US president Donald Trump likes to play the leading role on the global stage, but he will be a mere spectator in the coming days as China welcomes other world leaders for events that will underscore its growing power and their ability to defy the West.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi will visit China for the first time in seven years to take part in the biggest ever summit of the expanding Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), and Russian president Vladimir Putin will stay on after those talks to attend a huge military parade with 25 other foreign leaders on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian are also on the guest list for the parade to commemorate the end of the second World War, while the only European states to be represented other than Russian ally Belarus will be Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia – which all have prickly relations with the EU and are accused of drifting towards autocracy.
Modi will want to highlight the breadth of his country’s trade and investment options just days after a doubling of US tariffs on Indian imports to 50 per cent, half of which is a levy imposed by Trump to punish New Delhi for refusing to stop buying Russian oil and arms.
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Modi and Putin will restate their determination to maintain close economic ties despite US opposition, and the Russian leader will use the SCO summit – which starts on Sunday in the northern city of Tianjin – to show the West that his country is deepening relations with much of the world despite European attempts to isolate it.
The presence of Putin, Kim and Pezeshkian – as well as Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing – will make next Wednesday’s military pageant a who’s-who of nations heavily sanctioned by the West, and emphasise their host’s claim to be the de facto leader of the “Global South” and champion of an international order that is not dominated by Washington or liberal values.
For Chinese president Xi Jinping, these events are not only a chance to showcase his country’s political and military might, but present it as an antipode to today’s America – as a stable, reliable, predictable partner, immune to the kind of policy jolts, flips and gyrations that are characteristic of the Trump White House.
The timing could not be better for Putin. It comes barely a fortnight after Trump warmly welcomed him to Alaska for a summit that appalled Kyiv and many other European capitals, ended his pariah status in the US and made a mockery of the warrant issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court over Russia’s abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children.
[ The Irish Times view on the Trump-Putin summit: a shameful day in AlaskaOpens in new window ]
In Tianjin and Beijing, Putin will be a world away from daily western denunciations of his invasion of Ukraine and threats to impose more sanctions on Russia if he continues to refuse to negotiate an end to Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
The Kremlin has described Putin’s four-day visit to China as “completely unprecedented”, apparently because of the length of his stay and the number of bilateral meetings he is expected to hold outside the summit of the SCO, which comprises 10 member states and 16 observer and “dialogue” countries.
China and Russia signed what they call a “no limits” strategic partnership just weeks before Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and when Xi visited Moscow this May, he said the giant countries should be “friends of steel”.
China’s ambassador to Russia, Zhang Hanhui, described the two countries this week as “time-tested true friends” whose ties “have risen to their highest level in history” under Xi and Putin and were now “among the most stable, mature and strategically valuable relations between major powers in the modern world”.
In China they would “once again hold an important meeting of historic significance”, he said, claiming that Beijing and Moscow were “bringing more stability and positive energy to a turbulent world through the certainty and stability of [their] strategic co-operation”.
Alexei Maslov, director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University, told Russian media that Putin’s trip to China was more than “symbolic”.
“Of course, it is a symbol ... that the Russian president is going for such a long period, but it is also, in my opinion, a very businesslike visit, because a whole range of questions will be discussed there, above all global security questions,” he said.
Russia may hope to involve China more closely in diplomacy around its war in Ukraine, knowing that it would add more delay and complexity to an already stumbling process, and confident that Beijing would not push Moscow to end an invasion that it has not condemned, even while claiming to be an impartial advocate of peace.
“Russia’s war is made possible by crucial Chinese support,” German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said during a visit to Tokyo this week.
“Eighty per cent of the dual-use goods that Russia uses come from China,” he added. “And at the same time, China is the largest buyer of Russian oil and gas.”
