Russia and China. Anatomy of a Partnership by Aldo Ferrari & Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti

Author:Aldo Ferrari & Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti [Ferrari, Aldo & Ambrosetti, Eleonora Tafuro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Geopolitics, Political Science
ISBN: 9788867059812
Google: pHabDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 56863047
Publisher: ISPI
Published: 2019-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4. Russia and China: The Progressive Building of a Major Trading Bloc

Alessia Amighini

In the broader context of deepening Russian-Chinese political relations throughout the 1990s, mostly since the start of a “strategic partnership” in 1996, the economic links between the two countries have until very recently been regarded by most as “the weakest link”1. Due to widespread fears in Russia that closer economic relations with China might lead to dependence on what was already, in the late 1990s, expected shortly to become the more successful economy, Russian leaders were reluctant to go beyond the limited economic cooperation and trade with China that had been planned by Moscow and Beijing when the Russian Federation was established in 1991. That is why throughout the 1990s bold ambitions on both sides to reach high levels of bilateral trade were for the most part disappointed on every occasion: such trade was smaller in 1999 than in 19922.

For nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and China have significantly intensified their economic and trade relations, progressing from a “strategic partnership” to a “treaty of friendship and cooperation” signed in 2001. This has been caused by both domestic and international factors. On the domestic side, Russia has increasingly needed to build growth on stronger foundations than its energy exports to the West, which proved an unreliable economic partner when sanctions were applied over Ukraine. This led to major changes in the political priorities of the Russian government, which had until then rebuffed Chinese invitations for fear that greater economic cooperation would work to China’s benefit in an unbalanced relationship. Against a backdrop of changing geopolitical circumstances Moscow has steadily shifted its strategic focus from West to East, and in less than a decade the two countries have managed to revitalise their formerly weak and troublesome economic partnership to such an extent that they are now the key players in a recently-formed trading bloc that covers most of the Eurasian continent.

After analysing the volume and structure of the countries’ bilateral trade during the 1990s, this chapter will show how they overcame their difficulties and built stronger economic relations during the next decade and especially in its latter half, when bilateral economic ties began to grow stronger following institutional arrangements and agreements that have fostered a steady improvement in economic cooperation and regional integration. Today China and Russia are major economic partners, increasingly linked by trade and investment: in 2017 Chinese-Russian trade rose 20.8% to more than $84 billion, and China had been Russia’s biggest trade partner for eight years running3. In the first eight months of 2018, according to Chinese customs data, bilateral trade grew at an annual rate of 25.7% – well above the 9.1% growth rate of China’s foreign trade as a whole4.

The economic relations of the two countries, having been stuck in an unproductive framework during Soviet times, were eventually able to escape it as the result of a strong mutual commitment to enhancing bilateral economic cooperation. In addition, important regional

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