The Chinese-Russian accord is significant because it was accompanied by a joint challenge to the West’s buildup of its alliances and military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
While the nuclear element of the joint communique following the May 16 summit of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin was not trumpeted and received little media attention, the two countries spelled out points of agreement on issues of significance.
The backdrop is China’s accelerated expansion of its nuclear forces and new fields of missile silos, leading the Pentagon to predict it may more than triple its capability to 1,500 weapons by 2035.
While Beijing is believed to adhere to a historical pledge that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, its actual doctrine remains obscure, there is a worrying absence of military dialogue with its rivals and recent purges at the top of its nuclear forces add to the uncertainties.
Nonetheless, it is clear that President Xi sees nuclear weapons as pieces on the global chessboard in a way that no previous leader of the People’s Republic thought necessary or desirable. Mao Zedong himself dismissed the atomic bomb as “a paper tiger.”
That’s no longer true. Buried in the joint communiqué was a series of mutual understandings on nuclear arms by this de facto alliance against the democracies.
They were easily overlooked by anyone focused on the immediate policy questions of the day, whether China was supplying arms to Russia and whether Xi was about to attack Taiwan.
One was a matter of omission, spotted by the assiduous China watcher Bill Bishop, who highlighted it in his regular newsletter. But there was more than that to the statement by the two autocrats.
The omission came in a section of the communiqué repeating support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Joint Statement by five nuclear powers (the USA, Russia, China, the UK, and France) of 3 January 2022 affirming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
In a previous statement, Putin and Xi had added that all nuclear weapons states should not deploy such weapons abroad and should withdraw any already deployed. This time, the language was missing.
In essence, this demonstrated China’s formal assent to the move by Putin to station nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus at the invitation of his ally, the dictator Aleksandr Lukashenka.
Like Ukraine and China’s neighbor Kazakhstan, Belarus gave up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons stocks in the 1990s in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, and Britain.
China had long joined Russia in denouncing the “double standards” by which the US continued to store short-range tactical nuclear weapons in NATO member states. Now it seems to accept the principle when it applies to its own ally.
In return, Xi won Putin’s support for an attack on moves by the industrialized democracies in Asia to rearm and strengthen ties in the face of huge Chinese military investment and territorial expansion — or “expanding military alliances and establishing military bases in the vicinity of other nuclear-weapons states’ borders” as the communiqué put it.
Xi and Putin expressed “serious concern” that the US “under the pretext of conducting joint exercises with its allies that are clearly aimed at China and Russia” was acting to deploy land-based intermediate-range missile systems in the Asia-Pacific region (possibly a reference to plans to sell 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan and defend the so-called first island chain that rings China’s coasts.)
They did not specify the systems referred to but warned the US and NATO against providing “extended deterrence” to individual allies. They also singled out the AUKUS pact tightening defense cooperation between the US, Britain, and Australia.
In unusually specific language, the two leaders warned against “building infrastructure in Australia, a signatory to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, that could be used for US and British nuclear forces to conduct operations and to carry out US-UK-Australian nuclear submarine co-operation.”
The AUKUS pact envisages joint construction of nuclear-powered submarines and joint basing in Western Australia, but Australian vessels will not carry nuclear missiles, a distinction absent from the Sino-Russian statement.
Why the detail, when so much seems so far away from today’s conflicts over trade, tariffs, and wars in Europe and the Middle East?
While serving Xi’s ambition of uniting the autocrats against the democracies, the document also served Putin by confirming that the Pacific is his own backyard. Much of Russia’s Far East consists of thinly populated territories which were ceded to the tsars by the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. Both men are riding the tigers of nationalism, which are composed of something more volatile than paper.
For anyone minded to write off autocratic communiqués as propaganda of no urgent import, it is worth noting the Chinese leader’s concluding words to his “friend” Putin: “As we say in China, tree bark forms by the accumulation of soil, while an accumulation of water creates oceans.”
Michael Sheridan’s new biography of Xi Jinping, ‘The Red Emperor’, is to be published by Headline Books, part of the Hachette group, in August 2024. He is the author of ‘The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong’ (2021) and was a Far East Correspondent and later a Paris Correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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