Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up LONDON/BEIJING, Sept 11 (Reuters) – Xi Jinping will leave China for the first time in more than two years for a trip this week to Central Asia, where he will meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin, just a month before he is set to as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. The trip, Xi’s first abroad since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows how confident he is in his power in China and how dangerous the global situation has become. Amid Russia’s standoff with the West over Ukraine, the crisis over Taiwan and a stuttering global economy, Xi is due to pay a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up The Chinese president will then meet with Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kremlin. Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Usakov, told reporters last week that the Russian president is expected to meet Xi at the summit. The Kremlin declined to provide details of their talks. China has yet to confirm Xi’s travel plans. The meeting will give Xi a chance to underline his influence, while Putin can show Russia’s tilt toward Asia. Both leaders can show their opposition to the United States just as the West seeks to punish Russia for the Ukraine war. “It’s all about Xi in my view: he wants to show how confident he is at home and be seen as the international leader of nations that oppose Western hegemony,” said George Magnus, author of the book “Red Flags” The Challenges of Xi. “I personally imagine that Xi will be more concerned about how Putin’s war is going and whether Putin or Russia are playing at some point in the near future because China still needs an anti-Western leadership in Moscow.” Russia suffered its worst defeat of the war last week, abandoning its main stronghold in northeastern Ukraine. read more The deepening “borderless” partnership between rising superpower China and natural resources titan Russia is one of the most interesting geopolitical developments in recent years – and one the West is watching anxiously. Once the senior partner in the global communist hierarchy, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is now seen as the junior partner of a resurgent communist China that is projected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in the next decade. Although historical contradictions in the partnership abound, there is no sign that Xi is ready to abandon his support for Putin in Russia’s most serious confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War. Instead, the two 69-year-old leaders are deepening their ties. Trade grew by almost a third between Russia and China in the first 7 months of 2022. The visit “shows that China is willing not only to continue ‘business as usual’ with Russia, but even to show explicit support and accelerate the formation of a stronger China-Russia alignment,” said Alexander Korolev, senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW. Sydney. “Beijing is reluctant to distance itself from Moscow even as it faces severe reputational costs and the risk of being targeted by secondary economic sanctions.”
XI SUPREME
Xi is widely expected to break precedent at a Communist Party congress starting on October 16 and secure a third five-year leadership term. read more While Xi has met Putin in person 38 times since becoming China’s president in 2013, he has yet to meet Joe Biden in person since the latter became US president in 2021. Xi last met with Putin in February, just weeks before the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine, which left tens of thousands dead and wreaked havoc on the global economy. In that meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin proclaimed a “borderless” cooperation, supporting each other on the Ukraine and Taiwan standoffs with a promise to cooperate more against the West. China has refrained from condemning Russia’s operation against Ukraine or calling it an “invasion” in line with the Kremlin’s description of the war as “a special military operation”. “The bigger message is actually not that Xi supports Putin, because it was clear that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Chang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “The biggest message is that he, Xi Jinping, is leaving China for the first time since the pandemic ahead of the party congress. If conspiracies were to be made against him, then conspiracies would be made. And he’s clearly confident that the plots aren’t going to happen because he’s out of the country.” Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary, is poised to secure a historic third leadership term at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party starting on October 16. He last left China in January 2020, before the world went into lockdown for COVID. read more
KREMLIN CHIEF
After the West imposed the toughest sanctions on Moscow in modern history over the war in Ukraine, Putin says Russia is turning to Asia after centuries of seeing the West as a melting pot of economic growth, technology and war. read more Portraying the West as a declining US-dominated coalition that aims to bind – or even destroy – Russia, Putin’s worldview meshes with that of Xi, who presents China as an alternative to the US-led order of things after World War II. Putin aide Usakov said the Xi-Putin meeting would be “very important”. He did not provide further details. As Europe tries to wean itself off Russian energy imports, Putin will seek to boost energy exports to China and Asia. Putin said last week that a major gas export route to China through Mongolia had been agreed. Gazprom ( GAZP.MM ) has been studying for years the possibility of a major new natural gas pipeline – Power of Siberia 2 – traveling through Mongolia carrying Russian gas to China. It will transport 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, about a third of what Russia usually sells to Europe – or equivalent to the annual volume of Nord Stream 1. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states, is set to admit Iran, one of Moscow’s key allies in the Middle East. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Written by Guy Faulconbridge. Additional reporting by Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty and Yew Lun Tian and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing. Edited by Raissa Kasolowsky and Alexander Smith Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
