Russia and China: Building bridges

Lei Daijun can barely believe he is here. Standing in Red Square, the 74-year-old former teacher from central China gazes forlornly at the Kremlin walls, the palatial façade of the famous arcaded department store GUM, and the gingerbread-style State Historical Museum. More than half a century ago in China, as a Russian language student, Lei marvelled at these sights on the pages of his textbooks. Now he has come to Russia for the first time. With his wife, two daughters, son-in-law and two grandchildren, he is touring Moscow and St Petersburg for two weeks.

While his nine-year-old granddaughter You Qian poses for photographs, Lei listens attentively to the Russian tourists milling around him. “I cannot understand anything they are saying,” he says, disappointed. “Back then, in university, I mastered Russian. Although it was hard in the beginning, I mastered it. But now it’s all gone.”

Lei’s education, like that of millions of other Chinese of his generation, was heavily influenced by the literature, films and music of the Soviet Union, then Beijing’s closest ally. But an ideological split between the two Communist powers in the late 1950s scarred their relationship for decades to come. Now, caught in an angry stand-off with Europe and America, Russia has conspicuously turned east.

Vladimir Putin and the Chinese President Xi Jinping have met more than a dozen times since 2013, when Xi chose Russia for his first foreign trip as president. Last year it was Xi who sat at Putin’s side during Russia’s 70th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Putin has declared that Russian-Chinese relations are “on the rise and undergoing the best period in their centuries-long history”.

The experience of elderly tourists such as Lei, finally travelling to a Russia that he was taught to love as a child, reflects the historic ruptures Russia and China will have to overcome as they seek to build a friendship that goes beyond political declarations. When Mao Zedong and the Communist party came to power in China in 1949, Lei was eight. Soviet books and films were almost the only foreign cultural products available. Elderly Chinese still rave about “How the Steel Was Tempered”, the 1932 socialist realist novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky, and many know by heart the Chinese-language version of “Katyusha”, the Russian wartime song of a girl longing for her soldier boyfriend.

After graduating in 1962, Lei, fluent in Russian, worked as a language teacher in his hometown of Nanchong in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. But two years later, the government ordered all Russian language lessons to stop. Lei was assigned to teach English instead. “I didn’t know much English myself but I had to make do,” he says.

His Russian teaching career had become a casualty of high politics. In 1956, after the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly criticised the dictatorship of his predecessor Josef Stalin, relations with China’s Communist party started to fray. In 1961, Beijing denounced the Soviet Union as “revisionist”, and most ties were cut. By 1969, the tensions had boiled over into an open border war on the Ussuri river, which runs between northeast China and the easternmost sliver of Russia.

Until the death of Mao in 1976, both regimes routinely denounced each other with vicious propaganda. Although Moscow and Beijing have sought rapprochement since the 1980s, memories of this distrust have lingered.

The past still shadows relations between the countries, even as their governments push towards what appears at times to be a quasi-alliance. Putin and Xi share a desire to rein in America’s role as sole superpower by building a multipolar world — with each seeking leadership roles. On issues ranging from conflict in the Middle East to internet governance, Beijing and Moscow frequently back each other’s foreign policy initiatives.

On the Syrian conflict, for example, in which Russia is at odds with the West, it sees eye to eye with China. They both want to strengthen multilateral groupings such as the Brics (the emerging national economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a group of central and south Asian countries founded by China, and have held a number of joint military exercises.

On the economic side, Moscow has sought Chinese loans and investment to fill the gap left by EU and US sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, while Beijing has tried to exploit Russia’s financial needs to gain more access to its resources. Under a contract signed with much pomp in May 2014, Beijing agreed to buy Russian gas worth $400 billion (Dh1.5 trillion) over 30 years — a deal that Russia’s state-owned energy group Gazprom called the largest in its history.

Russia has also said it is ready to grant Chinese investors majority stakes in oil and gas exploration projects. A Chinese consortium is expected to grab a massive contract to build a high-speed rail link between Moscow and the southern city of Kazan in exchange for a much-needed financing package.

But despite this strong political will from the top, the relationship between the two countries remains strangely hollow. “We know that you like our money but you don’t really like us,” Cai Guiru, president of the Association of Chinese Entrepreneurs in the Russian Federation, told participants at a business conference in St Petersburg some months ago. “We keep trying to change that, and we are not giving up.” Her remark triggered embarrassed smiles among her Russian audience but no one contradicted her.

On a hot Sunday afternoon last August, a group of Chinese journalists got off a bus on a construction site near the town of Tongjiang. They had been brought there to report on a long-planned rail bridge to Russia, the first to link the two huge countries across the river that separates them — called Heilongjiang in Chinese and Amur in Russian. The bridge, first proposed almost nine years ago, was to be a symbol of the growing friendship between the two countries. But while the Chinese have built a steel frame on massive concrete pillars that stretches well past the middle of the river on their side, construction on the Russian side has not even started.

When one Chinese press photographer zoomed in on the grassy Russian shore, the only thing he saw was a rickety watchtower with a straw man dressed in military fatigues patrolling its platform at the top. Held up by a lack of plans and financing, the bridge is not expected to be completed before the end of this year at the earliest.

Many of the big-ticket Russian-Chinese projects announced over the past two years have been similarly slow to get off the ground. Construction of the “Power of Siberia” pipeline, for example, is under way but behind schedule (Putin and Xi forced the deal through in 2014 before pricing had been finally agreed).

“The number one reason for such delays is the development of commodity prices — many projects may no longer make sense with oil prices so low,” says Alexander Gabuev, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, an arm of the US think-tank. China’s anti-corruption crackdown has also weighed on planned partnerships with Russia, because Chinese state-owned oil companies are particularly affected. “Many of the people [Igor] Sechin negotiated with a few years ago are in jail now,” says Gabuev, referring to the chief executive of Russian state oil company Rosneft.

Chinese investors complain that, despite Moscow’s pledges to throw open the doors to them, they continue to face suspicion and hostility from Russian government officials. As many analysts forecast a second year of recession in Russia amid plunging oil prices, and China’s slowing economy unsettles global markets, the simple formula of Russian resources for Chinese cash has become more complicated.

At an investment conference in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok last September, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev rejected complaints from Chinese delegates that Russian banks were not lending to Chinese investors, arguing that if they wanted to trade or invest in Russia, the Chinese should “bring their own money”. China, continued Trutnev, needed to “not just think of Chinese interests but consider Russian interests as well”.

Part of the problem is that outside diplomatic circles, bilateral co-operation is still very new, and the everyday relationships needed to make partnerships work — on construction sites and in boardrooms — are only now being built.

“The structure of Russian-Chinese economic co-operation does not really lead to broad people-to-people exchange,” says Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council (Riac), a government-backed think-tank in Moscow. “In our relations with countries such as Italy or Germany, there are lots of small and medium-sized enterprises who have a presence here and employ many Russians. There is a multilayered fabric of human contacts that has grown over many years with cultural exchanges, mixed marriages. With China, we have very little of that.”

Given the geography and history of the two countries, that’s not surprising. Despite sharing a land border that, at more than 4,200 kilometres, is the world’s sixth longest, they have their backs turned towards each other. Neither country counts its border regions as part of a historic or economic heartland. Though China’s northeastern provinces are home to more than 100 million people, the area is a backwater compared with the eastern and southern parts of the country. Many of the younger generation from Heilongjiang, the province that contains the longest stretch of the border with Russia, leave to find work in Beijing.

On the other side, Russia long struggled to transform its control of the regions neighbouring China from a colonial-style rule focused on extracting raw materials to a more modern form of governance. Both in Tsarist and Soviet times, the state had to resort to force or offer big incentives to get people to move to the Asian part of the country.

The region closest to the Chinese border, a vast expanse of wooded and swampy land with winters even harsher than those in European Russia, was one of those where prisoners were sent to work themselves to death in labour camps. The only other means to get people to settle there was by handing out free agricultural land — a 19th-century policy that Putin’s government revived last year. Even now the inhabitants of Russia’s Far East number no more than five million — compared with an estimated 17 million who live in the Greater Moscow urban area — and many of them would like to move west.

This imbalance of population density, combined with memories of Russia’s seizure in 1855 of territory that once belonged to China, has kept concerns alive in Russia that an ever-stronger China might one day regain control over parts of the Russian Far East. In 2008, when the two countries settled a long-running border dispute, Moscow and Beijing insisted that this chapter of history was closed. But ordinary people in both countries remain wary.

“We know that we should not talk about this now, we are not strong enough yet, but when the time comes, these lands have to be given back,” says Gu Xiaomei, a manager of China National Electric Engineering who worked at a construction site in Birobidzhan, a Russian city near the Chinese border.

Russians living in the area say they worry about the growing dominance of Chinese in local agriculture and construction. “Of course they can come here to visit, but there should be certain limits,” says Pavel Gromyko, who works at a hotel in Birobidzhan.

In terms of embracing the East, Russia’s elite do not exactly set an example. Many feel as firmly rooted in Europe as the Russian aristocracy in Tsarist times, notwithstanding Putin’s frequent angry bashing of the West. Oligarchs including Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s closest friends, own homes in cities such as London, Geneva or Saint-Tropez. Senior government officials educate their children in the West. “The notion of us being anything other than Europeans is ridiculous,” says a senior Kremlin official. When a Russian state company hosted a lavish dinner at last September’s conference in Vladivostok, everything from salad to dessert was flown in on two aircraft from Moscow, 9,000 kilometres to the west.

Apart from geographic and historic factors, the different paths Russia and China have taken in the transformation of their former socialist economies have also left the two societies very far apart. The fact that a Communist regime continues to cling to power in Beijing, while it was toppled in Moscow almost 25 years ago, may lead many in the West to think of a Russian market economy versus a Chinese command economy. But more than 35 years of market reforms in China have tied the country more closely to the global economy than Russia.

China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001, a decade before Russia. Moreover, two generations of Chinese have made a living from manufacturing Western-branded products for the world market — a link that Russia lacks as its economy relies mostly on the export of raw materials. Since 2014, Russia’s ties with the global economy have been forcibly loosened through Western sanctions.

Meanwhile, the accumulation of modest prosperity in Chinese one-child families has enabled millions to send their offspring to study in the West, helping to build cultural and personal links with Europe and the US rather than with Russia. The Chinese students who end up in Russia are largely those whose grades are not good enough or whose parents are not rich enough. “I came here to study Russian because I didn’t pass the English exam that would have allowed me to get a public scholarship for studying in Europe,” says Wu Peng, a 25-year-old Chinese who lives in Khabarovsk, a Russian city on the border with China.

Russian experts warn that the preference for Western, and mostly English-speaking, countries among younger generations in China is a serious challenge for building friendly ties between the two nations. “There are foundations for cultural links that were laid in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Kortunov. “But the generation that was educated in those years is no longer dominant in China today.”

Lei Daijun’s family is a case in point. Although he preserved his sentimental feelings for Russia over more than 50 years, his children have been drawn ever more closely into the orbit of Russia’s geopolitical foe, the US. It is Lei Qing, Lei’s younger daughter, who finally made possible her father’s journey to Russia. She was among the first Chinese to study in America in the 1980s, and she stayed there. Now she is paying for her parents’ entire trip.

Russian officials hope that such visits can draw the two nations closer and, indeed, the Leis are part of a growing number of Chinese tourists in Russia. In 2014, Chinese tourist arrivals in Russia grew 11 per cent to 409,817, overtaking the Germans to top the ranks of foreign tourists in Russia for the first time.

But Lei Qing and her sister Lei Jin are slightly disappointed. “Nobody speaks English here,” says Lei Jin, a teacher like her father. For her children, it is the first trip abroad. Her 12-year-old son You Qingfeng observes that Moscow looks a lot poorer than what he has seen of America in films and photos. “Everything is kind of old-fashioned here. They said the Metro was beautiful, but it’s so old!”

Wu Peng, an outgoing, purposeful young man from a family of entrepreneurs in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, recalls feeling miserable during his first two years in Russia, but says he then got his act together. Now he speaks fluent Russian and says he wants to stay another five years to make some money. Since graduating from university in 2012, he has represented a Singaporean pump manufacturer at a trade fair in Moscow and now offers driving and translation services to Chinese state companies with construction contracts in the Russian Far East. But when I ask him whether he feels at home and whether he has any Russian friends, he pauses. “Not really. I don’t have any contacts with Russians outside work, and mostly I’m bored,” he says. Adding with a smile, “To us, Russia is as foreign as the West but without the benefits.”

Han Qing, a doctor from the ancient Chinese capital of Xian who works at a Chinese medicine clinic in Moscow, says his Russian patients are a complete mystery to him. “Normally, we look, smell, ask and touch,” he says, referring to the four-methods of diagnostics used in traditional Chinese medicine — observing the patient’s appearance, smelling their body odour, asking their symptoms and feeling their pulse. “But these people have such white skin, I can’t see anything on their faces. And they wear so much perfume that I can’t smell anything. I can’t understand anything they say either — so that leaves only feeling the pulse.”

There are signs, however, that things may be changing. “Who would have thought that our countries would ever become so close?” asks Alexander Osin, a 53-year-old Russian married to a woman from northeastern China. He says that when he first met his wife seven years ago, they were an odd couple. Osin is a linguist trained in Swedish and Norwegian who once had ambitions to become a diplomat, while his wife Zhang Fenghua is a can-do businesswoman who organises visas and work permits for other Chinese in Russia.

“Our generation, they trained us towards the West,” says Osin. “I thought I would become a government official but then the Soviet Union collapsed, and it didn’t work out for me. But now I feel really close to China. The Chinese are like our own people.”

His wife says she felt looked down upon by Russians when she came to Moscow as a language student in the 1990s. “But that has changed. The Russians’ understanding of us has turned around. They see what we have accomplished, how hard we work and what progress we have achieved for our country,” she says.

That is more than just an individual impression. Over the past year, the political push for more Russian-Chinese economic links has provided incentives for many Russian service companies and professionals to take an interest in China, and dozens of Moscow law firms, interpreter services and public relations companies have sent delegations to China and set up offices in Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong.

Opinion polls suggest Russians’ and Chinese views of each other are growing more favourable. According to US research group Pew, the percentage of Russians viewing China in a positive way rose from 64 per cent to a record 79 per cent in 2015, a trend reflected in Russian polls. Though the Pew poll also found the proportion of Chinese feeling positive about Russians dropped from 66 per cent in 2014 to 51 per cent last year, Russia’s popularity in China, according to regular surveys conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, exceeded that of the US every year since 2011.

“At the ground level, the economic perceptions are already changing,” says Caroline Humphrey, an anthropologist at Cambridge University who researches the Russian-Chinese border. “While Russians used to look down upon the Chinese, they are beginning to talk about them with admiration. The Chinese, on the other hand, definitely no longer view Russia in the Soviet terms of a big brother.”

For the relationship to turn into a true friendship, however, that may not be enough. “Russia needs China more than China needs Russia. Russia has nowhere else to go,” says Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “But the level of the overall relationship is nowhere near what official rhetoric makes believe. Only now is the Russian elite beginning to realise that if they want the Chinese to come, it will have to be on knock-out terms.”

Some officials and academics point out that the state has a better chance of shifting people’s attitudes in Russia and China than it would in Western democracies. “In a different political system, these things develop through civil society, but we have quite peculiar civil societies in both our countries,” says Andrei Kortunov of Riac. Instead, the process is steered more from above. Government officials and political scientists in both countries say they are working to overcome ignorance and historic grudges dividing the nations.

“The [image of Russia] in China is far too heavily dominated by some clichés. The first things that come to Chinese minds are Putin, and the beauty of Russian women,” says Larisa Smirnova, a Russian academic at the University of Xiamen in southeastern China who also works with Riac. She warns that the Chinese Communist party has long used the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic and political upheaval Russia underwent in the 1990s as a cautionary tale. Many Chinese who travel to Russia are shocked to find how poor the infrastructure is compared with their own.

“Russia has potholed roads and shabby airports — we really have overtaken them,” says Gu Xiaomei. On the other hand, Russian academics say there is far too little knowledge in China about Russian culture and its natural or architectural attractions. “The Chinese pride themselves on their ancient culture. We have to make them aware of our culture too, and make more of assets such as Russian literature and art,” says Smirnova.

To foster understanding between the younger generation in both countries, she urges that the Chinese and Russian higher education systems must be brought in line with each other, facilitating mutual recognition of degrees and setting up more university partnerships and joint study programmes. Another track is directing the media. “A lot of distrust and prejudice disappear if you just stop talking and writing about it all the time, and that’s what is happening in both countries,” she says. “There has long been a problem with xenophobia in Russia, and some people liked to spread some ‘yellow peril’ talk, but that has stopped appearing in the Russian media now.”

With a draconian censorship regime in place in China and ever tighter state control over the media in Russia, such an approach could prove quite effective. “We must control the negative publicity,” Chinese deputy premier Wang Yang told his counterpart Yuri Trutnev at a recent conference in Russia.

One easy theme to create common narratives is the two countries’ fondness of military heroism and their shared sense of being misunderstood by the West. Last year, Smirnova and her Chinese students watched the 2015 Russian-Ukrainian film “Battle for Sevastopol”, an epic about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Second World War sniper. One scene features the young woman trying to persuade the US to enter the war against Germany with the words: “I am 25 years old and I killed 300 fascists.” Smirnova says: “My students absolutely loved it.”

As someone married to a Chinese, she insists that while Russians and Chinese have to overcome hurdles to get close, once they do so, their personal connections can cut much deeper than with someone from the West.

“There is something between these two countries that are still trying to find their place in the world. There’s this Communist background, and there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future in both our countries,” she says. “In the West, people often think that the way they live is the standard everyone else should follow. Between the Russians and the Chinese, you can go and get drunk and make mistakes and say rubbish. We can form a very strong heart connection.”

–Financial Times