Yuan loves silence

The rules of the game are being revised by Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia–Eurasia Center

The recent meeting between Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping was remembered by Muscovites for traffic jams, comparable in scale only to the level of the Russian-Chinese partnership that is growing day by day. But the package of 15 documents signed in the Kremlin, most of which are memorandums, is unlikely to be remembered – it looks so lightweight in comparison with the recent past. For example, when President Putin flew to Shanghai in May 2014, in addition to the Power of Siberia gas contract, fifty agreements appeared. What happened?

As my Chinese interlocutors explain, Western sanctions are predictably to blame for the paucity of the published package of documents. None of the Chinese companies wants to fall under the secondary restrictions of Washington for transactions and simply contacts with Russian organizations, especially from the SDN list. Beijing is confident that even those contracts that are not directly prohibited by the sanctions can be interpreted as “injections into the budget of the aggressor country” or other assistance to the “Russian military machine.” This means, the Chinese fear, that the United States may use this as a pretext for a new blow to the sectors of the Chinese economy that are most dependent on them.

At the same time, of course, Beijing is not going to refuse profitable deals with Moscow – its negotiating positions are too good now. But they should be concluded and discussed without unnecessary noise. For example, judging by traffic jams, a large delegation arrived with President Xi. But the list of participants in the talks, contrary to a long tradition, was not published. The Chinese news agency Xinhua also did not spread who accompanied the chairman in Moscow. Although some members of the Politburo and other bosses are recognizable in the photo at the negotiating table, there is no official information about their trip to the Russian Federation.

Under these conditions, analysts and journalists have to guess what was discussed at the talks, only from the available footage of TV channels and the Kremlin press service, as well as a briefing by presidential aide Yuri Ushakov for the Kremlin pool.

So, for example, almost half of the Russian delegation at a meeting with Xi Jinping in a narrow format turned out to be responsible for the military-industrial complex and military-technical cooperation: from Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to the head of Roskosmos, Yuri Borisov. The same thing happens with civil projects. Head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina took part in the talks in a narrow format, and Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft, who admitted that he had learned the Chinese expression “a lot of yuan” in an extended format, participated in the talks. How exactly these yuan will get to the Russian Federation in the face of restrictions on the capital account in China and how much oil Rosneft will sell to China is unknown. But this does not mean that such agreements do not exist.