Xi-Putin rapport keeps West on its toes

Vappala Balachandran

Former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin’s visit to China (May 16-17) and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping’s European tour (May 5-10) have helped both leaders win the perception battle against the Western bloc. This was apparent from the bloc’s inability to bring any clarity over the future of the Ukraine war, reinforced by Israel’s relentless Gaza operations despite a global outcry over massive civilian fatalities.

Xi’s recent visit to France, Hungary and Serbia received global attention as it revealed Europe’s differences with America in facing a strengthened Russia-China axis.

That Russia and China have agreed at this summit to oppose “further escalation” of the Ukraine conflict is considered a logical outcome of their earlier assertion of their relations being a ‘stabilising force’ in a chaotic world.

There was no surprise that Putin chose China for his first international visit after his re-election in March. During his visit in February 2022, Russia and China concluded a “new era of cooperation” and “no-limits partnership”. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, one of the best China watchers in the world, had then said that Putin had “signed on Xi’s global agenda”.

This also proved how prescient then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was in 1952 when he told US Ambassador Chester Bowles that “there may be more chance of China running Russia 20 years from today than Russia running China”. This was recorded by the late Ambassador Howard B Schaffer in Bowles’ biography, published in 1994.

Meanwhile, Xi’s recent visit to France, Hungary and Serbia received global attention as it revealed Europe’s differences with America in facing a strengthened Russia-China axis led by Beijing. Also, by design or otherwise, it also coincided with the 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

French President Emmanuel Macron could not obtain any specific concession from Xi over the lopsided bilateral trade, even in the presence of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. However, observers say that the visit yielded some benefits to the French President for leading “a quest that Europe’s allegiance to the US foreign policy must yield to a multipolar global order by accommodating the rising powers’ interests and concern”. It also improved Macron’s relationship with Xi, which is part of his strategy to make France a crucial partner for all emerging world powers.

However, Xi’s trip brought tangible benefits to Hungary and Serbia, both members of the Belt and Road Initiative. In Hungary, Xi seems to have promised more investments in transport and energy, the construction of a high-speed railway connecting the capital city centre to its airport and cooperation in the nuclear sector. For Serbia, a $2.1-billion project to connect the Hungarian capital with the Serbian capital was approved. Serbia also earned a special mention by Xi, who said it became China’s first strategic partner in central and eastern Europe eight years ago, and “it becomes the first European country with which we shall build a community with a shared future”.

A case study of the China-Serbia relations would prove what intel historians have been saying, that China is perhaps the only country which became a superpower through deft use of its intelligence agencies. Initially, Mao Zedong had followed Joseph Stalin’s diktat and did not have any contact with the rebellious Josip Tito.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the position changed, and Mao welcomed a Yugoslav Communist delegation with profuse apologies, as recorded by the Wilson Centre digital archives. This happened between September 15 and 28, 1956, when the Chinese Communist Party’s Eighth National Congress was in session.

In 1977, Tito, then 85, took with him his close aide Stane Dolanc, a Slovenian leader, during his first visit to Beijing. Dolanc was later interior minister (1982-84). Tito, who stayed in China from August 30 to September 8, was heartily welcomed in China by Hua Guofeng, the designated successor of Mao. That was when close intelligence cooperation was formalised.

According to Roger Faligot, a French investigative journalist, the Chinese Deputy Minister of Security paid a return visit to Belgrade in 1983 on Dolanc’s invitation. Gradually, the Yugoslav service became the closest ally of Chinese intelligence through joint operations. After the Yugoslav Federation started disintegrating, the Chinese service started collaborating with the Serbian service. In November 1997, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, accompanied by Jovica Stanisic, head of the Serbian service, visited Beijing to reinforce the cooperation.

The May 7, 1999, bombing was a landmark event which put America on the defensive and enabled China to wrest concessions from the Bill Clinton administration. This was after the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, established by Tito in 1945 and comprising six constituent republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia) disintegrated in 1992, leading to internecine wars. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia through ‘stealth bombers’ for two-and-a-half months in a bid to stop ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanian population.

According to then CIA Director George Tenet, wrong coordinates of a military target supplied by the CIA led to the targeting of the Chinese embassy during this bombing. It took “more than a month” for the US to give a full explanation that the real target was the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement. Twenty years later, BBC said on May 7, 2019, quoting ‘NATO sources’, that the Chinese embassy was a “rebroadcast station for Yugoslav army signals”, being “China’s most significant intelligence collection platform in Europe” and hence the bombing was intentional.

This was denied in a book by Pan Zhanlin, then Chinese Ambassador in Belgrade. While refuting the allegation that China was seeking American stealth technology, he said the Serbian forces had given China parts of the US F-117 stealth fighter jet that these forces had shot down in the early NATO campaign.

According to historians, then President Jiang Zemin advised the Chinese Politburo to give a moderate response to the NATO bombing as Beijing was working on something big with America. That was the WTO membership, which was cleared at a meeting of the US National Intelligence Council on September 29, 1999; it recommended that “WTO membership for China is strongly in our interest”. Thus, China became a WTO member in December 2001.

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