Are China-Russia ties cooling off?

Although most international attention during the early August Russia-Georgia crisis was on the reactions of the US and European countries, China's response also made the headlines. With China and Russia enjoying a strategic partnership, and sharing a distaste for US "hegemony", some degree of Chinese support for Russia's action might have been expected.

However at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) - China, Russia and four Central Asian Republics - at the end of August, China's position on Moscow's action in Georgia was decidedly cool. This was explained by pointing to China's consistent opposition to secessionist movements, given its various problems with Taiwan, Tibet and the northwest region of Xinjiang.

But perhaps there is another strand to China's coolness. By looking back at history and at the activities of the SCO, another reason behind China's position also lies in the long-standing nervousness over Russian intentions in Central Asia, including in its far east near China's borders.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, at around the same time as the Qing dynasty was campaigning to extend its empire westwards, in the process largely defining the boundaries of today's China, the Russian empire was expanding east. The two met in various places including around what is now the border between China's northeast and Siberia, where in 1689 they signed a landmark border treaty.

The main Qing targets at the time were the Mongolian polities to its west and north. Of course, history did not stop with the Qing. During his first trip to Moscow in late 1949, the first leader of the People's Republic, Mao Zedong, was, in the words of one historian, "forced to acquiesce in the existence north of the Xinjiang border of an independent Mongolian People's Republic, which by definition was going to remain firmly under Russian influence," a derogation from the territory controlled by Beijing at the height of Qing power.

Relations deteriorated following the Sino-Soviet split, leading to border clashes during the 1960s. It was only in July 2008 that the two countries reached complete agreement on the demarcation of their 4300km border, though nationalists on both sides challenge their governments over both historical and recent concessions over borders.

A second important fillip of history came with the collapse of the USSR. The potential problems over border management following independence of the Central Asian Republics bordering China led to the establishment in 1996 of the Shanghai Five grouping (China, Russia and the three former Soviet republics which China shares common borders, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan).

The group gained momentum and formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2001, with Uzbekistan as a sixth founding member. In spite of the principle of equality between all six members, China plays a dominant role in the organisation, whose Secretariat is based in Beijing. The SCO has focused on combating the common concerns of separatism, extremism and terrorism, with the latter given greater prominence in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.

Joint military exercises have broken new ground. China has since proposed consideration of a central Asian free-trade area. A soft agenda of opposing US hegemony is also part of the group's raison d'etre, and US nervousness about the SCO reached a peak in 2006 when Iran was invited to become an observer.

From the Chinese perspective, the SCO is indicative of a turn to multilateralism in Chinese diplomacy since the mid-1990s, as well as a focus on ensuring security and stability in its immediate periphery to support economic growth and development, though scholars disagree on the extent to which they give China the benefit of the doubt in evaluating its intentions.

There is also a view that "the long-term goal of Beijing is to turn Central Asia into China's stable 'strategic backyard", to quote one political scientist on the subject, with the suggestion that China moved to set up the SCO, following the USSR's demise, to "fill the vacuum on the Eurasian continent".

There is evidence too of Russian concerns both over the balance within the SCO and that Russia's resource-rich east is being left too close to a rising China. Part of this jockeying for strategic influence is the very practical issue of access to the region's rich energy and other natural resources, and Russia has sponsored an alternative central Asian organisation which does not include China, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation.

If one of the purposes of the SCO for Beijing is to enhance its strategic influence in central Asia, then this implicitly at least encroaches on an area that Moscow has traditionally seen as within its sphere of influence. Shortly after the Georgian incident, Russian President Medvedev said that Russia should have a privileged sphere of influence in Asia, though it is not clear exactly where, nor what the Chinese response to that statement has been.

So any signs of a change in Russian policy towards its periphery do not only have the potential to affect states on its European borders, but could apply in a similar way to its eastern periphery.

The geopolitics here are different: Nato does not impinge on Russia's eastern borders, there is no evidence that Moscow is currently concerned by a military threat from China (or Japan for that matter) in the east, and it tolerated the US's post-9/11 presence in central Asia.

China's economic interests, its soft power diplomacy, and its posited long-term eyeing up of the strategic vacuum in central Asia left by the USSR's demise may at some point in the future prompt some pushback from a Russian government which appears to be looking to grow back into its role as a major global power.

China's opposition to Russia's action in Georgia should therefore be seen against this backdrop. Future tension in Central Asia may not be limited to the part that borders Europe.

Tim Summers, a former British diplomat is a researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.