Abstract
In July 2017, Russian President Putin conferred Russia’s highest award to Chinese President Xi Jinping, paying fulsome tribute to his contribution to bilateral friendship. A year later, the Chinese President returned the compliment, conferring a newly instituted Chinese award on President Putin and declaring the Russian President as his ‘best, most intimate friend’.
In September 2018, the two countries demonstrated that their bilateral partnership went well beyond the mutual admiration of their two leaders. They conducted their largest-ever joint military exercise, Vostok-2018—a ‘war games’ exercise—with naval deployments in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans and land deployments extending from the Arctic coast to the Chinese border. President Putin’s spokesman called it the interaction of two allies.
In China, Russia, and Twenty-First Century Global Geopolitics, the authors analyse the dynamics of the strategic partnership, which should have been improbable in the background of their strategic rivalry, but is quite obvious in the context of the current global geopolitics.
Much of what is today the Russian Far East was Chinese territory until the mid-nineteenth century. While China was bogged down in domestic problems and in a war with Britain and France, Russia encroached into this territory. This occupation was formalised by treaties, which a weak China accepted, and which gave Russia a long Pacific coastline right down to Vladivostok. China obviously considered them unequal treaties and sought the return of these territories. The two countries had bitter border conflicts in the 1960s. After the Cold War, they settled for an agreement, more or less retaining the status quo, paving the way for a close partnership.
Russia’s strengths in energy resources, raw materials and military technologies matched the growing Chinese demand for these products. Hence, bilateral trade and defence cooperation expanded rapidly in the 2000s. But memories of the historical rivalry restrained Russia from transferring cutting-edge military technologies to China. Apprehensions about Chinese reverse engineering reinforced this caution. Russia also exercised the greatest care about Chinese economic presence in the Russian Far East, particularly in the energy sector.
The total breakdown in relations between Russia and the West in 2014 dramatically altered the circumstances. As the USA and its allies sought to isolate Russia internationally and imposed an escalating economic sanctions regime, China’s political support, especially in the UN, assumed critical importance. Russia needed alternative markets for its energy exports, as an insurance against excessive dependence on European purchases. This need for China broke down the barriers to closer defence and energy cooperation. China has now contracted to buy the latest weapons platforms, such as the Su-35 fighter aircraft and the S-400 air defence system. The two countries have announced cooperation in co-development and production of other weapons platforms. Energy projects include Chinese investment in Arctic oil and LNG projects. They have conducted joint military exercises in the South China, Black and Baltic Seas, to signal mutual support in their respective backyards.
The authors identify the major convergences driving the China–Russia partnership. Mutual security is an important one: They are keen to maintain peace along their 4,000 km border and to protect their regimes against Western efforts to undermine them, in the garb of promoting democracy. Their security structures cooperate closely on cybersecurity and measures to monitor and manipulate social media. They want to create a multipolar world order, countering US hegemony. They believe that the rules-based order advocated by the West contains injustices difficult to remedy. They find common cause in seeking a greater role in the global economic and financial architecture.
At the same time, there are factors that might dim the intensity of the Russia–China embrace. One is the persistent apprehension in Russia that China could reopen the territorial settlement. There are bases for this apprehension. A senior figure in the Russian defence establishment told this writer that when he visited his Chinese counterpart, he found a large map on the office wall, depicting the Russia–China border as in the early nineteenth century. The Russian media periodically reports large influxes of Chinese farmers or traders into the vast, virtually unpopulated Far East region. A second issue is the increasing power differential, and the reluctance of Russia to be the junior partner. For example, Russia considers Central Asia its sphere of influence. It has had to surrender economic influence over this region to China, but still considers itself the dominant political force and net security provider. Chinese advances in Central Asia may be undermining this assumption. A third is the use of nationalism to unify the country: It is possible that Russian and Chinese nationalism could be directed against each other (as happened in the last century). Further, relations with the West are important to both countries. The economic engagement of each with Europe and the USA is far more significant than their bilateral economic relations. Also, self-image as a great power drives the aspiration of each to deal with the USA and Europe on an equal footing. Hence, while they see their bilateral relations as balancing the USA, each worries that the improvement of relations of the other with the USA may diminish its importance to the USA.
This wariness is manifested in both Russian and Chinese behaviour. China has opposed the Western isolation of Russia and the economic sanctions, but has stopped short of endorsing the Russian annexation of Crimea. As Russia–Ukraine relations deteriorated, China strengthened its defence cooperation with Ukraine. Chinese companies have been hesitant to invest in Russian sanctioned entities or sectors. For its part, Russia supported China’s grounds for rejecting the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration on its territorial claims in the South China Sea, but adopted a position of neutrality on the Chinese claims themselves. It has sustained relations with its traditional partners, who are China’s strategic rivals. Its defence cooperation with India includes high-technology weapons systems, co-development and transfers of technologies. Its partnership with Vietnam includes sale of sophisticated weaponry, a Free Trade Agreement (with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union), joint exploration for energy in the South China Sea and plans to reopen a Russian naval base in Cam Ranh Bay. President Putin has spearheaded the effort to resuscitate Russia–Japan relations, by finding a resolution to their vexed Kurile Islands dispute that dates back to the Second World War. He has invited Indian, Japanese and Korean investment in the Russian energy sector and the Far East to dilute the Chinese presence.
One of the authors of the book under review has expertise on China and Chinese foreign policy, and the other specialises in Russian security and foreign policy. These two strands are evident throughout the book, sometimes giving the impression of separately written country perspectives spliced together, resulting in some repetitions and occasional forays into analyses not directly relevant to the theme of the book.
The authors have both been on the faculty of the USA Air Force Academy. Their outlook on Russia and China reflects some of the perspectives of the armed forces community in the USA. They state, for example, that ‘while China has asserted its maritime interests, it is relatively cautious in its foreign policy … Russia has been more willing to violate traditional rules … and defy US preferences ….’ (p. 2).
An influential segment of the USA strategic community has consistently projected Russia as the greater threat to USA security and geopolitical interests, because of its nuclear weapons arsenal and its perceived aggression. This thesis validates the raison d’etre of NATO, sustains arms sales to Europe and keeps the transatlantic alliance together. It underplays (as the authors do) the Russian argument that many of its aggressive acts (Georgia, Crimea) have been provoked by the refusal of the West to recognise Russia’s core security concerns and to treat Russia as an equal negotiating partner. As the USA economic interdependence with China has grown significantly in the last decade or so, Chinese actions draw less ferocious criticism. There is also the obvious strategic reality that the South China Sea is not the Black Sea, and Southeast Asia is not Europe. Hence China’s unilateral enforcement of its territorial claims, converting almost an entire sea into its territorial waters; imposing economic sanctions on Japan, Korea and Mongolia for actions that it deems to be contrary to its national interests; and the exploitative template of its Belt and Road Initiative are all summarised as China’s assertion of its maritime interests.
With defence cooperation of alliance proportions, combined with ambiguities in the political relationship and an underwhelming economic engagement, the strength and durability of the China–Russia ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’, as it is described by the two countries, has been the subject of vigorous debate among scholars. Some see this axis as a threat to the current global order, if the current unremitting Western hostility to Russia and China continues. A significant body of strategic opinion in the USA rejects this prognosis, dismissing the relationship as little more than an axis of convenience.
Bolt and Cross have taken a position somewhere between these extremes. They assert that the USA has neglected the significance of the Russia–China partnership, which can play a key role in shaping the international order. They draw attention to Henry Kissinger’s 1970s’ concept of the strategic triangle, using relations with China to counter the Soviet influence. They argue that the course of China–Russia relations in the contemporary geopolitical scenario makes it unrealistic to expect that the USA can disrupt this partnership by moving closer to one or the other countries or seeking to drive a wedge between them. They recommend balancing cooperation and competition with each country, in a way as to serve US interests, as well as to accommodate legitimate security and economic interests of each. This is basically trying to square a circle, and not necessarily an approach that an Indian strategist would advocate, but it is still better than the current scenario, where the two erstwhile rivals are being driven into a tightening embrace by the unremitting hostility of the West.