As much as Putin may dream of the creation of a Greater Russia and, in time, more, it’s become increasingly evident that being cold-shouldered by the West is transforming his country into the junior half of the partnership it has with China.
In trade, the two nations have a seeming synergy. Russia supplies China with important raw materials and energy, while Russia needs Chinese investment and high-tech products.
That fact, although hardly surprising, says something about the nature of the relationship between the two, with China buying what Russia, so to speak, digs out of the ground, while it supplies Russia with goods that are far higher up the value chain.
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In 2013, China accounted for 11 percent of Russia’s trade. In 2021, the figure was 18 percent, while Russia represented a puny 2 percent share of China’s trade. This imbalance is even more striking when considering that 70 percent of Russia’s exports to China are energy related.
The war in Ukraine has accelerated these inequalities in their economic relationship and confirmed Russia’s subservience to Beijing. China has refused to turn its back on Moscow, but it hasn’t refrained from cashing in on its ally’s plight either. For example, after being left with a near-monopoly following the mass exodus of Western manufacturers, Chinese car makers such as Haval have jacked up their prices by 50 percent, while Russia is selling its oil to China at a 35 percent discount.
As the world has learned, Putin sees himself as something of a historian. As historians go, he is not the best, but one of these days he should spend some time looking into Chinese views on the “unequal treaties,” a series of 19th century treaties that China was (essentially) forced to sign with stronger powers, conceding this or conceding that.
Many of those treaties, such as that ceding the island of Hong Kong to Britain, have been transformed into irrelevance over the years, even if, in China, their memory still stings. But some of them have left a legacy that still endures, most notably in the delineation of the current Russo-Chinese border. This leaves the large swaths of formerly Chinese territory (including today’s Vladivostok) that had been acquired by the czars under an unequal treaty or two in Russia. That border has been ratified by the current regime in Beijing, and, so long as Russia holds together, there is no likelihood that China would try to change it. Even so, memories of those lost lands endure and will probably play some part in inducing China to make Russia an ever more, well, “unequal” partner.