Are Russia and China really forming an alliance?

Russia’s and China’s efforts at joint economic development and investment do not look much like cooperation between two eager allies. Even after Moscow’s so-called pivot to the east, spurred by post-Crimea sanctions, from 2014 through 2018 China directly invested no more than $24 billion into its northern neighbor’s economy. During the same period, China invested $148 billion in sub-Saharan Africa (including $31 billion in Nigeria alone), and $88 billion in South America (including $34 billion just in Brazil). Or consider the Program of Cooperation in the regions of Far East, Russian Eastern Siberia, and Chinese North-East in 2009–2018, signed in 2009 by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The initiative included 91 joint investment projects. Six years into the program, China had financed only 11 of these, while the rest were delayed, in the words of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Ivan Zuenko, by “bureaucratic hassles.”

China’s parsimony is evident in both the private and public sectors. A much-heralded plan for the CEFC China Energy company to purchase a 14 percent stake in Russia’s largest, and majority state-owned, oil company, Rosneft, fell through. So did a Chinese government pledge to invest $25 billion in the Power of Siberia pipeline, which cost Russia $55 billion. Moscow has celebrated its projected annual delivery of 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China via Power of Siberia as a big step toward economic interdependence. But to China, the pipeline is no more than a diversification of the country’s energy sources. In 2017, it imported over 90 billion cubic meters of natural gas, mostly from Australia, Qatar, and Turkmenistan.