THERE IS something very familiar about the growing closeness between China and Russia. The world’s most populous nation and the world’s biggest country have had diplomatic relations for six decades and Soviet Russia was the first to recognise the fledgling Communist state in 1949. This was no surprise given that Soviet agents had helped to bankroll Mao Zedong’s revolutionaries over the years.
This closeness was underlined by the chummy dialogue and easy dealings during last week’s visit by the Russians to China during which the two countries pledged to work together to combat the global economic crisis and to increase co-operation on financial issues. “Russia is one of the top items on China’s diplomatic agenda, and we pay much attention to relations with Russia,” President Hu Jintao told Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after a meeting in Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. Despite the high diplomatic language, however, the links between China and Russia are still underlined by cash in the shape of $3.5 billion in deals and a framework for the export of a huge quantity of Russian natural gas to China.
There is also a slight sense of deja vu in the way China and Russia act in concert to oppose efforts to sanction some of the world’s more difficult countries, those George W Bush liked to called rogue nations. China, Russia and countries such as Venezuela, and even Brazil, see this primarily as a useful way of combating the influence of the United States.
Familiar as the cosy Sino-Russian friendship appears, it was not always thus. There have been lingering border disputes over the years between what were the world’s two great Communist economies, including a war in 1969. When chairman Mao Zedong visited Russian leader Josef Stalin in December 1949, he was kept in a dacha outside the city for two months and many feared he was under house arrest. In the 1950s, Soviet Russia’s post-Stalin move away from the cult of personality clashed with China’s efforts to build just that around Mao, who was trying to push through the disastrous agricultural experiment known as the Great Leap Forward. This culminated in 1958 with Mao greeting Nikita Khrushchev wearing his swimming togs, asking the Soviet leader to join him for a dip even though he knew Khrushchev couldn’t swim.
China is a famous abstainer on the United Nations Security Council and will take the side of the smaller nation in pretty much every stand-off between Washington and whatever state happens to fall within its cross-hairs, be it North Korea or Iran. Moscow shares some of these characteristics.
But at what point does Beijing realise that it is now so rich, so powerful and increasingly so influential that it no longer needs to act aggrieved when the foreign press criticises its human rights record in front of the premier? Or feel that it must support Iran when it claims to be a victim of bullying by Washington? A new China has been born on the international stage, with all the fresh responsibilities that brings.