by Dr. James M. Dorsey
Potential rivalry in Central Asia is not the only thing gnawing at the fundaments of a Chinese-Russian alliance.
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| Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, photo via Office of the President of Russia |
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,151, April 24, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Odds
are that China and Russia will prove to be long-term US rivals. However,
it may just as well be that their alliance will prove to be more
tactical than strategic, with the China-Russia relationship resembling
US-Chinese ties: cooperation in an environment of divergence rather than
convergence.
Addressing last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore, then US defense secretary Jim Mattis dismissed fears first
voiced in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Advisor, that long-term US interests would be most threatened by a “grand coalition” of China and Russia “united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
On the contrary, Mattis suggested. China and
Russia have a “natural non-convergence of interests” despite the fact
that both countries have defined their relationship as a “comprehensive
strategic partnership,” he argued.
“There may be short-term convergence in the event
they want to contradict international tribunals or try muscling their
way into certain circumstances but my view – I would not be wasting my
time going to Beijing…if I really thought that’s the only option between
us and China. What would be the point of it? I’ve got more important
things to do,” Mattis argued.
Mattis predicted that in the longer term, “China
has more in common with Pacific Ocean nations and the United States and
India than they have in common with Russia.”
Mattis’s prediction of a US-China-India entente
may seem even further away today than it did in Singapore a year ago,
but his doubts about the sustainability of the Chinese-Russian alliance
are being echoed by Chinese and Russian analysts and developments on the
ground.
Shi Ze, a former Chinese diplomat in Moscow who is
now a senior fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, a
think tank affiliated with the country’s foreign ministry, noted that
“China and Russia have different attitudes. Russia wants to break the
current international order. Russia thinks it is the victim of the
current international system, in which its economy and its society do
not develop. But China benefits from the current international system.
We want to improve and modify it, not to break it.”
Russian scholar Dmitry Zhelobov recently suggested
that there was little confidence to cement the Chinese-Russian
alliance. Zhelobov warned that China
was gradually establishing military bases in Central Asia to ensure
that neither Russia nor the US would be able to disrupt Chinese trade with the Middle East and Europe across the Eurasian heartland.
Add to that the fact that Chinese dependence on
Russian military technology appears to be diminishing, potentially
threatening a key Russian export market.
In 2017, China rolled out its fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 fighter, which is believed to be technologically superior to Russia’s SU-57E.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to
signal greater awareness of potentially shifting sands in Central Asia
by signing an agreement in March during a visit to Kyrgyzstan to expand by 60 hectares the Kant Air Base 20 kilometers east of the capital Bishkek that is used by the Russian Air Force. Putin also agreed to pay a higher rent for the base.
He further lavished his Kyrgyz hosts with US$6 billion in deals ranging from power, mineral resources, and hydrocarbons to industry and agriculture.
Putin moreover allocated US$200 million for the
upgrading of customs infrastructure and border equipment to put an end
to the back-up of dozens of trucks on the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border caused by
Kyrgyzstan’s inability to comply with the technical requirements of the
Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Potential rivalry in Central Asia is not the only
thing gnawing at the fundaments of a Chinese-Russian alliance. So is
anti-Chinese sentiment and Russian public suspicion of Chinese
intentions and commercial and social practices, already pervasive in the
region’s former Soviet republics.
Increasingly, Russian leaders are facing mounting public anger in the Lake Baikal region and the country’s Far East at their alleged connivance in perceived Chinese encroachment on the region’s natural resources, including water.
A petition by prominent Russian show business personalities opposing
Chinese plans to build a water bottling plant on the shores of Lake
Baikal attracted more than 800,000 signatures, signaling the depth of
popular resentment and pitfalls of the Russian alliance with China.
Protests have further erupted in multiple Russian cities against
Chinese logging in the country’s Far East that residents and
environmentalists charge has spoiled Russian watersheds and is
destroying the habitats of the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur
leopard. The protesters, who denounced construction of housing for Chinese workers, are demanding a ban on Russian timber exports to China.
Russian fears of Chinese encroachment on its Far
East go back to the mid-1800s and prompted Joseph Stalin to deport the
region’s Korean and Chinese populations. When Russia and China finally
settled a border dispute in 2008 with a transfer of land to China,
Russian media raised the specter of millions of Chinese migrants
colonizing Siberia and the Far East.
Popular Russian fears diverge from official thinking that in recent years has discounted the threat of Chinese encroachment given that the trend is for Russians to seek opportunity in China, where wages are high, rather than the other way round.
The official Russian assessment would counter
Mattis’s thesis and support Brzezinski’s fears, which continue to have a
significant following in Washington.
“China and Russia will present a wide variety of
economic, political, counterintelligence, military, and diplomatic
challenges to the United States and its allies. We anticipate that they will collaborate to counter US objectives,
taking advantage of rising doubts in some places about the liberal
democratic model,” said Director of National Intelligence Daniel R.
Coats in the intelligence community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment
report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The report went on to say that China and Russia
were “expanding cooperation with each other and through international
bodies to shape global rules and standards to their benefit and present a
counterweight to the United States and other Western countries.”
The truth is that the jury is out. There is no
shortage of evidence that China and Russia are joining forces in
multiple theatres across the globe as well as in multilateral
organizations like the UN and in Russian and Chinese efforts to drive
wedges among Western allies and undermine public confidence in democratic institutions.
The question is how disruptive Chinese-Russian
rivalry in Central Asia and mounting Russian public unease with Chinese
advances will be and whether that could alter US perceptions of Russia
as an enemy rather than an ally.
The odds may well be that China and Russia will
prove to be long-term US rivals. However, it may just as well be that
their alliance will prove to be more tactical than strategic, with the
China-Russia relationship resembling US-Chinese ties: cooperation in an
environment of divergence rather than convergence.
Said strategist Robert D. Kaplan: The “future has arrived, and it is nothing less than a new cold war.”
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/future-china-russia-alliance/
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