China and Russia: Are there limits to ‘no limits’ friendship? by Ian Bond, 15 December 2022 China has mostly offered Russia rhetorical support in its war against Ukraine. Beijing seems uncomfortable with Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling. But China is unlikely to allow Russia to be decisively defeated. When Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Beijing in February 2022, they declared in a joint statement that “friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of co-operation”. Since then, Putin has tested this claim by launching a war of aggression against Ukraine – a country with which China previously had friendly relations. While China has been helpful to Russia in some areas, it has generally tried to appear neutral. It is in the West’s interest to keep China on the sidelines of Putin’s war; if it could be persuaded to exert some pressure on Russia to stop fighting, that would be a bonus. With these aims in mind, there are five aspects of the China-Russia relationship for Western leaders to bear in mind as they calibrate their approach to Beijing: the personal (between Xi and Putin); the diplomatic (for instance, China’s co-operation with Russia at the UN); the narrative (what Chinese media and commentators are saying about the war); the economic (China’s trade with Russia and with the West); the geostrategic (the impact of the war, and its outcome, on China’s interests and its ambitions to become the world’s pre-eminent power). The personal In two highly personalised systems, the relationship between Xi and Putin is bound to have a big impact on relations between their states. In 2013, Xi’s first foreign trip as president was to Moscow, where he told Putin “You and I are good friends”. Since then, the two men have stayed in frequent contact – probably no foreign leader has met or spoken to Putin as often as Xi in the last decade. Xi’s regular personal engagement was important to Putin in 2014 and 2015, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine’s Donbas region, when many contacts with the West were severed. CER INSIGHT: China and Russia: Are there limits to ‘no limits’ friendship? 15 December 2022
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