Lukashenka intends to enlist additional support from Beijing

President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko began his visit to China on February 28. In Beijing, he will hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. For the Belarusian leader, this is already the 13th official trip to Beijing since 1995. And he met Xi in various statuses 12 times: seven times during his visits to China (2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019). ), four times on the sidelines of the SCO summits and one more time during the visit of the Chinese chairman to Belarus in 2015.

Belarusian-Chinese cooperation grew until the political crisis of 2019, after which a series of cataclysms began that affected the pace of rapprochement and distorted this picture, says Vasily Kashin, director of the HSE CCEMI: the political pandemic of the coronavirus and the closure of borders in China itself, destabilization against the backdrop of presidential elections in Belarus in 2020, and in 2022 – a Russian military special operation in Ukraine.

The amount of investment from China in Belarus has always been less than from Russia, but Beijing gave a lot of loans for specific projects involving Chinese technology, the expert says. In 2017, the late Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei said that the parties are implementing more than 30 investment projects financed by loans from Chinese banks and the government, totaling about $6 billion in energy, industry, transport infrastructure, real estate, telecommunications and other sectors. In addition, Minsk and Beijing had a number of joint projects to create industrial facilities in Belarus with a focus on exports to Russia, Kashin notes (see reference).