Against the backdrop of strategic cooperation and interaction between Russia and China developing by leaps and bounds, the two countries are witnessing an explosion of mutual interest in each other
Back in June 2019, during a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, one of the joint statements with Russian President Vladimir Putin on bilateral relations set out to diversify ties. And to engage other levels of government, especially parliaments and governments, as well as the business community, regions and the general public, in contacts that were very limited at the time. This happened; a striking example was the Russian-Chinese Youth Forum held in Moscow in April of this year. And this February, in another joint statement – following the Russian leader’s visit to China – it was stressed that “the friendship between Russia and China has no boundaries and there are no forbidden zones in their cooperation”.
And understandably, this wording was used by the heads of states to cover the very sensitive topic of expanding cooperation in the defense and security sphere and military-technical cooperation; both sides have long maintained that relations between Moscow and Beijing are more than a political-military alliance. For they go beyond primitive bloc thinking, touching on a much wider range of ties than can be spelled out in official documents. Let’s make it clear. On the Chinese side, for example, the SCO uses the formula of the “Shanghai spirit”, a special type of relations within the organization whose axis is formed by Moscow and Beijing, which founded it back in 2001. It is the spirit of bilateral relations that creates that favourable atmosphere for the development, as they say, of the “matte”. From economy and trade to culture and humanitarian sphere.
Against this background, especially in the context of a decisive U-turn in Russia’s foreign policy to the east, where our country is supported not only by China but also by North Korea, the inertia of previous approaches to ties with China nevertheless persists and makes itself felt in our society. There are two groups dissatisfied with the intensive development of relations. The first are pathological Westerners – less often ideological, most of them opportunistic – who do not give up hope for Russia’s return to the comprador policy of the 1990s, when the country nearly became a colony of the West.
The conclusions of studies involving leading US think tanks, such as the Houston Project, which came out of the depths of the Santa Fe Institute, remember, included a call to “cease treating the Russian Federation as a single entity, which it will cease to be in the near future” (2000-2001). The bearers of this viewpoint retransmit primitively globalist approaches to China in the spirit of a “democratic” and “human rights” ideology that asserts universalism and denies countries and peoples any national uniqueness. In particular, the Chinese concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics is criticised as “totalitarian” or, at the very least, “authoritarian” and incompatible with the “only true” Western model.
Another group of opponents of rapprochement with China, belonging to the leftist movement but occupying a frankly marginal position in it, are trying, though not too successfully, to reproduce in the public consciousness the anti-Chinese phobias of the late Soviet era. As a rule, it is the very same consistently oppositional part of the leftist movement that once participated in the “swamp” protests, along with the liberals and representatives of various anti-social groups. The most aggressive-orange part of these groups, following the Westerners, is dissatisfied with the inhibition of destructive, subversive tendencies in China, which it sees as a “clampdown on democracy”.
They are an impressive majority of followers of Trotsky and the ideas of “world revolution” and oppose the Stalinist legacy of Soviet history. It is simply amazing how their example clearly demonstrates the real opposition between Trotskyism and the ideas not only of Lenin and Stalin, but also of Mao Zedong, between whom – as the older generation can’t deny – during the Soviet-Chinese confrontation the ideological officialdom often equated. It is only now in the discourse of the left that there are articles proving the radical opposite of the theories of “permanent revolution” and “new democracy”.
Note that the former, as a number of works show, is rooted in British colonial practices, while the latter, by contrast, is a tool for the withdrawal of developing countries from colonial dependence. And it moves forward Lenin’s doctrine of the “singularity” of the Eastern experience of socialist revolutions, which is itself incompatible with Trotskyism as the most dogmatic form of left-wing, pro-Western globalism, which draws its inertia from Eurocentric approaches. It is no coincidence that the most far-sighted bourgeois scholars who combine theory with practice, such as Arnold Toynbee, the long-time head of Chatham House, characterised Soviet communism as “a Western invention turned into an anti-Western weapon, more effective than the atomic bomb”. The same could be said about the concept of socialism with Chinese specificity, grounding Marxism on the ground of national interests and therefore so successful.
When one tells the representatives of the leftist tendency that, despite all their ostensible radicalism, they reproduce in their dynamics the evolution of European leftist conciliation, expressed by the Second International, which after World War II was reformed into the Socialist International as part of the global bourgeois two-party system, they are genuinely surprised. But they are stubborn and, with few exceptions, remain in these positions. There’s no understanding in this environment of direct responsibility of Trotskyism for the transformation into the part of ideological base of neoconservatism, on the base of which, with participation of extreme liberals and Protestant fundamentalists, the concept of “global democratic revolution” (“name” of Bush junior and his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice) grew and took roots.
Another part of the opponents of Russia’s pivot to the East, including class orthodoxies, trying to prove the “bourgeois rebirth” of the CCP, even forgetting the basics of Marxism. (The author of these lines had to explain to some of them that the solution to the capitalism/socialism dilemma in Marxism is in relation to the means of production, not “the presence of billionaires”.)
What is the importance of the modern Chinese experience for Russia, and why is there no reasonable alternative to the interaction between our countries? The answer to this question, in our view, lies in the plane of both foreign and domestic policy. The external, geopolitical part of the argument for further close rapprochement with China finds its answer in international security, the basis of which is the global balance. It is not a secret that the strategic goal of the West, or more exactly, of the Anglo-Saxons heading it, as the countries of the “sea”, the island world from the turn of XIX-XX centuries is proclaimed the mastery of Eurasia land areas, which in the annals of the Western theories is considered as Heartland, the “world centre”; the hegemon that owns it is the global hegemon setting his world order.
The technology of this mastery, outlined in the concept of Rimland, or the limitrophic environment of Heartland, consists in its gradual, from the periphery to the centre, expansionist fragmentation with the inclusion of the breakaway parts in its sphere of influence and turning them into bridgeheads in opposition to the metropolis. The collapse of the USSR is the most resonant, but not the only example of such a move by the Limitrophs deep into the Heartland. Other examples include attempts to impose confrontation in peripheral areas on China by pitting them against the centre and the central government.
It is no coincidence that in recent years Anglo-Saxon strategists have consistently activated subversive forces in most of the potentially “problematic” points along China’s inner perimeter, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong (Xianggang). Washington’s Taiwan adventures are a continuation of this policy of destabilizing the periphery; if this strategy were to succeed, its authors would try to develop a geopolitical offensive and move it into the interior regions. First of all, to the most developed coastal provinces and centres – primarily Guangdong, but also Shanghai. This explains China’s unambiguous position; Beijing is well aware that no compromise is possible as far as sovereignty is concerned, and all talks about it only fuel the “perestroika” illusions and trends, appealing to the “party of agreement”.
What draws attention here? The simultaneity of Western actions against both Russia and China. Our country has already been put by these actions before the need to carry out ESR in the former USSR; it is clear to the naked eye that the systemic basis for crossing “red lines” in relation to China and the separatist regime ruling in Taiwan pursues the same goal. And the timing for this, from the American point of view, is “optimal”. On two counts. Firstly, it is calculated on the fact that the Chinese leadership is limited in its drastic actions in view of the approaching party congress. Secondly, there is a time pressure on the current US administration; the very likely loss by the Democrats of the November midterm conclusions fundamentally changes the internal configuration in the US itself, not only depriving the “lame duck” that Joe Biden will turn into of the strategic initiative, but also limiting him in conducting foreign policy. (Hence the Democrats’ speculations about “semi-fascism” by the Republicans).
There is another, most important reason. Attempts have been made repeatedly to divorce Russia and China, including proposals to Moscow against Beijing, and Beijing against Moscow. Since this has not led to any positive result for the West, the obvious course is to tie the main Eurasian capitals by involving each of them in their own crises, thus trying to inflate a kind of conflict of interest. Why is this so important to the West? Because on its own, the U.S. can still deal with both Russia and China. With military and strategic parity with Moscow, Washington is vastly superior to Russia in economic power. With China, it is the other way around: the equality of economic power and China’s superiority in the real sector are compensated by its military, especially its nuclear superiority.
And according to a number of assessments, it is speculation on the nuclear factor, which the US and its satellites have intensified both in the West and in the East, that covers both the ongoing support of the Kiev regime and attempts to undermine stability in Kazakhstan, as well as military and diplomatic manoeuvres around Taipei. Again, the idea is most likely to create such a critical mass of their own problems for Moscow and Beijing in order to divert their attention from their common objectives. Against this background, the idea is to try to persuade one side to engage in Western geopolitical games against the other. It doesn`t matter which one it`s going to be against the other.
Hence a very simple conclusion. The combined military and economic potentials of Russia and China balance the West, forming the same global balance that Washington and London dream of undermining, or better yet, irreversibly destroying. If this were to happen in reality, no appeal to international law would help. International law can only work more or less effectively in a relative equilibrium; when it is broken, power factors come into play, which, in fact, still determine the content of geopolitics. No one has cancelled the “winner-takes-all” rule.
However, there is another aspect: the Russian-Chinese rapprochement is forming a global alternative to the world order. As this awareness spreads among the elites of the Eurasian countries, especially in Muslim countries, not even fear of American power begins to evaporate, but a feeling of a projected hopelessness and inevitability of accepting Western conditions. Hence the anti-American front that grows in proportion to this perception; the example of Saudi Arabia and a number of other Gulf countries is very indicative in this sense.
If we talk about the domestic political side of Russia-China rapprochement, its importance is due to the content of the alternative project of the global future. In this sense, the growing rigidity of the joint confrontation with the West in the field of “democracy” and “human rights”, which characterizes the common position of Russia and China in the humanitarian sphere, is very important. If we briefly outline what the Russian and Chinese sides have been telling the West in recent months and years, the values and approaches that determine the state of this sphere are not universal and have a clear civilizational link.
In other words, each of the countries-civilizations, of which Russia and China (and not only) undoubtedly belong, has the right to their own interpretation. All the more so because the “values” proposed by the West are not their own, Christian values, but the embodiment of a destructive, syncretic symbiosis of ecumenical and occult principles. In its ultimate sense, these “values”, in the political field expressed by the doctrine of tolerant, “green neo-Nazism”, call for the actual division of humanity into two biological “subspecies” – “full-fledged” people and “untermenschen” people. And that is exactly what the ideologues of the “Great Reset” are driving at present, one wing of which is represented by the oligarchy on the platform of the Davos WEF and the other wing which is closely connected to the Vatican and the Jesuits behind it.
The most important thing here is not even in the fact of its own interpretation, but in the fact that “democratic”, “human rights”, “green” demagogy is losing its contrived “universality”. And thus they lose the role of a battering ram, which explodes opponents of the West from within, forming around them a negative public opinion, which is then used by the internal pro-Western opposition. Their own concepts of democracy and human rights, conforming to the civilizational tradition (which is largely religious), for humanitarian subjects are a peculiar equivalent of a nuclear missile shield protecting these societies from external expansion, before which they appear defenceless in the absence of such concepts.
Bearing in mind the aforementioned presence in Russia of a certain inertia of pro-Western idolatry, the strengthening of an alliance with China, engaged in building a society of social justice, has a beneficial effect on our internal development already by the logic of the proverb “You will be bought by whom you will be bought by”. This is yet another important argument for those concerned about Russia’s future, which is exactly what the self-styled “Chinaphobes” are fighting against inside the country. At the same time, they sometimes defend not so much Western “values” that they took sides with but rather their quite certain class and vested interests.
How strong is the Russian-Chinese alliance? Are there any signs by which this can be judged? There certainly are. And apart from the dynamics of military-technical cooperation and trade and economic ties, the very fact of the deepening inner-Western confrontation testifies to this. It is common knowledge that it has always existed between continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxons. But the emergence of some signs of contradictions between Washington and London, quintessentially reflected in the resignation of Boris Johnson and the attempts by his potential successors to inflate the nuclear issue in the struggle for power, are new, if you will, precedents.
One can only speculate on the extent to which these trends may acquire, say early next year, following power shifts in both Anglo-Saxon capitals. Never and nowhere does a rift arise in an empty space, much less in the face of a successful offensive. An “overreach” always has many fathers, it is a “zrada” that is orphaned. And the struggle within the Anglo-Saxon world is over who exactly and on whom to label the culprit of this very “zrada”. That is how, under the influence of Hitler’s failure at Moscow and the hopeless entanglement of the Japanese aggressors in China, a “black cat” ran between Berlin and Tokyo, scattering the strategies of the main partners in the fascist axis in different directions.
And all this may also indicate that a global hybrid confrontation is approaching or even already entering a decisive phase. And while for Russia and China the question in these developments is at least a question of sovereign political survival, with regard to the collective West it is a question of choosing between continuing global expansion or retreating into the area of its historical habitat. For our opponents, however, this prospect is made frighteningly difficult by the practical impossibility of survival without sucking resources from the rest of humanity. That is why the confrontation, in the course of which Moscow and Beijing will be tested time and again for bending, will grow. Well, we shall see.
Vladimir Pavlenko, REGNUM news agency
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