major threats to national security, the imposition of sanctions for alleged human rights violations, and the formation of what Beijing and Moscow see as an alliance against Russia and China.

These include the Quad, an informal US-led alliance that brings together India, Japan and Australia. The group, which China has denounced as “NATO NATO”, resumed naval exercises for the first time in 13 years last year. Four navies have deployed exercises this year, conducted in two phases in the Philippine Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

Subsequently, a security alliance has recently been created between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, known as AUKUS. Announcing a tripartite pact in September, the US and UK said Australia would get nuclear-powered submarines; analysts said the move would allow the Australian Navy to take care of the conflicting waters of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

China has condemned the alliance as “very irresponsible” for regional stability, and said Russia is “a major challenge to the international non-proliferation nuclear regime”.

“These [type of actions] inevitably encourage China to work more closely with Russia in order to seek mutual responses to the actions, “said Danil Bochkov, an analyst at the Moscow International Affairs Council in Moscow.

These responses include recent Sino-Russian trials around Japan and South Korea, both of which are US allies.

Bochkov said the escalation of competition could lead to the resurgence of rigid blocs seen in the Cold War, with the US-led community on the one hand and China, Russia and their allies on the other.

“This creates a geopolitical stalemate that seems impossible to overcome in any way,” he said, “leaving all the powers to accumulate their strength for the worst situation, testing each other’s ‘red lines’ at the same time with dangerous local confrontations.”