Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia September 11, 2018. Mikhail Metzel/TASS Host Photo Agency/Pool via REUTERS
Leon Aron, Foreign Affairs: Are Russia and China Really Forming an Alliance?
The Evidence Is Less Than Impressive
In March of 1969, Chinese troops ambushed and killed a Soviet border patrol on an island near the Chinese-Russian border. Fighting on and near the island lasted for months and ended with hundreds of casualties. Fifty years later, the ferocity of the skirmish between Mao Zedong’s China and Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union seems to belong to a very distant past—so distant, indeed, that many foreign-policy experts are convinced that an anti-U.S. alliance between the two countries is emerging. Yet even half a century on, such an assessment stretches the evidence beyond what it can bear. On closer inspection, Chinese-Russian economic, foreign policy, and military cooperation is less than impressive. The history of relations between the two countries is fraught, and they play vastly different roles in the world economy, making a divergence in their objectives all but unavoidable. In short, reports of a Russian-Chinese alliance have been greatly exaggerated.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: China is focused on getting energy products, minerals, and military technology from Russia while selling to Russia finished goods. Russia is focused on exporting its energy resources and selling military hardware to China. As to cooperating on geopolitical issues, it is limited to individual cases lie Syria, Venezuela, etc..
