By Guy Faulconbridge and Yew Lun Tian
LONDON/BEIJING (Reuters) – Xi Jinping will leave China for the first time in more than two years to travel this week to Central Asia, where he will meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin, just a month before he consolidates his position as China’s top hard leader since Mao Zedong.
The trip, Xi’s first since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows how confident he is about his control of the force in China and how dangerous the global situation has become.
Amid Russia’s confrontation with the West over Ukraine, the Taiwan crisis and a sluggish global economy, Xi is scheduled to pay a state to Kazakhstan on Wednesday.
The Chinese president will then meet Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the ancient city of Samarkand on the Silk Road in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kremlin.
Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters last week that the Russian president would meet Xi at the summit. The Kremlin declined to give the main points of their talks. China has yet to verify Xi’s plans.
The assembly will give Xi a chance to highlight his influence, while Putin can demonstrate Russia’s tilt toward Asia; any of the leaders can show their opposition to the United States just as the West seeks to punish Russia for the war in Ukraine.
“In my opinion, everything revolves around Xi: he needs to show how self-confident he is locally and be noticed as the foreign leader of nations that oppose Western hegemony,” said George Magnus of “Red Flags,” an e-book on Xi’s challenges. .
“Privately, I think Xi will be very concerned about how Putin’s war is going and even whether Putin or Russia are at stake at some point in the near future, because China still wants anti-Western leadership in Moscow. “
Russia suffered its worst defeat of the war last week, abandoning its stronghold in northeastern Ukraine.
Deepening the “unlimited” partnership between China’s emerging superpower and Russia’s natural resource titan is one of the most intriguing geopolitical advances of recent years, and one that the West is watching anxiously.
Once one of the leading wives in the communist hierarchy, Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is now considered a junior wife in a resurgent communist China that is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy over the next decade.
While long-standing contradictions abound in the partnership, there is no indication that Xi is willing to abandon his own for Putin in Russia’s maximum serious confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War.
Instead, the two 69-year-old leaders are deepening their ties. Trade soared through a third between Russia and China in the first 7 months of 2022.
The scale in “shows that China is willing not only to continue” business as usual “with Russia, but also to show and push for the formation of a more potent China-Russia alignment,” said Alexander Korolev, a senior lecturer in politics and foreign relations at UNSW. Sydney.
“Beijing is reluctant to distance itself from Moscow, even in the face of serious reputational prices and the dangers of the target of secondary economic sanctions. “
XI SUPREME
Xi is expected to break the precedent at a Communist Party congress that begins oct. 1. 16 and get a third five-year term in leadership.
While Xi has met with Putin on the user 38 times since he was china’s president in 2013, he has yet to meet Joe Biden on the user since the last US president in 2021.
Xi last met with Putin in February, just weeks before the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine, which has killed tens of thousands of people and wreaked havoc on the global economy.
At the opening meeting of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin declared a “limitless” partnership, relying on clashes with Ukraine and Taiwan with the promise of additional collaboration vis-à-vis the West.
China has refrained from condemning Russia’s operation in Ukraine or calling it an “invasion,” in line with the Kremlin calling the war a “special army operation. “
“The ultimate vital message is not that Xi supports Putin, because it is quite transparent that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
“The biggest sign is that he, Xi Jinping, is leaving China for the first time since the pandemic in the run-up to the party congress. If there were plots that opposed him, then the plots would take a stand. And he is obviously convinced that the plots will not take a position because he is out of the country.
Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary, is poised to win a historic third term as leader of the 20th Communist Party Congress starting Oct. 16. He last left China in January 2020, before the world was blocked by COVID.
HEAD OF THE KREMLIN
After the West imposed the toughest sanctions on Moscow in fashion history because of the war in Ukraine, Putin said Russia turned to Asia after centuries of seeing the West as the melting pot of economic growth, generation and war.
By presenting the West as a U. S. -dominated coalition. With the declining U. S. government that aims to obstruct, or even destroy, Russia, Putin’s worldview coincides with that of Xi, who presents China as an option for the U. S. -led order. After World War II.
Putin’s aide Ushakov said the Xi-Putin assembly would be “very important. “
As Europe seeks to move away from Russian energy imports, Putin will seek to stimulate energy exports to China and Asia.
Putin said last week that a main direction of fuel export to China Mongolia had been agreed. Gazprom has been reading for years the option of a new main pipeline, the Power of Siberia 2, which passes through Mongolia to bring Russian fuel to China.
It will ship 50 billion cubic meters of fuel a year, about a third of what Russia sells to Europe, or the equivalent of Nord Stream 1’s annual volumes.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states, is expected to admit Iran, one of Moscow’s main allies in the Middle East.
(Written through Guy Faulconbridge; Additional reports through Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty and Yew Lun Tian and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing; Editing through Raissa Kasolowsky and Alexander Smith)
. . .
© 2008-2022 – Shore News Media