China has effectively joined the Western sanctions against Russia: trade with its “eastern neighbor” fell by 30% in 2015, and the Chinese are taking advantage of the crisis to jack up prices.
That is the full outcome of Russia’s much-touted “pivot to the East,” which state television has been gushing about for the past two years.
Any reasonable person could see from the start that nothing would come of it: if developing relations with China were really so profitable, those ties would have grown naturally, without any government declarations. Now, two years after Putin’s “breakthrough” trip to China—as state media called it—it has become impossible to deny. A long and detailed article in Kommersant-Vlast makes exactly that point, following Putin’s trip to China.
It never got beyond caricature, and the article contains an excellent quote explaining why it could not have gone any further:
This is the key point the Kremlin does not want to understand. No India, Brazil, Argentina, or Korea is going to “join us in friendship against the West,” because they are the “West.” China too, strange as that may sound. In economic terms, of course, they want to be the West. That is what they look to, work with, and make money with; they send hundreds of thousands of students there every year. What “war with the West” are they supposed to fight, and for what?
The West is synonymous with “making money.” Russia’s offer sounds like: “Stop making money—let’s lose it together instead.”
Anti-Americanism as part of political rhetoric? Sure—there is no need to go to China for that. In Britain and France, up to 20% of voters want their governments to stand up to the “global hegemon.” But it is naive to think that the anti-Americanism of Le Pen’s supporters amounts to some kind of “struggle against the West”; if anything, it is a parochial, pro-Western isolationism.
Putin’s anti-Western campaign will leave Russia with exactly two allies: Venezuela and Zimbabwe. China will not be one of them—they have not lost their minds.