China and Russia seem determined to improve their formal relationship. But they face three problems: enduring mistrust, ultimate divisions of interests, and India’s increasing alignment with the U.S.-led democratic alliance system.
I note this in light of the Chinese state media reports that President Xi Jinping of China will participate in next Tuesday’s virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. According to Beijing, Xi was invited by Russian President Vladimir Putin to speak. Chinese state media says Xi will deliver an “important speech,” his attendance being “of great significance.”
To some degree, that’s true. Both Putin and Xi have expressed optimism in recent weeks as to the future possibility of their forming an alliance. This rhetoric has matched to increasingly close military cooperation, including in the South China Sea. That fits well with their shared enjoyment at banding together to get under America’s skin. The Russian deputy foreign minister just visited an anti-American Korean War exhibit, for example.
There are challenges facing these aspirations, however.
As neighbors with a less than friendly history, the two nuclear powers are ill-inclined to engage in the kind of trust-building that any true alliance would require. For a start, the Chinese and Russian intelligence services continue to operate against each other in the same way they operate against western intelligence services, which is to say, as adversaries rather than allies. Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence service prioritizes the detection of the not insignificant number of Chinese intelligence assets working within Russia’s energy and weapons research industries.
On the flip side, the Chinese distrust the Russian intelligence services and were likely infuriated by the almost certain Russian intelligence operation against U.S. government personnel in Guangzhou.
Then there’s the strategic dichotomy between the two nations.
Where China seeks to replace the U.S.-led liberal international order with its own feudal mercantile order, it is largely unconcerned with structures such as NATO, insofar as those structures stick to Europe. Nor is Beijing terribly worried about the political makeup of governments in Europe. Putin takes the very opposite approach, working to ensure that governments in Europe are either supplicant to his core interests — as with Germany on Russian energy policy — or openly deferential to his political power, as with the former Soviet states like Belarus, Ukraine, and the “-stan” states of central Asia.
Putin funds a significant intelligence and military effort to ensure these interests hold. But where he does so, he risks undermining China’s interest in a stable and steadily increasing feudal economic relationship with these states. These conflicting interests are very difficult to bridge.
Finally, there’s India, much more of a problem to China than it is to Russia. Because of India’s significant value to the Russian arms export industry, Putin is reluctant to agitate New Delhi. It means that Putin won’t support Chinese efforts to put economic pressure on India. On that point, thanks to China’s effort to bully India into making territorial concessions in relation to its far-northern mountain region of Jammu and Kashmir, nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi is quickly moving into a more overtly pro-American standpoint.
Considering the positive relations between Modi and both Obama and Trump, we should expect this dynamic to hold true under a Biden administration. This portends a truly global alliance of the most powerful and the most populous democracies in explicit resistance of Xi’s core interests. Again, will Putin stand against India if India keeps buying tens of billions of dollars in military equipment from him?
In short, we should expect diplomatic words from Xi at next week’s summit, and a pledge to work with Putin to uphold the rights of nations outside America’s orbit. But don’t expect any pledge to build an alliance.
