EDITORIAL: Russia vs. China, the Smackdown

EDITORIAL

Russia vs. China, the Smackdown

China is a Communist country.  Russia is supposedly capitalist.  Suppose a major business publication were to undertake a study of the two countries to decide which one presents a more horrific environment for foreigners to do business in:  Which country do you think would come out on top – that is, on the bottom?

Did you guess Russia?  You’re right!  The study’s authors explain:  “We applied a concept called the Capital Receptivity Index (CRI) that measures an EE using 23 specific factors — distributed among the four elements listed above. Countries are scored on each factor from 1 (world’s worst) to 5 (world’s best), which makes the maximum possible score 115. Tallied as a percentage, the CRI of the U.S. is 82% (94/115), Russia’s is 38% (44/115) and China’s is 46% (53/115).”

Here is the data breakdown (with each country’s score out of the total possible score):

EDITORIAL: China is the New Russia

EDITORIAL

China is the New Russia

“Russia’s military bonanza is over, and China’s is just beginning.”

That was the conclusion of a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, finding that the chickens of Russia’s foolish decision to sell advanced military hardware to China have finally come home to roost:

After decades of importing and reverse-engineering Russian arms, China has reached a tipping point: It now can produce many of its own advanced weapons—including high-tech fighter jets like the Su-27—and is on the verge of building an aircraft carrier.

Ouch.

China sticks it to Russia and Gazprom

Pavel Baev, writing in the Moscow Times:

Most news reports and comments on Monday’s festive opening of the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to China portrayed the event as a strategic setback for Russia. There has been no official reaction, but the Kremlin has demonstrated total indifference to the break on its monopoly on importing gas from Central Asia. (Actually, Iran had broken the mononpoly much earlier in 1997.)

EDITORIAL: Vladimir “Just Call me Commie!” Putin

EDITORIAL

Vladimir “Just Call me Commie!” Putin

Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.

The New York Times, October 17th

You read that right:  Proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin is openly proclaiming his desire to copy the governing strategies of the Chinese Communist Party.  Meanwhile, ex-Commie bigwig Mikhail Gorbachev was scathingly condemning what he called a “mockery” of democracy in Russia’s most recent elections, which were a travesty even by Russia’s barbaric standards as we report below.  Russia has sunk about as low is it can get.

How many people were there, we wonder, those Russopile bastards, telling us when Putin came to power that Russia could “never go back” to the dark days of Communism and totalitarian, one-party dictatorship, that it did not matter that Putin was a proud KGB spy  because he had seen the light of Soviet failure and would not repeat those errors.  They were, of course, lying to us, seeking to buy time for Putin to consolidate the very type of government they denied he was capable of building.

It’s hard to imagine a more emphatic declaration of Putin’s failure than that he wants to study the Chinese, that is unless you want to talk about giant French retailer Carrefour.

Russia as Appendage of China

It’s always encouraging to see a Russian courageous enough to speak the truth to power. Alexander Lukin, director of the Center for East Asian and SCO Studies at Moscow State University for International Relations, does so in regard to Russian relations with China in the pages of the Moscow Times. Simply brutal stuff, sure to get him called “traitor” far and wide throughout his own land. Those who say so, of course, are the real enemies of the Russian people.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held talks with his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, in Beijing on Tuesday. An official meeting between the two countries’ prime ministers will be held annually under the auspices of Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation and as part of efforts to form a permanent bilateral commission. Issues involving trade and economic cooperation are usually the main focus of these talks. During the latest visit, Putin and Wen signed more than 20 agreements on projects involving bilateral cooperation.

A joint communique was signed announcing the start of cooperation on ballistic missiles and missile delivery vehicles, as well as the establishment of cultural centers. There also were agreements on improving customs controls, developing high-speed train lines in Russia and cooperation between Russian and Chinese special economic zones.

EDITORIAL: Russia and the Rogues

EDITORIAL

Russia and the Rogues

If Russia were a civilized nation, it’s people would cower in shame upon learning that a leading U.S. diplomat had chosen to lump their country together with the barbaric likes of Iran and China when he singled out the worst human rights offenders on the planet.  In Russia’s case, the legacy of “killings with impunity of human rights defenders” actually makes its offenses seem the worst of the sorry lot.

But Russia isn’t a civilized nation.  So instead, we can tell you without fear of contradiction that Russians will respond not with shame but with benighted pride, condemning anyone who dares criticize them and denying even the slightest need to reform.  Russians will, like the barbarians they are, justify the killings by suggesting the victims asked for it, betrayed Russia, deserved killing.  They will not demand justice now any more than they did during the time of Stalin.

Sunday Book Review: “Fortunately, China is not a Russia”

Chen Weidong, the Executive VP of COSL, China’s leading oilfield services company, writing on the Energy Tribune:

“The Advantage of Petroleum in Russia” (US edition was published as “From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia,” Energy Tribune Publishers) is another powerful book from my friend Michael Economides. We had discussed the possibility of publishing this book in Chinese last May right before the publication of the book in the U.S. Under the coordination of the Graduate School of China Social Sciences Academy and Huaxia Publishing Co., the Chinese version of this book has finally become reality.

For most of the last 100 years, since the Nobel family created the Russian petroleum industry in 1873, crude oil and natural gas have been Russia’s “pillar of power, the forever foundation of the state, and the lifeline of Russia.” In this book, Professor Economides and his co-author, Russia and former Soviet Union specialist Donna D’Aleo, with their broad knowledge of petroleum and geopolitics, have showed us a panorama of life and death, success and failure of Russian petroleum industry with rich history, clear logic, and abundant events.

Russia and China not only have very deep historical roots, they also have the advantage of being complementary strategic superpowers, especially in the energy and petroleum fields. I have been thoroughly entranced by the stories in the book about the petroleum elites, cruel wars and political struggles made very lively by the authors’ narrative and their humorous and philosophical comments. After finishing the reading, I whispered to myself: “fortunately China is not a Russia.” Herewith, a few more thoughts.

Latynina on Russia’s China Problem

Given that Russia expelled Solzhenitsyn and chucked Dostoevsky into a concentration camp, while lionizing mass murder Joseph Stalin and electing Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, as its president, it’s pretty clear that the country has a good bit of difficulty telling friend from foe.  Writing in the Moscow Times hero journalist Yulia Latynina shows that the problem carries over into foreign policy as well.

President Dmitry Medvedev has proposed that Europe reform its system of collective security. The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe trashed the idea, voting 55-1 against it. Why? Because an odd suggestion was hidden behind the phrase “reform the system of collective security” — namely that NATO be prohibited from expanding its membership, European countries lose their right to deploy U.S. missiles on their territory, but Russia be allowed to do whatever it wants. After the Georgia war, the proposal sounded especially unconvincing.

Russia has two major problems: China and the Caucasus.

China, Rethinking Russia

Dmitry Shlapentokh, an associate professor of history at Indiana University, writing in the Moscow Times:

Second honeymoons rarely, if ever, recapture the zest of lost love. Yet ever since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Russia and China have sought to rekindle the close relations that once supposedly existed between the two countries before Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. But the renewed China-Russian marriage always smacked more of convenience — aimed as it was at checking U.S. hegemony –than of true romance. Now Russia’s invasion of Georgia has shattered even the illusion of attraction.

In 1969, the Chinese and Soviet armies exchanged fire across their disputed border. Recently, the two countries signed an agreement that seemed to put an end to their long border dispute. The agreement was a sort of follow-up to the visit to Beijing of President Dmitry Medvedev, who made China one of his first official trips abroad after being elected president.

During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Chinese and Russian troops engaged in joint military maneuvers, and the two countries became dominant powers in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, which, to some Western observers, looked like an effort to counterbalance NATO. There were also years of “Russia in China” and “China in Russia” cultural exchanges, meant to underscore that the two countries were tied together not just by geopolitical pragmatism, but by genuine cultural and historical ties as well.

But the fact is that 17 years of high-level bilateral cooperation have produced little of substance. Indeed, in the wake of the invasion of Georgia, Beijing may be seriously rethinking its relations with Moscow. It may not yet be ready to embark on a full-fledged policy of “containment,” but in the wake of the dismemberment of Georgia — and with Russia claiming a zone of “privileged influence” throughout the former Soviet world — China clearly views Russia as an emerging strategic threat.

Medvedev, off the Reservation, Admits Russia cannot hold Far East

Paul Goble reports:

President Dmitry Medvedev says that if the Russian government does not take immediate steps, Moscow could lose the Russian Far East, a declaration that one Russian news agency called “unprecedented” and at the very least suggests Russia faces far more serious problems there than the Kremlin has acknowledged up to now.

Speaking to a conference on social-economic development in Kamchatka kray, Medvedev said that “if we do not step up the level of activity of our work [in the Russian Far East], then in the final analysis we can lose everything,” with that region becoming a source of raw materials for Asian countries. The consequences of further inaction, the Russian president said, could come not only quite quickly but “end in an extremely dramatic way” much as the Soviet Union did 17 years ago. And consequently, he called on the Russian government to “take administrative decisions” and not to get tied up with “other problems.

Putin’s China Blunder

The International Herald Tribune reports on Vladmir Putin’s cosmically stupid China blunder:

Russia’s military success against Georgia is having repercussions that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his stand-in president, Dmitri Medvedev, surely do not welcome. Simply put, Putin has alienated China and other countries that share his interest in countering U.S. power.

The Asian Development Bank, in which China plays a leading role, has extended a $40 million loan at the lowest possible rate to Georgia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization – which includes China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as well as Russia – refused to countenance Russia’s recognition of two breakaway regions of Georgia. The rebuff of Putin is all the more striking because – at least from Putin’s perspective – the central purpose of this group was to form an eastern counterweight to NATO.

China and the Central Asian states may share the Kremlin’s resentment of American dominance in the world, but they are not so eager to construct a multipolar world that they will act against their national interests.