Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has been visiting China since Monday. Officially he is there to participate in the commemoration of the Year of Russia in China. He has already met with his counterpart Wu Yi and with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
Medvedev is no ordinary bureaucrat. He is officially third in command of the Russian Federation; he is the chairman of Russian state energy giant Gazprom; and he is President Vladimir Putin’s protege, and likely his chosen successor. Russians have become used to Medvedev’s omnipresence in the state media as Putin works to develop his loyal subordinate’s ability to follow in his footsteps.
Yet Medvedev’s lengthy China visit has been extraordinarily low-key, with barely a wisp of mention in the Russian press. Across the border there is a bit more news, but the language of the Chinese state media is sedate and bland, using the same sort of phraseology it would normally reserve for visiting Paraguayan officials — not the likely next president of Russia.
It is unusual for the two Eurasian giants to have so little to say about each other, but these two have a natural tension built into their relationship. Chinese-Russian relations are hardly hostile, but neither do they have a lot of obvious room for movement. An alliance against the United States might be attractive in theory, but in practice it is a complicated concept; and in any case, Beijing and Moscow would sell each other out in a heartbeat if it meant they could have a more constructive relationship with Washington.
Demographically, the two are fundamentally disconnected. Russia’s population — and ultimately its future — is concentrated, for better or worse, in its western reaches; less than 10 percent of its people live east of the Urals. China, in contrast, is focused on the Asian rim, an area where Russia will never have more than a few isolated outposts.
Economically, there is always talk of developing the infrastructure to export Russian resources to China. But if there were major roads linking China to Russia’s Siberian resources, it would be awfully tempting for China to roll some tanks up those roads and take back the far eastern provinces that, as Beijing sees things, czarist Russia stole from Imperial China in the 1800s. This, more than anything else, is why every substantive Chinese effort to jump into the Russian mainland energy industry has been rudely rebuffed and why economic relations between the two amount to little more than ongoing arms sales.
All of this does not mean that a Beijing-Moscow axis will never develop, just that for such a relationship to overcome such entrenched obstacles, the pressure for cooperation would need to be massive.
And right now, it is not. In fact the two states have, for now at least, allowed their relations not so much to cool as to stagnate. Medvedev, the all-but-anointed next president of Russia, is only in town to go through the motions.
This is not a sustainable strategy in the long run, but for now it works just fine. Neither state has any interest in taking actions that might trigger a crisis with the other, and neither feels particularly cornered by the United States at the moment. For the past year each has been obsessed with a major obstacle, only to see it recently taken care of quite tidily.
For Russia, the problem was status of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Moscow viewed the rise of pro-Western forces in Kiev as a dagger pointed at its heart. Ukraine is Russia’s cultural heartland, strategic buffer, breadbasket, transportation link to Europe, and primary access to the sea. Without a pro-Russian — or at least neutral — government in Kiev, it becomes very difficult to imagine how the Russian state can survive in the long term.
Then three weeks ago, Viktor Yanukovich — Russia’s horse in the rigged election that led to the Orange Revolution in the first place — became prime minister. Pro-Western forces may not have been completely ejected from Kiev, but at least now pro-Russian players are back in the corridors of power. The Kremlin is breathing a sigh somewhere between relief and giddiness.
In China it is all about finance. The Chinese system is predicated on the state’s ability to funnel loans at heavily subsidized rates to state firms in order to maximize throughput, market share and employment — and to hell with profitability. The result is a bad loan ratio upward of 50 percent of gross domestic product. This is the sort of thing that tends to presage particularly nasty economic collapses. The only way the system can continue to be propped up is if the state retains ironclad control over all deposits, so that it always has an ample supply of cash to loan out at low interest.
China feared, with much justification, that the entrance of foreign banks into the country in December 2006 — as mandated by Beijing’s World Trade Organization agreements — would lead Chinese depositors to send their money to interest-paying private foreign banks instead of noninterest-paying Chinese state banks, thus drying up the gravy train. Chinese officials have spent much of 2006 reshaping the sector to circumscribe the ability of foreign banks to set up independent branches, to limit depositors’ rights to put their money in nonstate-managed accounts, and to lasso those foreign banks into partnerships with the state. It has — broadly at least — worked.
And perhaps even more important, the cause of much Chinese and Russian grief — the United States — has its attention focused firmly elsewhere: Iraq and Iran to be specific.
Taken together, these factors give both Beijing and Moscow more maneuvering room than they have known in years, and rather than seeking out familiar friction points in their relations with each other, they are working independently on issues ranging from energy politics with Europe to North Korean missiles.
Such a friendly separation will not last forever, but for now the two major powers simply are not under much stress — and so they do not have much of a need for each other.
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