Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China, February 4, 2022. Sputnik/Aleksey Druzhinin/Kremlin via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS: THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.
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LONDON/BEIJING, September 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 with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, just a month before consolidating it. place 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 about his grip on power in China and how dangerous the situation has become global
Amid Russia’s standoff with the West over Ukraine, the Taiwan crisis and a stuttering global economy, Xi is due to pay a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday.
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China’s president will then meet Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kremlin said.
Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters last week that the Russian president was expected to meet Xi at the summit. The Kremlin declined to give details about their talks. China has not yet confirmed Xi’s travel plans.
The meeting will give Xi a chance to underline his influence while Putin can demonstrate 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.
“From my point of view, this is about Xi: He wants to show the confidence he has domestically and be seen as the international leader of nations opposed to Western hegemony,” said George Magnus, author of “Red Flags “, a book on Xi’s Challenges.
“Privately, I imagine Xi will be very concerned about how Putin’s war is going, and indeed whether Putin or Russia are at play at some point in the near future because China still needs 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 intriguing geopolitical developments in recent years, and the West is watching anxiously.
Once the main partner of the global communist hierarchy, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is now considered a junior partner in a resurgent communist China that is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in the next decade.
While historical contradictions abound in the partnership, 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 ties. Trade soared 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 shows explicit support and accelerates the formation of a stronger China-Russia alignment,” Alexander said Korolev, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at UNSW. Sydney.
“Beijing is reluctant to distance itself from Moscow even as it faces serious reputational costs and the risks of becoming a target of secondary economic sanctions.”
XI SUPREME
Xi is expected to break with precedent at a Communist Party congress starting on October 16 and secure a third five-year leadership term. Read more
Although Xi has met with Putin in person 38 times since he became China’s president in 2013, he has yet to meet with Joe Biden in person since the latter became president of the United States in 2021.
Xi last met Putin in February just weeks before the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine, which has left tens of thousands of people dead and wreaked havoc on the global economy.
At that meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin declared a “boundless” partnership, supporting each other in the confrontations with Ukraine and Taiwan with promises of greater cooperation against the West.
China has refrained from condemning Russia’s operation against Ukraine or calling it an “invasion” in line with the Kremlin’s view of the war as “a special military operation”.
“The bigger message really isn’t that Xi supports Putin, because it’s pretty clear that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental Studies and London Africans.
“The biggest sign is that he, Xi Jinping, is leaving China for the first time since the pandemic for the party congress. If there were conspiracies against him, this is when the conspiracies would happen. And he is clearly confident that the conspiracies they won’t be done 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 Communist Party Congress starting on October 16. It last left China in January 2020, before the world went into lockdown due to COVID. Read more
HEAD OF THE KREMLIN
After the West imposed the toughest sanctions in modern history on Moscow over the Ukraine war, Putin says Russia is turning to Asia after centuries of looking to the West as the crucible of economic growth, the technology and war. Read more
Casting the West as a declining coalition, dominated by the United States, that seeks to chain – or even destroy – Russia, Putin’s worldview coincides with that of Xi, who presents China as an alternative to the order led by United States after World War II.
Putin aide Ushakov said the Xi-Putin meeting would be “very important.” He gave no further details.
While Europe tries to move away from Russian energy imports, Putin will try to increase 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 for years been studying the possibility of a major new pipeline, Power of Siberia 2, traveling through Mongolia carrying Russian gas to China.
It will transport 50 billion cubic meters of gas a year, about a third of what Russia usually 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, must admit Iran, one of Moscow’s key allies in the Middle East.
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Written by Guy Faulconbridge; Additional reporting by Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty and Yew Lun Tian and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Alexander Smith
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