While NATO-serving pundits merrily scribble proposals for how to turn China and Russia against each other to benefit their geopolitical order (case in point: the German Marshall Fund’s Isaac Stone Fish silly piece in today’s Washington Post), Russian and Chinese officials hold up the growing strength of their relationship as an example for others that nations relating to each other not on the basis of power, but on mutual benefit, forms the strongest bonds.
Senior Chinese diplomat and CPC official Yang Jiechi arrived in Moscow on May 24, to co-chair the 16th round of Russian-Chinese consultations on strategic stability yesterday with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. While in Moscow, he spoke by phone with President Putin, delivering and receiving messages between President Xi Jinping and Putin, and “touching upon several pressing issues on the international agenda,” the Kremlin reported.
Yang described Russian-Chinese relations to Putin as “the perfect example of a new type of mutually beneficial international relationship,” which helps overcome global challenges, calling the “momentum” and “positive energy” of the Chinese-Russian comprehensive strategic partnership key for “global stability amid worldwide changes,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry read-out on the call emphasized, Russia’s TASS agency reports.
Chinese semi-official daily Global Times took up this theme in its editorial today, “China-Russia Ties Assure Global Strategic Balance.” The daily recommended the West stop speculating about what “tool with special effects” it can devise to split apart the two nations. The efforts of the U.S. and its allies to “suppress” both nations have brought them closer together, “and the heavier the pressure, the more steadfast the support from the other country will be.” More than this, however, is involved, the editors caution.
