Russia and China Have Grown Close. Has the West Realized It?

Moscow and Beijing are closer than Moscow and Europe.

Putin and Xi meeting in March 2023. (Creative Commons 4.0/www.kremlin.ru/)

International travel often is a window into geopolitics. In 2007, as I was finishing a semester studying abroad in Moscow, I thought about traveling to Beijing. There were few flights; the fastest train trip would have taken six days. To buy the tickets, I would have had to wait in line at the train station and pay in cash. Instead, I took a flight from Moscow to Frankfurt and visited Central Europe. However, times have changed. In 2024, at least five airlines fly nonstop from Moscow to Beijing. Flying from Russia to Europe requires a layover in Turkey or Serbia, adding hours of travel time. Airline tickets to Russia cannot be purchased on travel websites like Kayak or Expedia because of Western sanctions. 

Moscow and Beijing are much further away from each other geographically than Moscow and Europe are. However, geopolitically, Russia and China have become much closer since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- days prior, the two countries announced a "no limits" partnership. 

After the end of the Cold War, many in the West hoped that Russia and China would join the liberal international order; instead, they have teamed up against it. They challenge the Western club of democracies -- possibly itself nearing a fatal blow with the U.S. election of Donald Trump -- by having rulers for life. Russia challenged the post-World War II norm that borders shouldn't be changed by force by launching a war in Ukraine; China may follow by invading a sovereign Taiwan. Unlike Stalin and Mao, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping embrace capitalism. However, the state remains paramount: Putin recently installed an economist to run the defense ministry, while in China, state-owned banks dominate and its currency is not freely convertible. 

Late last week, Putin traveled to Beijing in his first foreign trip in his new six-year term. He met with Xi for a highly choreographed summit. There was little in the way of substance to come out of the event: China and Russia are both autocracies that don't need to announce to their publics exactly what they are doing; the pomp goes a long way on state television. The joint statement was sweeping; they pledged a "new era of cooperation." According to China expert Jacob Mardell, "new era" was high praise coming from Xi: he wrote on LinkedIn that the phrase "is used everywhere to denote a fundamental historical shift under Xi Jinping’s leadership" that "align[s] with China's vision, i.e., a post-US world."

The geopolitical shifts are seen in how close their economies have become. One of the most visible signs of Chinese exports in Russia is the explosion in cars as European and Japanese imports stopped; according to the Russian business publication The Bell, Chinese car imports grew a whopping 594% from 2022 to 2023 for a total of 11.7 billion dollars. Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia and Iraq in 2023 to become China's largest importer of crude oil, which it is able to buy at a steep discount due to a Western price cap. These are welcome developments for China's economy, which has struggled due to the zero-COVID lockdown and a real estate collapse. (The Biden Administration has also imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and other imports.)