Meeting in Uzbekistan: Xi Jinping's first trip in two and a half years leads to Putin of all places

Created: 2022-09-08 05:18

By: Sven Hauberg

Putin and Xi in Saint Petersburg in June 2019: Even after the outbreak of the Ukraine war, China is sticking to Russia.

© Dmitri Lovetsky/dpa

Xi Jinping has not left China for two and a half years.

Now his first trip abroad takes him to Vladimir Putin of all places.

Munich/Samarkand – Since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, China's head of state and party leader Xi Jinping has only met a few foreign heads of state in person.

Even with US President Joe Biden, Xi has so far only spoken via video conference.

But the 69-year-old apparently always likes to find time for Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

They last met in Beijing in early February – shortly before the start of the Ukraine war – to take a joint stand against the West in general and NATO in particular.

In the coming week, Xi and Putin will meet again: In Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the two heads of state want to meet for talks on the sidelines of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as the Russian ambassador in Beijing, Andrei Denisov, said on Wednesday, according to the TASS news agency .

It will be a meeting with symbolic power, because Xi Jinping has not left China for around two and a half years.

The fact that his first trip abroad is now taking him to Putin of all places should agree with analysts who have been observing an ever-increasing rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow for months.

Xi will first travel to Kazakhstan next week and then be in Uzbekistan on September 15-16 for a summit of the China-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Xi last flew to Myanmar in January 2020 and then stayed in China.

There had recently been speculation that his first trip abroad could take him to Saudi Arabia.

China and Russia: Together in the "Vostok-2022" military maneuvers

China has maintained neutrality in the conflict since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time, Beijing regularly emphasizes its special friendship with Moscow.

China's top diplomats point out that Beijing maintains friendly relations with almost every country in the world and one should not read too much into individual expressions of mutual affection.

However, it can hardly be denied that the relationship between Russia and China has a very special quality.

This week, for example, Li Zhanshu, number three in the Chinese Communist Party's political hierarchy, traveled to an economic forum in Vladivostok, Russia, where Putin was also expected.

"The message is that China might not break sanctions to help Russia - but it's definitely not throwing Russia under the bus," the

quoted analyst Alexander Gabuev of the US think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"If it's neutrality, then it's definitely pro-Russian neutrality."

Military cooperation between Russia and China has been increasing for several years: last week China was a guest at Russia's large-scale military maneuvers "Vostok-2022" in the east of the country in order to "deepen practical and friendly cooperation with the armies of the participating countries", as China's Defense Ministry said.

With the maneuver, Beijing wants to demonstrate its solidarity with Moscow, but at the same time learn to better assess the capabilities of the Russian armed forces, Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, an expert on Chinese-Russian relations at Stradiņš University in Riga,

.

Economically and ideologically, China and Russia are moving closer together

The two countries are also getting closer economically.

While China's foreign trade lost significant momentum in August compared to the previous month, trade with Russia grew strongly.

Chinese exporters delivered 26.5 percent more goods to the neighboring country, over the same period China imported 59.3 percent more from Russia than in July, mostly energy.

In order to export even more gas to China in the future, Gazprom wants to push ahead with pipeline projects in the east of the country.

Designing of the Kraft Siberian 2 pipeline, which will bring gas from the deposits in Eastern Siberia to China, is about to begin.

In the future, transactions will also be processed in rubles and Chinese yuan.

According to experts, the economic cooperation between the two countries is a win-win situation for all sides: While Russia has many raw materials that China urgently needs, China has technological know-how that Russia wants to benefit from.

Above all, however, China and Russia are growing together ideologically.

Beijing has been claiming for months that NATO and above all the USA are responsible for the escalation of the Ukraine war.

At the beginning of the conflict, China also spread several false reports from Russia, for example about alleged US bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine.

To this day, Beijing has not condemned the war itself.

In return, the Kremlin is backing China's tough stance on the Taiwan conflict after Nancy Pelosi's visit to the democratically ruled island.