Author Topic: Russia-China  (Read 978 times)

Crafty_Dog

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Russia-China
« on: September 16, 2022, 05:41:11 AM »
GPF:

Drilling in the Pacific. Russia and China launched joint naval drills in the Pacific on Thursday, their second such exercises in the past year. Russia’s Ministry of Defense said the drills were aimed at strengthening naval cooperation, maintaining peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific, and protecting both countries’ maritime activities. Moscow has been stepping up its ties with China as it faces severe economic pressure from Europe.



Crafty_Dog

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RNE: What Russia's instability means for China
« Reply #3 on: June 30, 2023, 07:48:34 AM »
The Specter of Wagner: What Russia's Political Instability Means for China
5 MIN READJun 29, 2023 | 16:20 GMT

(PAVEL BYRKIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)

China will remain committed to its partnership with Russia after the paramilitary Wagner Group's uprising, and the incident will also lead Beijing to strengthen its efforts to prevent similar developments in China. After the private security company Wagner Group rebelled against the Russian military on June 23-24, a number of Russian partners, including Iran and Turkey, voiced their full support for President Vladimir Putin's regime. The statements released by China's Foreign Ministry and the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee seemed subdued by comparison, prompting international media to question the health of the Sino-Russian partnership. However, a lengthy border, reliance on mutual political stability, authoritarian governance models, anti-Western ideologies, Chinese President Xi Jinping's close personal relationship with Putin, and mutually beneficial energy deals will ensure that Beijing remains committed to Putin's continued leadership. Instead, China's mild response (in comparison to Russia's other partners) confirms Beijing's deep-seated fear of political overthrow, as well as its opposition to interference in the ''internal affairs'' of its partners.

China's various statements and articles called the ''Wagner Incident'' Russia's internal affair and outlined China's support for Russia's national stability. They also reiterated Russia's claim that the ''enemies of China and Russia'' were behind the mutiny and that Western attempts to use this story to attack Russia were futile.

The Chinese Communist Party views the fall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a timeless cautionary tale for its own regime longevity. It is also ever watchful of Western-led overthrows of authoritarian systems and domestic rebellions weakening the central authority of governments, informed partly by history (e.g., the NATO-led bombing of Libya) and partly by Marxist theory on the predation of capitalist powers.

Meanwhile, Beijing is sending all of the support signals it needs to Moscow in backroom meetings, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry saying as much in its press briefing on June 26.

If Putin were ousted, China would still be interested in keeping close ties with Russia, but the ideology of the new Russian leader would influence the scope and depth of the bilateral relationship. China's interest in Russia's stability means that Beijing will continue to support Putin, even if he conducts a bloody crackdown to restore his grip on power. In the low-likelihood, high-impact scenario in which Putin is ousted and a new government takes over, China would still be interested in keeping close ties with Russia, though it would probably take some time for Beijing and the new government in Moscow to return to their current levels of cooperation. The bilateral relationship would also depend on the ideology of the new Russian president, as an anti-China and/or pro-West Russian leader would push Beijing to recalibrate its relationships with Russia and the United States to ensure that it does not face two anti-China fronts. In the short term, this scenario could even convince Beijing to de-escalate its economic competition with the United States in order to balance the U.S.-China-Russia geopolitical triangle, although the long-term prospects of any new economic agreements between Washington and Beijing would still be in doubt. However, if a pro-China Russian nationalist comes to power, little would change in the China-Russia relationship; in fact, Beijing could increase its diplomatic engagement with Russia to establish the foundation of Xi's ties with the new leader, exacerbating Western fears of a Sino-Russian axis.

Domestically, the ''Wagner Incident'' will drive Beijing to continue its internal security- and national security-focused policy agenda, inhibiting creative solutions to Beijing's myriad economic issues and making it hard for China to reach a partial rapprochement with the United States. Beijing views internal political chaos in neighboring countries with an acute sense of dread. This has been the case in many regional political uprisings (including the January 2022 protests in Kazakhstan), to which Beijing has reliably responded with statements of support for the ruling regime and accusations of Western government-fueled ''color revolutions.'' Thus, the Wagner mutiny will confirm the Party's ongoing efforts to secure political and military loyalty within China. This will mean persisting low levels of trust for political dissenters and a focus on ideological and policy unity, creating minimal room for creative solutions to China's mounting economic problems, which include the ailing real estate sector and ongoing tech competition with the United States. Furthermore, the Wagner incident will bolster the Party's emphasis on national security in all policy spheres, such as its efforts to insulate supply chains from Western sanctions, root out threats of espionage (real or imagined), and enforce the Party's control over data sovereignty. These security-focused policies will reinforce U.S. and European ''de-risking'' strategies toward China in the realms of trade and investment, as well as Washington's commitment to economic restrictions on China — all done on the basis of Western national security concerns. They will also make it even less likely that China's nascent diplomatic talks with the United States yield any concrete agreement to limit strategic competition, whether along economic or military dimensions.

Crafty_Dog

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FA: Is Russia losing its grip in Central Asia
« Reply #4 on: June 30, 2023, 08:00:48 AM »
second

s Russia Losing Its Grip on Central Asia?
What China’s Growing Regional Ambitions Mean for Moscow
By Temur Umarov and Alexander Gabuev
June 30, 2023
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/russia-losing-its-grip-central-asia


Last month marked a diplomatic milestone for Chinese President Xi Jinping. He had invited the leaders of five Central Asian states to the city of Xian for their first-ever joint summit with China. The reception, with festivities worthy of an Olympic opening ceremony, was lavish even by Chinese standards. It made official China’s foray into a region that even today is often referred to, for better or worse, as Russia’s backyard. The pomp, and the praise that Xi and his guests from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan heaped on one another, led some observers to proclaim a Sino-Russian scramble for Central Asia in which Beijing had just notched a victory at the Kremlin’s expense.

In truth, Chinese and Russian power plays in Central Asia are complex and subtle. China’s clout is growing, but Beijing is nowhere near usurping Moscow as Central Asia’s true hegemon. Moreover, whatever rivalry exists is far outweighed by overlapping interests and avenues for cooperation. Russia may be transforming into the junior party in a deepening, asymmetrical partnership with China, but in Central Asia it is still the dominant power, and it is becoming more, not less, willing to coordinate with China.

If Beijing’s expanding influence in the region reveals anything, it is that Central Asian states, more than three decades after their independence from the Soviet Union, are beginning to emerge as regional political actors in their own right, rather than as the objects of clashing great-power interests and ambitions. All five countries in the region must navigate a rising China, a belligerent Russia, and a deepening schism between these two neighbors and the West. To that end, they support Putin without fully turning their backs on the West, and they embrace China while hedging their bets with the help of Russia. Beijing and Moscow, in turn, are treading carefully, intent on accommodating both each other’s interests and those of Central Asian states.

The prevailing wisdom is that if Moscow and Beijing were to come into conflict, it would likely be over their overlapping interests in Central Asia. In this view, China is exploiting a moment of Russian weakness occasioned by its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, and the Xian summit was its opening move.

To be sure, Russia’s global influence has suffered over the past year, and Central Asia is no exception in this regard. Take Kazakhstan, where a recent Gallup survey found that more people now disapprove than approve of Russia’s influence abroad—a first in the country’s history. And although governments in the region have not introduced their own sanctions over the war in Ukraine, they have mostly complied with the Western sanctions regime. But such deviations from Moscow’s agenda are pragmatic acts of economic self-preservation, not signs of a real break.

Just a week before the Xian summit, all five Central Asian leaders traveled to Moscow for the annual Victory Day military parade. The optics of standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin to celebrate Soviet victory in World War II even as he wages war on neighboring Ukraine would not have been lost on his guests. But they likely decided that attending was a safer bet, certain that they would not risk Western punishment for attending a parade but uncertain how Putin, who had personally invited them, would react to a snub.


Chinese and Russian power plays in Central Asia are complex and subtle.
Since the start of the war, Moscow has taken care to occasionally remind its neighbors of their place in the regional pecking order. On numerous occasions starting last summer, for example, it has temporarily shut down the Caspian oil pipeline, which runs through Russian territory and serves as a vital conduit for Kazakh oil exports to Europe. Although in most of these instances Russian authorities cited technical issues or environmental concerns of scant credibility, the stoppages often seemed to come after the Kazakh government ran afoul of the Kremlin.

Moscow has plenty more levers of influence. It is a crucial source of basic goods for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, its fellow members in the Eurasian Economic Union. Russian trade with all of Central Asia is soaring, having risen by 20 percent in 2022. When Russia temporarily banned all sugar and flour exports at the beginning of the war, it contributed to budget deficits and record-high inflation across the region. Meanwhile, Central Asians continue to move to Russia in search of employment: according to Russia’s Interior Ministry, over ten million Central Asian labor migrants arrived in 2022, two million people more than in the previous year.

Undergirding these economic ties is the deep trust that binds political elites across the region. In Central Asia, just as in Putin’s Russia, power is mostly in the hands of gray-haired men who grew up in the Soviet Union. They have known one another for decades and speak the same language, both culturally and literally, as all are fluent in Russian. The first trip for new leaders and senior officials is nearly always to Moscow.


Russia still wields considerable soft power throughout Central Asia.

More and more often, Russian officials are returning the favor. In 2022, for the first time in ages, Putin visited all five Central Asian nations in a single year. Almost all members of Russia’s Security Council have made similar trips since the invasion of Ukraine, as have influential Russian business leaders. Several recent media investigations have shown that behind these friendly informal exchanges lie corruption schemes through which Moscow helps line the pockets of Central Asia’s ruling elites.

No less persistent is Russia’s role as a model of authoritarian stability. In recent years, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have all implemented restrictive laws that closely resemble earlier Russian prototypes, from bans on “LGBT propaganda” to tightened controls on independent media and on nongovernmental organizations that partner with Western institutions.

More broadly, Russia still wields considerable soft power throughout Central Asia. Pro-Kremlin Russian media continue to disseminate propaganda across cities in the region, and not without success: Russia’s reputation may have taken a hit, but according to a recent survey by Central Asia Barometer, 23 percent of Kazakhstanis still blame Ukraine for the war (27 percent think that Russia is responsible, and half the respondents are undecided). In Kyrgyzstan, 30 percent blame Ukraine and only 19 percent consider Russia responsible.

UNDERESTIMATED COORDINATION

Like claims of waning Russian influence in Central Asia, the notion that China is angling to replace Russia as the region’s hegemonic power is inaccurate. Where the two sides disagree, Moscow has little choice but to back down and adapt. But on many issues, Chinese and Russian interests do not compete. The war in Ukraine and the deepening rift between China and the United States have brought Moscow and Beijing closer together. That interdependence extends to their relations in Central Asia.

Nowhere is China’s arrival on the scene more visible than in trade and investment, including through projects loosely tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. Its trade with the region is greater and growing faster than Russia’s, reaching $70 billion last year against Russia’s $40 billion. Yet that expansion has not come at Russia’s expense. Much of it takes the form of Central Asian commodity exports to China—exports that Russia, itself a leading commodities exporter, has little use for. Beijing has also taken care not to disrupt the Eurasian Economic Union: it has neither built a rival supranational institution nor officially sought free-trade agreements with Eurasian Economic Union members other than Russia. It does, of course, still conduct significant bilateral trade with these countries, which Moscow has no option but to accept, since it cannot compete with the market, technology, or money that Beijing has to offer.

In matters of regional security, too, Chinese and Russian interests and influence often complement each other. The top priority for both sides is to keep Central Asia’s current regimes in place and to keep the West—and above all, the United States—out. And far from being sidelined, Russia remains a towering presence: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all sit under its security umbrella as part of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also host Russian military bases and share a unified regional air defense system with Russia. Militaries in the region have close working relationships with their Russian counterparts, including access to Russian weapons at subsidized prices and joint training and education at Russian academies. Even Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, although not members of the CSTO, have bilateral agreements with Russia that limit their ability to expand their security ties to other states. The agreements also give Russia the ability to intervene politically and militarily in Uzbek and Turkmen domestic issues—powers that Russia used when it led a CSTO “peacekeeping operation” to quell intra-elite clashes in Kazakhstan in January 2022. The episode was a forceful reminder that Moscow remains the only outside player that can use its military to prop up friendly regimes.


Central Asia is a testing ground for security instruments Beijing has yet to use elsewhere.

Unlike Russia, which views its security interests in Central Asia in terms of national security and geopolitical competition, China is content with protecting its commercial interests and making sure that developments in neighboring countries do not endanger political stability at home. Xinjiang Province, in China’s far west, borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and it resembles them in culture, ethnicity, language, and religion far more than it resembles other parts of China. Ever since these nations gained independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Beijing has sought friendly ties with them for fear that they might otherwise inspire or foment separatism in Xinjiang.

Another concern of Beijing’s is that Central Asia could act as a bridge for jihadis from Afghanistan to join forces with Uyghur extremists in Xinjiang, especially after a suicide bomber targeted the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in 2016. Going back decades, but especially since the Bishkek attack, China has conducted dozens of joint military exercises with its Central Asian counterparts and held hundreds of high-level meetings with their military and intelligence agencies. It has also scaled up cooperation on military technology, participated in multiple exchange programs connecting Central Asian officers with Chinese military universities, and conducted regular joint border patrols.

Over the course of these exchanges, Central Asia has emerged as a testing ground for security instruments that Beijing has yet to use elsewhere. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, it has pioneered the practice of deploying private security companies to guard Chinese investment projects. Another such experiment has been to dispatch Chinese paramilitary police units to patrol and police foreign borders: Since 2018, China has set up two such bases on the Tajik-Afghan border, acting as a force multiplier for Tajik authorities. Although the first of these bases came as a surprise and an irritant to the Kremlin, the second one, built in 2021, drew no such objections. It seems that Moscow has come to view China’s gradually growing security presence not as a competitive challenge but as an opportunity for burden sharing.

A LOPSIDED PARTNERSHIP

Russia’s change of heart about the Chinese bases in Tajikistan points to a broader shift: China’s rise as a dominant player in countries along its border—at this point an inevitable outcome—is happening not against Russia’s will but at a time when ties between the two countries are deepening, albeit asymmetrically and in China’s favor. Even if there is cause for competition in Central Asia, both Moscow and Beijing see friendly bilateral relations as a priority, especially amid their increasing confrontation with the West.

The Central Asian states themselves are landlocked countries wedged between two increasingly aligned great powers. They have nothing to gain from replacing near-total dependence on Russia with near-total dependence on China. All of them are trying to diversify their ties to the outside world, and in that respect, both Russia and China are equally important to them.

Down the line, the Sino-Russian power asymmetry could of course grow lopsided enough for Chinese leaders to interfere in Central Asian politics with little need for the Kremlin’s consent or aid. But it is unlikely that this would diminish their shared interests and their mutual support for authoritarian regimes in the region. The potential for cooperation remains far greater than the risk of conflict—and Central Asia a place where the Chinese-Russian axis strengthens rather than weakens.

==============

Tangential question:  If this article is correct, what chance for Ramaswamy's idea about pulling Russia away from China?
« Last Edit: June 30, 2023, 08:03:04 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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ET: Cracks in China-Russia Coalition?
« Reply #5 on: July 03, 2023, 08:22:38 AM »
ANALYSIS: China–Russia Coalition ‘Has Cracked’ After Wagner Mutiny
By Eva Fu
July 1, 2023Updated: July 1, 2023

Short-lived as it was, the Wagner rebellion has brought an impact rippling far beyond Russian borders. It could be the beginning of the end for the coalition that Beijing led with Moscow against the free world, some analysts have said.

In a dramatic 24 hours, the paramilitary group captured world attention as it took over the city of Rostov, a key tactical hub for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Leading the revolt was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a once-trusted ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin who described the action as a “stab in the back.”

Prigozhin is now in exile in Belarus under a deal that Russia won’t press criminal charges against him. But his flight—after posing the most serious test to Putin in the Russian president’s more than two decades in power—has far from closed the matter in the eyes of outside observers.


“We see cracks emerging,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS. “Where they go, if anywhere, when they get there, very hard to say,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve seen the final act.”

The cracks have not just emerged in the Russian regime, according to geopolitical analyst Gordon Chang.

“China is trying to overturn the entire international system. Although China’s powerful, it’s not that powerful. It needs allies like Putin, and if Putin isn’t going to survive, then, China’s in trouble,” Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,”  told The Epoch Times.


Beijing had maintained silence as Prigozhin’s forces marched on Moscow, only addressing it for the first time a day after a truce halted the movement of Prigozhin’s armed forces. “This is Russia’s internal affair,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said in a statement. “As Russia’s friendly neighbor and comprehensive strategic partner of coordination for the new era, China supports Russia in maintaining national stability and achieving development and prosperity.”

The delayed reaction from Beijing, Chang said, was because “it didn’t know what to say.”

“The problem here for Xi Jinping is because he’s declared a ‘no limits’ partnership with Russia,” he said of the Chinese leader. “And this ‘no limits’ partner was almost deposed in those stunning developments. So I think China is a little bit shaken by this.”

The “no limits” partnership Xi and Putin put forward came on the opening day of the Beijing Winter Olympics, as the two held their first in-person meeting in two years while scoffing at what they called the “interference in the internal affairs” from the West.

That was less than three weeks before Russia began an attack on Ukraine. About a year later, in March, Xi became the guest of honor in Moscow. In parting with Putin, the smiling Chinese communist leader said that they are the two driving forward “the change which hasn’t happened in 100 years.”

But the uprising has taken Beijing by surprise.

In a similarly fleeting coup in 1992, hardliners from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party locked up Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in his Crimea vacation villa. The plot fell apart in three days, but it was the trigger that brought the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union four months later.

Chang sees Putin in a similar position.

“He was able to prevent the insurrection from toppling him, but Russia has been destabilized, so I don’t think we’ve heard the last words,” he said.

For the Chinese regime, which counts on Russia as an effective ally to subvert the U.S.-led world order, this doesn’t bode well.

“China tries to portray itself as invincible, as dominating the world,” Chang said. “Well, it doesn’t look so intimidating right now. It looked a lot more intimidating last week than it does at this moment.”

Troubles Back Home
A weakened political standing for Putin isn’t the only concern in Beijing’s calculus.

Days after the Wagner rebellion, Xi promoted two political commissars to the rank of general, a move some interpreted as his attempt to consolidate power. A Chinese military officer, writing for PLA Daily, the official newspaper of China’s highest military operational body, opined that the Chinese armed forces must “enhance national security awareness,” and be ready to “face major tests in a stormy sea.”

“China believes that Russia is in such a mess because there is no communist party control of the government, so Xi Jinping is going to absolutely heighten that position,” Miles Yu, director of the China Center at Hudson Institute and a senior China policy adviser to the Trump administration, told The Epoch Times. Xi, he noted, has purged many high-ranking military officials to consolidate power during his over a decade of rule.

“He knows there’s a lot of resentment within the military rank and file. So that’s why this issue has been very, very unsettling for him,” Yu said.

Domestic issues will also keep Beijing on the alert, said Chang.

“The Chinese are always worried about color revolutions, as they say, and revolutions are contagious—they do spread.”

Last November, a deadly blaze in a high-rise building in Xinjiang set off mass protests around the country. Demonstrators raised blank sheets of paper to push back against the regime’s harsh COVID lockdowns in what has been dubbed the white paper protests.

The movement subsided with Beijing lifting the COVID curbs while quietly rounding up participants. But behind it, Chang sees a broader spirit of discontent that isn’t going away.

“Some people actually were demanding the Communist Party and Xi Jinping step down,” he said, citing some of the slogans protesters have chanted.

Epoch Times Photo
Protesters hold up a white piece of paper against censorship as they march during a protest against China’s strict zero-COVID measures in Beijing, China, on Nov. 27, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Economists had hoped that the end of the zero-COVID policy could spur China’s domestic spending and revitalize the country’s sagging economy. On many levels, though, the situation in China hasn’t looked much brighter than half a year ago.

Local governments are facing defaults under a $23 trillion debt, those aged between 16 and 24 have a record jobless rate of above 20 percent; property sales have continued to plunge. The country is set to face what could be the world’s largest millionaire exodus this year, while a growing number of disillusioned individuals are also fleeing the country.

“There are no answers for Xi Jinping other than to clamp down even tighter, and that ultimately is not going to be a solution because the economy is falling away,” said Chang.

June Teufel Dreyer, a political science professor at the University of Miami, similarly sees the economic problems as a major hurdle.

“Putin may even be more dependent on China after the uprising, so China’s desire to lead the world order will be strengthened,” she told The Epoch Times. The economic slowdown, she said, will be the number one issue that will get in Xi’s way of realizing his ambition.

For now, China and Russia will continue to be “huddling together for warmth” as they face off against the West, with each taking what it needs from the relationship, said Su Tze-yun, director of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research of Taiwan.

With the Ukraine war dragging on, Russia will likely find itself growingly reliant on China, now a main buyer of Russian oil that once flew to Europe.

It is a juncture that requires more decisive action from the free world, said Chang.

“The world is at a critical moment, and right now the coalition that opposes us has cracked and could very well fall apart. It’s important for the Biden administration and free states to make sure that that coalition cannot be put back together,” he said.

Luo Ya contributed to this report.

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FP: Is Russia losing its grip on Central Asia?
« Reply #6 on: July 07, 2023, 09:16:02 AM »
Is Russia Losing Its Grip on Central Asia?
What China’s Growing Regional Ambitions Mean for Moscow
By Temur Umarov and Alexander Gabuev
June 30, 2023
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/russia-losing-its-grip-central-asia

Last month marked a diplomatic milestone for Chinese President Xi Jinping. He had invited the leaders of five Central Asian states to the city of Xian for their first-ever joint summit with China. The reception, with festivities worthy of an Olympic opening ceremony, was lavish even by Chinese standards. It made official China’s foray into a region that even today is often referred to, for better or worse, as Russia’s backyard. The pomp, and the praise that Xi and his guests from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan heaped on one another, led some observers to proclaim a Sino-Russian scramble for Central Asia in which Beijing had just notched a victory at the Kremlin’s expense.

In truth, Chinese and Russian power plays in Central Asia are complex and subtle. China’s clout is growing, but Beijing is nowhere near usurping Moscow as Central Asia’s true hegemon. Moreover, whatever rivalry exists is far outweighed by overlapping interests and avenues for cooperation. Russia may be transforming into the junior party in a deepening, asymmetrical partnership with China, but in Central Asia it is still the dominant power, and it is becoming more, not less, willing to coordinate with China.

If Beijing’s expanding influence in the region reveals anything, it is that Central Asian states, more than three decades after their independence from the Soviet Union, are beginning to emerge as regional political actors in their own right, rather than as the objects of clashing great-power interests and ambitions. All five countries in the region must navigate a rising China, a belligerent Russia, and a deepening schism between these two neighbors and the West. To that end, they support Putin without fully turning their backs on the West, and they embrace China while hedging their bets with the help of Russia. Beijing and Moscow, in turn, are treading carefully, intent on accommodating both each other’s interests and those of Central Asian states.

The prevailing wisdom is that if Moscow and Beijing were to come into conflict, it would likely be over their overlapping interests in Central Asia. In this view, China is exploiting a moment of Russian weakness occasioned by its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, and the Xian summit was its opening move.

To be sure, Russia’s global influence has suffered over the past year, and Central Asia is no exception in this regard. Take Kazakhstan, where a recent Gallup survey found that more people now disapprove than approve of Russia’s influence abroad—a first in the country’s history. And although governments in the region have not introduced their own sanctions over the war in Ukraine, they have mostly complied with the Western sanctions regime. But such deviations from Moscow’s agenda are pragmatic acts of economic self-preservation, not signs of a real break.

Just a week before the Xian summit, all five Central Asian leaders traveled to Moscow for the annual Victory Day military parade. The optics of standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin to celebrate Soviet victory in World War II even as he wages war on neighboring Ukraine would not have been lost on his guests. But they likely decided that attending was a safer bet, certain that they would not risk Western punishment for attending a parade but uncertain how Putin, who had personally invited them, would react to a snub.


Chinese and Russian power plays in Central Asia are complex and subtle.

Since the start of the war, Moscow has taken care to occasionally remind its neighbors of their place in the regional pecking order. On numerous occasions starting last summer, for example, it has temporarily shut down the Caspian oil pipeline, which runs through Russian territory and serves as a vital conduit for Kazakh oil exports to Europe. Although in most of these instances Russian authorities cited technical issues or environmental concerns of scant credibility, the stoppages often seemed to come after the Kazakh government ran afoul of the Kremlin.

Moscow has plenty more levers of influence. It is a crucial source of basic goods for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, its fellow members in the Eurasian Economic Union. Russian trade with all of Central Asia is soaring, having risen by 20 percent in 2022. When Russia temporarily banned all sugar and flour exports at the beginning of the war, it contributed to budget deficits and record-high inflation across the region. Meanwhile, Central Asians continue to move to Russia in search of employment: according to Russia’s Interior Ministry, over ten million Central Asian labor migrants arrived in 2022, two million people more than in the previous year.

Undergirding these economic ties is the deep trust that binds political elites across the region. In Central Asia, just as in Putin’s Russia, power is mostly in the hands of gray-haired men who grew up in the Soviet Union. They have known one another for decades and speak the same language, both culturally and literally, as all are fluent in Russian. The first trip for new leaders and senior officials is nearly always to Moscow.


Russia still wields considerable soft power throughout Central Asia.

More and more often, Russian officials are returning the favor. In 2022, for the first time in ages, Putin visited all five Central Asian nations in a single year. Almost all members of Russia’s Security Council have made similar trips since the invasion of Ukraine, as have influential Russian business leaders. Several recent media investigations have shown that behind these friendly informal exchanges lie corruption schemes through which Moscow helps line the pockets of Central Asia’s ruling elites.

No less persistent is Russia’s role as a model of authoritarian stability. In recent years, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have all implemented restrictive laws that closely resemble earlier Russian prototypes, from bans on “LGBT propaganda” to tightened controls on independent media and on nongovernmental organizations that partner with Western institutions.

More broadly, Russia still wields considerable soft power throughout Central Asia. Pro-Kremlin Russian media continue to disseminate propaganda across cities in the region, and not without success: Russia’s reputation may have taken a hit, but according to a recent survey by Central Asia Barometer, 23 percent of Kazakhstanis still blame Ukraine for the war (27 percent think that Russia is responsible, and half the respondents are undecided). In Kyrgyzstan, 30 percent blame Ukraine and only 19 percent consider Russia responsible.

UNDERESTIMATED COORDINATION

Like claims of waning Russian influence in Central Asia, the notion that China is angling to replace Russia as the region’s hegemonic power is inaccurate. Where the two sides disagree, Moscow has little choice but to back down and adapt. But on many issues, Chinese and Russian interests do not compete. The war in Ukraine and the deepening rift between China and the United States have brought Moscow and Beijing closer together. That interdependence extends to their relations in Central Asia.

Nowhere is China’s arrival on the scene more visible than in trade and investment, including through projects loosely tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. Its trade with the region is greater and growing faster than Russia’s, reaching $70 billion last year against Russia’s $40 billion. Yet that expansion has not come at Russia’s expense. Much of it takes the form of Central Asian commodity exports to China—exports that Russia, itself a leading commodities exporter, has little use for. Beijing has also taken care not to disrupt the Eurasian Economic Union: it has neither built a rival supranational institution nor officially sought free-trade agreements with Eurasian Economic Union members other than Russia. It does, of course, still conduct significant bilateral trade with these countries, which Moscow has no option but to accept, since it cannot compete with the market, technology, or money that Beijing has to offer.

In matters of regional security, too, Chinese and Russian interests and influence often complement each other. The top priority for both sides is to keep Central Asia’s current regimes in place and to keep the West—and above all, the United States—out. And far from being sidelined, Russia remains a towering presence: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all sit under its security umbrella as part of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also host Russian military bases and share a unified regional air defense system with Russia. Militaries in the region have close working relationships with their Russian counterparts, including access to Russian weapons at subsidized prices and joint training and education at Russian academies. Even Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, although not members of the CSTO, have bilateral agreements with Russia that limit their ability to expand their security ties to other states. The agreements also give Russia the ability to intervene politically and militarily in Uzbek and Turkmen domestic issues—powers that Russia used when it led a CSTO “peacekeeping operation” to quell intra-elite clashes in Kazakhstan in January 2022. The episode was a forceful reminder that Moscow remains the only outside player that can use its military to prop up friendly regimes.


Central Asia is a testing ground for security instruments Beijing has yet to use elsewhere.
Unlike Russia, which views its security interests in Central Asia in terms of national security and geopolitical competition, China is content with protecting its commercial interests and making sure that developments in neighboring countries do not endanger political stability at home. Xinjiang Province, in China’s far west, borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and it resembles them in culture, ethnicity, language, and religion far more than it resembles other parts of China. Ever since these nations gained independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Beijing has sought friendly ties with them for fear that they might otherwise inspire or foment separatism in Xinjiang.

Another concern of Beijing’s is that Central Asia could act as a bridge for jihadis from Afghanistan to join forces with Uyghur extremists in Xinjiang, especially after a suicide bomber targeted the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in 2016. Going back decades, but especially since the Bishkek attack, China has conducted dozens of joint military exercises with its Central Asian counterparts and held hundreds of high-level meetings with their military and intelligence agencies. It has also scaled up cooperation on military technology, participated in multiple exchange programs connecting Central Asian officers with Chinese military universities, and conducted regular joint border patrols.

Over the course of these exchanges, Central Asia has emerged as a testing ground for security instruments that Beijing has yet to use elsewhere. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, it has pioneered the practice of deploying private security companies to guard Chinese investment projects. Another such experiment has been to dispatch Chinese paramilitary police units to patrol and police foreign borders: Since 2018, China has set up two such bases on the Tajik-Afghan border, acting as a force multiplier for Tajik authorities. Although the first of these bases came as a surprise and an irritant to the Kremlin, the second one, built in 2021, drew no such objections. It seems that Moscow has come to view China’s gradually growing security presence not as a competitive challenge but as an opportunity for burden sharing.

A LOPSIDED PARTNERSHIP

Russia’s change of heart about the Chinese bases in Tajikistan points to a broader shift: China’s rise as a dominant player in countries along its border—at this point an inevitable outcome—is happening not against Russia’s will but at a time when ties between the two countries are deepening, albeit asymmetrically and in China’s favor. Even if there is cause for competition in Central Asia, both Moscow and Beijing see friendly bilateral relations as a priority, especially amid their increasing confrontation with the West.

The Central Asian states themselves are landlocked countries wedged between two increasingly aligned great powers. They have nothing to gain from replacing near-total dependence on Russia with near-total dependence on China. All of them are trying to diversify their ties to the outside world, and in that respect, both Russia and China are equally important to them.

Down the line, the Sino-Russian power asymmetry could of course grow lopsided enough for Chinese leaders to interfere in Central Asian politics with little need for the Kremlin’s consent or aid. But it is unlikely that this would diminish their shared interests and their mutual support for authoritarian regimes in the region. The potential for cooperation remains far greater than the risk of conflict—and Central Asia a place where the Chinese-Russian axis strengthens rather than weakens.

DougMacG

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Xi personally warned Putin against using nuclear weapons
« Reply #7 on: July 20, 2023, 06:53:55 PM »
Xi Jinping personally warned Vladimir Putin against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, indicating Beijing harbors concerns about Russia’s war even as it offers tacit backing to Moscow, according to western and Chinese officials. The face-to-face message was delivered during the Chinese president’s state visit to Moscow in March, the people added, one of Xi’s first trips outside China after years of isolation under his zero-Covid policy. Since then, Chinese officials have privately taken credit for convincing the Russian president to back down from his veiled threats of using a nuclear weapon against Ukraine, the people said. Deterring Putin from using such a weapon has been central to China’s campaign to repair damaged ties with Europe, said a senior adviser to the Chinese government. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has placed Moscow and its ally Beijing at odds with much of the continent. (Source: ft.com).
« Last Edit: July 20, 2023, 06:58:06 PM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Russia-China
« Reply #8 on: July 21, 2023, 06:21:48 AM »
One possibility here:  The rooster takes credit for his crowing causing the sun to rise.

DougMacG

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Re: Russia-China
« Reply #9 on: July 21, 2023, 07:10:03 AM »
One possibility here:  The rooster takes credit for his crowing causing the sun to rise.

That's right. One thing is for certain. When a totalitarian makes a public statement, it is for propaganda purposes, whether it is true or false.

Most of life comes down to the conflict and coinciding of two questions, what do you want now and what do you want most. Both Russia and China are caught up in this. Russia wants Ukraine. At what cost?  China wants Taiwan.  At what cost? China also wants a market for its goods in Europe, a market for its goods in the US and in the rest of the world. Invading Taiwan upsets all of that.

Our job is to make their bad options risky, difficult and costly, and make the alternative path, living in peace and prosperity, relatively more desirable.

Putin is a zero sum thinker.  He only gains by taking.  Communist Xi is a (crony) capitalist. Blowing up the world with nuclear weapons is the opposite strategy of his belt and road initiative.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Russia-China
« Reply #10 on: July 28, 2023, 11:48:43 AM »
Patrols. The Russian and Chinese navies began “maritime patrols” in the Pacific Ocean following the conclusion of joint naval drills in the Sea of Japan last weekend. According to a statement from Russia’s Pacific Fleet, the patrols will strengthen cooperation between Russia and China, maintain peace and stability in the western Pacific, and protect Russian and Chinese economic activity in the region.