How Mikhail Mishustin completed his first visit to China

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and a delegation of heads of departments and state corporations, after attending a business forum in Shanghai, completed their Chinese tour on May 24 in the capital of China. There, Mishustin held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and was also able to meet his counterpart, Premier of the State Council Li Qiang, who received this post in March 2023.

The meeting with Li ended with the signing of five interdepartmental agreements, including a memorandum between the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on investment in trade in services. Mishustin and Li agreed to meet regularly in the future (the next is scheduled for the end of 2023) and active work at the level of both vice-premiers and more than 80 industry working groups.

Xi, speaking about the development of cooperation between the two countries, highlighted energy, trade and investment in this context. “China is ready to continue to engage with Russia on the basis of firm mutual support, taking into account each other’s key interests,” the Chinese leader said. Bilateral trade in the first four months of 2023 exceeded $73 billion, he added.

Mishustin, in turn, conveyed “comradely greetings” to Xi from Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the head of the Russian government, Russia and China are now working on 79 joint investment projects totaling more than $165 billion. At the same time, 70% of cross-border settlements are now carried out in the national currencies of the two countries – rubles and yuan.

In addition to the official part, Mishustin visited one of the leading universities in China, Tsinghua, in Beijing, among the graduates of which is the head of the PRC. In one of the laboratories, he was presented with the development of Chinese scientists – a drone project with an optical chip that forms neural networks of millions of neurons.

Mishustin’s visit to China indicates, first of all, that systemic work is being rebuilt between the countries, which was de facto suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic and the NWO, says Sergey Lukonin, head of the Chinese economics and politics sector at the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at IMEMO RAS. Initially, it was not worth expecting the signing of revolutionary documents based on its results, the expert believes. Another goal was Mishustin’s personal acquaintance with the new Chinese team, Lukonin is sure. At the same time, the problem remains that large Chinese companies are afraid of cooperation with Russian ones because of the possibility of falling under secondary American sanctions, but this was obvious even without Mishustin’s visit, Lukonin notes. Probably, not all the subtleties of the negotiations between the two parties became known to the press, as the parties seek not to attract too much attention from American and European regulators, the expert concludes.