Prior to his high-level meetings in Beijing yesterday, Russian Premier Mikhail Mishustin attended a major business forum on May 23 in Shanghai. While Russia was originally scheduled to send 500 entrepreneurs to the forum, around 1,200 actually flew to Shanghai for the event, indicating the high level of interest. While all of the agreements have not yet been made public, a major emphasis was placed on energy and on agricultural products.
On May 12, the Russian government approved an intergovernmental agreement with China on the supply of Russian gas to the PRC via the Far East route, through which the PRC will import up to 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually .
On May 15, Gazprom announced that design and survey work on the Soyuz-Vostok gas pipeline was in its final stage. This is a transit line with a capacity of 50 billion cubic meters, which will become part of the “Power of Siberia-2” export branch from Western Siberia to China.
On May 16, the Minister of Energy of Kazakhstan announced that “the route has been preliminarily determined, [and] the conditions for the construction” of the Russia-Kazakhstan-China gas pipeline are being discussed. If all of the above projects are implemented, annual Russian gas supplies to China will exceed 100 billion cubic meters annually.
Further, trade in agricultural products increased by 40% last year, exceeding that level of growth in the first quarter of this year. According to a Kremlin notice, Mishustin actively worked out in the PRC the instruction given by President Putin at the beginning of May, on “concluding an intergovernmental agreement between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the project” for a new Russia-China land corridor for grain. It is “in order to increase grain production in the territories of the Far East, Urals and of the Siberian Federal Districts, as well as the volume of its exports to the market of the People’s Republic of China.”
Agreements were also signed on phytosanitary requirements for the supply of millet and medicinal plant materials from Russia for Chinese medicine, on deepening investment cooperation in trade in services, and on expedited patent filing.
