MOSCOW (AP) - After moving to build closer ties with the United States and NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning to the East where Moscow's "strategic partner," China, has been jealously watching Russia's honeymoon with the West.
Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin are to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's summit in St.Petersburg on Friday and also scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting Thursday. The group, dominated by Russia and China, also includes four former Soviet republics in Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Participants of the summit are expected to sign the group's charter, making it a full-fledged international organization. Speaking to a Chinese newspaper before the summit, Putin hailed the group's role in global security, saying it could help make Russia, China, United States and Europe parts of one "arc of stability."
While Russia's ties with the West turned from initial post-Soviet euphoria to new tensions during the 1990s, Russia has developed increasingly close ties with its former Communist rival, China. The declared Russian-Chinese "strategic partnership" was cemented by their joint opposition to what both countries perceived as the threat of U.S. global domination.
"Russia's foreign policy throughout the 1990s was chaotically swaying between the United States and China," said Sergei Trush, an expert with the Moscow-based Institute for the United States and Canada at a round-table on Russian-Chinese relations Wednesday. "Russia was trying to determine which of the two great powers was more important."
China has become the No. 1 customer for the belaguered Russian defense industries which nearly ground to a halt without orders from the cash-strapped defense ministry, purchasing billions of dlrs worth of missiles, fighter jets, destroyers and submarines in recent years.
"The Chinese are very pragmatic," said Vsevolod Ovchinnikov, a commentator for the daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta who is a long-time expert in relations with China. "They consider Russia as strategic backing for their rear."
Russia's cooperation with China culminated in the friendship treaty Putin and Jiang signed last July - the first such document since 1950, when Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung created a Soviet-Chinese alliance - a friendship that slid into rivalry and then hostility in the 1960s.
The Shanghai security group, formed to help reduce tension on the former Soviet border with China, later became a forum for discussing joint action against Islamic separatism that threatened Russia, Central Asian republic as well as China.
The shared domination of Russia and China in Central Asia abruptly ended after Sept. 11 when Putin gave his quick blessing to the U.S. military deployment in Central Asian republics for operations in Afghanistan.
The unexpected move has led to a dramatic improvement in Russia's ties with the West and helped broker last month's nuclear arms reduction deal with the United States and a cooperation agreement with NATO.
Although China has not criticized the agreement making Russia a limited NATO partner, it has repeatedly dismissed the alliance as a Cold-War relic that has no reason to exist. Beijing has also been uneasy over the U.S. military deployment in Central Asia next to its borders.
Putin sought to assuage China's concerns. "We believe that relations with our great eastern neighbor, China, are a major priority," he said this week. "We have always conducted a balanced foreign policy. We intend to develop relations with both East and West."
While China's top concern was Russia's efforts to befriend the West, many Russian politicians and the media were worried about the flow of Chinese migrants into Russia's sparsely populated Far Eastern and Siberian regions, which China has claimed for centuries.
Despite all talk about partnership, the Russian-Chinese trade only amounted to dlrs 10 billion a year - the amount dwarfed by China's dlrs 120 billion annual trade with the United States.