Last Friday’s vote by Russia’s upper house of parliament to suspend compliance with the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty was characterized by official Chinese media as bringing “the Russo-American wrestle over strategic security to a critical phase.” Chinese media have followed the controversy closely since July, when Putin announced plans to suspend Russian participation in the treaty, which limits the number of conventional weapons deployed between the Atlantic and the Ural Mountains. A November 7 Xinhua report cites “NATO’s continuous eastward expansion and U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland” as a factor contributing to the unanimous vote one day earlier by the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, to suspend CFE participation. The report ends by noting that while the Russian parliament had in 2004 ratified a 1999 revised version of the CFE treaty, not a single member of NATO has yet done so. Conspicuously absent from the Xinhua report is any mention of NATO’s conditions for ratifying the treaty. These include withdrawal of Russian military forces from Georgia and Moldova. (Russian forces just completed their withdrawal from Georgia last week.) Chinese media have been giving highly favorable coverage to Russia in general, and to Vladimir Putin in particular. Putin is credited with having brought about political stability, economic prosperity, and military modernization, thereby making it possible for Russia to “say ‘no’ to America.” Economic and military clout, according to an October 20 Xinhua report, has enabled the Kremlin to take certain “high profile and tough” actions during the past year. These include Putin’s speech in February to the Munich Conference on Security Policy in which he slammed NATO expansion and U.S. foreign policy, the release on March 27 by the Russian foreign ministry of the “Review of Foreign Policy” that called for a new global security structure, the tough stance taken by Moscow in the case of the poisoned spy Litvienenko, the planting of a Russian flag on the ocean floor below the icecap of the North Pole, and the strong reaction to Washington’s plans to extend the missile defense shield to eastern Europe. Occasionally Chinese media reports on Putin are accompanied by a photo gallery of the Russian leader in various flattering poses–dancing with a Hungarian beauty, in the cockpit of a jet fighter, in a Judo sparring session as a sixth-degree black belt and the by-now world famous shot of Putin topless, which carries the Chinese caption “Russian Muscle Man.” There is something appealing to the Chinese about the muscle-flexing Russian leader, especially when he stands up to the Untied States. In July of 2006, Chinese media gleefully reported how, at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, Putin responded with a “frontal counter-attack” to the U.S. president’s call for greater religious and press freedom in countries such as Iraq:
China and Russia resolved their decades-old border disputes in 2005. That same year, Putin and Chinese president Hu Jintao launched the “theme years” project, designating 2006 as the “Year of Russia” in China and 2007 as the “Year of China” in Russia. Indeed, as noted in a report in China Daily, Putin opened his annual press conference in February with “nihao,” Mandarin Chinese for “hello.” In September, during their fifth meeting this year, Putin told Hu Jintao “we have achieved a peak in Russian-Chinese relations in recent times.” And that point was reiterated earlier this month by prime minister Zubkov during Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Moscow.
