ORF：Russia-China Relations: Perspectives from India, Russia and China

Source：Observer Research Foundation (ORF)

http://www.orfonline.org/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/report/ReportDetail.html?cmaid=46634&mmacmaid=46635

Russia-China Relations: Perspectives from India, Russia and China

11 January 2013

Observer Research Foundation organised an international conference on ’Russia-China Relations: Perspectives from India, Russia and China’ on 14 December as part of its ongoing study on Russia-China relations. The conference brought together experts on the subject from China, Russia and India.

In his presentation titled ’Sino-Russian Relations and the Emerging New Regional Order in Asia-Pacific, Dr Yang Cheng, Associate Professor, East China Normal University, Shanghai argued that both China and Russia should have dual roles in the Asia Pacific region: as defenders of Asia-Pacific regional security and as promoters and service providers for Asia-Pacific regional cooperation. The Asia-Pacific region is an area where both countries share extensive common interests and concerns. Therefore, the Sino-Russian partnership is important for promoting peace, security and development of the region. So China and Russia should share responsibilities for regional peace, stability and development.China welcomes more active Russian participation in Asia Pacific affairs and believes that this will contribute to the region’s stability. While Russia’s current role in the Asia Pacific region is somewhat limited, its participation in the Asia-Pacific affairs will enhance Russia’s great power status. So Russia needs to promote its economic integration with the region. As evidence of Russia shifting its diplomatic energy towards the East, he quoted Russia hosting the APEC summit at Vladivostok and its socio-economic development strategies for the Far East and Eastern Siberia. The barrier to more active Russian participation in Asian affairs, in his opinion, is that the Russian elites and general public have not accepted psychologically that Russia is both a European country and an Asia-Pacific country. Dr Cheng suggested that inter-regional cooperation between Northeast China, Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia will be a key indicator in determining how strong Sino-Russian strategic relations are. Dr Cheng concluded his paper by outlining several ways in which Russia-China cooperation in the Asia-Pacific can be enhanced.

In his presentation on ’Russia-China Strategic Relations’, Prof. Yuri Dubinin from the International Relations and Foreign Policy Department, MGIMO, Moscow, examined the three important dimensions of Sino-Russian relations, bilateral, regional and global, to bring out the scope and scale of cooperation between Russia and China. He said that at the bilateral level, the transformation in relations has been very impressive, both at the strategic and economic levels. At the regional level, participation in fora like the RIC, APEC, ARF and EAS expands the scope of the Russia-China partnership both geographically and substantially. At the global level, China and Russia share similar views on several issues of international importance. According to him, these common approaches started to develop in the mid-1990s and were then incorporated in two joint communiqués signed by President Boris Yeltsin and Chairman Jiang Zemin in 1996 and 1997 which pledged that the two nations would enter into a strategic partnership in the 21st century and would also facilitate the emerging multipolarity of the global international structure. He concluded that Sino-Russian relations in every sense have the characteristics of a strategic partnership and can promote cooperation, security and stability.

Uma Purushothaman, Associate Fellow, ORF made a presentation on ’Sino-Russian Relations: An Indian Perspective’. Her presentation focussed on various aspects of the Sino-Russian relationship, including their strategic relations, relations at multilateral fora, economic relations, energy cooperation, defence relations and their relations in the Russian Far East. She suggested that there are many areas of divergence in each one of these aspects and therefore the partnership cannot be called a truly strategic partnership.

Prof. Gao Fei from the China Foreign Affairs University, Beijing presented a paper on ’Russia-China Economic Relations’ at the conference. He pointed out that there is discrepancy in trade figures between Chinese data and Russian data. He said that while the GDP and per capita GDP of China has increased dramatically since 1992, Russia’s GDP and per capita GDP has remained more or less stable. The proportion of armaments in bilateral trade has come down since 1992. Prof. Fei also produced data to show that the number of Chinese labourers in Russia has decreased in the last few years. He suggested that one reason for this is that China pays much higher wages than Russia does to labourers and therefore they have less economic incentive to work in Russia.

Natalia Ryzhova, Director, Amur Laboratory for Economic and Social Studies, Economic Research Institute of the Far Eastern Branch, Russian Academy of Science made the final presentation of the day on ’Why the Russian and Chinese Peripheral Regions do not Cooperate’. She drew attention to the fact that while Russia and China have one of the longest borders in the world, trade between them is modest: while only 5% of Russia’s exports comes to China, only 2% China’s exports goes to Russia. Though China and Russia have signed intergovernmental agreements on cooperation and mutual development of the remote and borderline regions in the Russian Far East and Chinese North-East, these have not yielded any substantial results. Most of the economic exchanges between the borders is realized through informal and extralegal channels. Ryzhova argued that the informality in border regions has increased due to economic and political centralization and redistribution.

The presentations were followed by discussions among the participants. During the discussions, some differences emerged among the Chinese and Russian participants over several strategic issues. The conference was chaired by Mr. Nandan Unnikrishnan, Vice President and Senior Fellow, ORF and attended by former diplomats, academicians, media persons and ORF faculty.

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