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this year and will breach $200bn for the first time in 2023, according to Russian Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov who is also in the delegation.
Russia is now China's second-largest trade partner outside of Asia, second only to the United States, which accounted for half a trillion in trade in the first nine months of this year, followed by Russia with $176bn and Germany with $158bn.
Increasingly this trade is settled in national currencies and since Russia was banned from SWIFT there has been a rapid yuanization of the Russian financial system.
Russia primarily exports energy resources, metals, timber, agricultural products, and seafood to China, while China imports cars, electronics, excavators, microprocessors, clothing, shoes, and consumer goods from Russia.
The Sino-Russian investment fund is supervised by a dedicated
LNG-2, involve Chinese investors, and Russia exported 6.5mn tonnes of LNG to China in 2022, a 44% increase from the previous year.
Russia has a reputation as a technological noob, but some its military technology is world class, as a legacy of the Cold War. Russia remains a major arms exporter to China and Russian aviation, rocket, nuclear, and even submarine technology has been shared with China in the last decade, according to a 2022 assessment by the US Department of Defence.
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
The BRI is not just an Asian project
but extends well into Europe and
also has major investments into raw material production in Africa as well as increasingly into infrastructure as a way of cementing relations with Beijing.
The BRI connects more than 60 countries in Europe with the global south. The concept was developed by Xi in 2013 and is the backbone of China’s foreign economic
countries participating in the initiative: laying fibre optic cables and 5G cellular networks, creating data storage centres, using satellite navigation, and developing e-commerce.
In 2018, China initiated the Polar Silk Road project, which involves coordinating development strategies with Arctic states to facilitate the creation of a maritime economic corridor between China and Europe across the Arctic Ocean.
The projects are financed by the Chinese sovereign wealth fund and state-owned banks, including the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China as well as the Silk Road Fund created in 2014. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are also major players.
China builds interaction with its partners on a bilateral basis. To date, under the initiative, the Chinese side has concluded agreements with 150 countries and 30 international organizations. The initiative’s projects are being implemented in countries of Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe, covering two-thirds of all countries and more than 60% of the world's population.
Russia is not directly involved in the initiative, but supports it. In 2015, the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China signed an agreement to connect the Silk Road Economic Belt and the EEU, which has Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia as members.
For the period from 2013 to 2022,
trade turnover between China and BRI participants was $19.1 trillion, with average annual growth of 6.4%. The total volume of investments exceeded $380bn, including China’s direct investments to participating countries to the tune of more than $240bn.
In the first half of 2023 alone, trade turnover between China and BRI countries grew by 9.8% y/y. The share
of this indicator in China's foreign trade turnover reached 34.3%. More than 3,000 projects with an investment volume
of almost $1 trillion have already been implemented through the initiative.
“The Power of Siberia gas pipeline has been transporting gas since 2019, and a Power of Siberia-2 is expected to appear in the next ten years followed by a Power of Siberia-3”
intergovernmental commission and currently has 79 large-scale projects with total investments of approximately $170bn, reports Tass.
Russia is a significant supplier of oil and gas to China. The Power of Siberia gas pipeline has been transporting gas since 2019, and a Power of Siberia-2 is expected to appear in the next ten years followed by a Power of Siberia-3.
The heads of Russian energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, Alexei Miller and Igor Sechin, are both part of Putin's retinue during his visit to China.
Liquefied natural gas (LNG) production projects, including Yamal LNG and Arctic
and foreign policy and expected to run over the next three decades.
The initiative includes several projects. First of all, these are the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. These projects, proposed by Xi Jinping in 2013,
named after the ancient caravan route that runs through Central Asia. The maritime route connects the coastal regions of China with Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe, as well as the countries of the South Pacific.
In 2015, the Digital Silk Road project was added, stimulating the development
of digital interconnectedness of the
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