China-Russia visit signals goodbye to Trump and hello to Putin

Four days after US President Donald Trump departed Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived — a swift diplomatic handover that underscored China’s central place in an increasingly unsettled global order.

Beijing’s ties with Washington and Moscow differ sharply, of course: one relationship is defined by strategic rivalry, the other by strategic partnership.

Yet as China welcomes a steady procession of global leaders, each high-profile visit helps reinforce the sense that Beijing is becoming a pivotal stage for world affairs at a moment of profound geopolitical change.

“To the world it shows that Beijing is where it’s happening,” Aaron Glasserman, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China, told RTÉ News.

For China, however, this prominence comes with risk, analysts said.

If Beijing believes the global balance of power is tilting its way as US hegemony ebbs, the Chinese leadership has little interest in upsetting that momentum.

Its objective, analysts said, is to manage relations with the United States carefully enough to buy time and strategic room to strengthen its own position — even if that means holding the Kremlin at arm’s length on some issues.

Children wave flowers and flags

That helps explain why Mr Putin left Beijing without securing the major energy infrastructure agreement he had been seeking.

“Now that he has Trump in a comfortable place [Xi Jinping] doesn’t want to do rock the boat,” Mr Glasserman said, “by being too openly supportive of Russia or challenging to America, whether it’s in the Middle East, Iran, or with Europe and Ukraine”.

“Staying out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration” he added, “is a top priority for Xi Jinping”.

At first glance, the Russian and American summits bore striking similarities.

Both included a marching honour guard, a brass band and chanting children waving flags outside the Great Hall of the People.

But the contrasts were unmistakable too.

For one thing, Chairman Xi Jinping appeared noticeably warmer toward his Russian visitor than toward the American president who had just departed.

“My old friend,” he called President Putin.

Mr Putin returned the gesture, telling his “dear friend” that it felt like three autumns since their last meeting, invoking a Chinese proverb.

Mr Trump also received the full red-carpet welcome, but from the outset there was a pointed signal as well, as we reported here last week.

That message was clear: the US should keep away from Taiwan.

US President Donald Trump left just four days before

That meeting was, after all, a summit between superpowers that now deal with one another — at least under Mr Trump and Mr Xi — as peers.

China views Russia differently, by contrast, casting it as the junior partner in an emerging world order.

With reminders of the “no-limits partnership” struck just weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two sides agreed to “further extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation”.

“The China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era is characterised by full substance, a high level of mutual trust, a solid foundation, and broad prospects,” according to the state-controlled newspaper Global Times.

And as if to underline their unity, the two leaders quickly turned their criticism toward the man who had only recently left Beijing.

In a joint statement, US foreign and nuclear policy was denounced as “irresponsible”. Mr Xi said the conflict in the Middle East risked dragging the world back to the “law of the jungle”.

Warnings about “neo-colonialism” followed, language that sounded aimed at rallying Global South countries against the US and former European colonial powers.

They also pledged to defend the UN Charter — though there was notably no reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which violates it.

“By upholding the international system centred on the United Nations and adhering to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, China and Russia serve as key forces in opposing hegemony, promoting multipolarity, and stabilising the global situation,” said the Chinese read-out.

Running through it all was a quieter message for Washington: Russia is not about to be peeled away from China, despite hopes entertained by some US policymakers.

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping tour a photo exhibition on Russia-China ties in Beijing

Even so, for all Mr Putin’s efforts, he did not leave with the prize he has long sought — the Power of Siberia II.

The proposed gas pipeline would run roughly 2600km from Russia’s Arctic coast to China’s Eastern City of Shanghai.

Russia’s need for China to help sustain its wartime economy under western sanctions is plain to see.

China, for its part, would welcome additional cheap Russian gas. But over the past several years it has also worked to diversify energy supplies, seeking to avoid dependence on any one source or on vulnerable global maritime chokepoints.

Indeed, after Mr Trump’s visit, tankers carrying American liquefied natural gas departed Louisiana for China, signalling the return of energy imports that had been halted during last year’s tariff war.

China is interested in greater access to the Russian Arctic, however — a strategically important foothold in the High North whose value is rising as the polar ice caps melt.

The joint declaration highlighted deeper cooperation there and criticised the US and its allies over “the growing militarisation of high latitudes”.

The Arctic should remain “a territory of peace, stability and low military-political tension,” it said.

Russia, China and NATO countries have all stepped up military activity in the region in recent years.

Donald Trump, notoriously, has floated the idea of seizing Greenland, a European territory, on national security grounds.

Russia once guarded its Arctic access from China jealously, but its growing dependence has forced it to open that door as part of the cost of securing Beijing’s support.

Now that both the Americans and Russians have come and gone, Mr Xi may be preparing for another diplomatic move: a possible visit to North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, according to South Korean media reports.

Like China and Iran, North Korea has backed Russia’s war on Ukraine with technical and logistical assistance.

North Korea also sent tens of thousands of soldiers to the front, generating around $13 billion for the internationally sanctioned regime, according to analysis by South Korean defence agencies.

Some analysts have labelled this alignment of autocracies — China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — the “axis of upheaval”.

This was Mr Putin’s 25th trip to China

“CRINK” is another shorthand that has gained currency in foreign policy circles, referring to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine back in 2024, foreign policy analysts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine argued that growing cooperation among the four countries would both disrupt and provide alternatives to the Western-led international order.

The weakening of international sanctions on Iran and North Korea offers one example of that dynamic.

Still, experts disagree over how durable or cohesive the grouping really is, beyond a loose alignment held together more by anti-western sentiment than by deep strategic unity.

For now at least, Mr Glasserman of the University of Pennsylvania said, it bears little resemblance to formal western alliances such as NATO.

China’s grand strategy, he said, is centred on making itself indispensable to the global economic system.

“If you want to put it on an axis of chaos, you also have to put it on a bunch of other axes too, because it is very deeply embedded with many other groups of countries,” he said.

As Mr Xi presses ahead with his fast-paced international diplomacy, he may be following an old strategic instinct: keep friends close, while ensuring rivals remain closer still.