Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin

"Landep News"

Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin continued on Wednesday his visit to China, a strategic one in the eyes of many experts, as he  attempts to press on with the plans to introduce Russia on the largest and fastest-growing market in the world, with a meeting with president Hu Jintao and with a conference with the press.

On Tuesday he met with the Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao, and after half day of talks they announced that the two superpowers are on the right track to solve the pricing problem of the Russian gas that is expected to be delivered by the pipeline that will be built from Siberia to China.

The main reason of the visit was to take one step ahead in this project, analysts in Moscow anticipating that the actual agreement in building the pipeline would be signed during subsequent meetings by the end of the year.

While Europe is searching for ways to eliminate the dependence on Russian gas, by building a pipeline that would bring the gas from the Central Asian countries, Russia is also fighting its own war to diversify the clients, so that it may not face dependence on Europe.

It is for that reason that China and the other Asian countries appear as an ideal client, especially with China becoming the leading consumer of oil and gas in the world.

Earlier in the year, president Dmitry Medvedev met with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who agreed to allow a pipeline for gas to go through NKorea to SKorea in exchange for food, which Russia has already delivered.

This visit to China marks the resumption of an older orientation in Russian foreign politics, which was nuanced a little during the term of president Medvedev: The orientation towards Eastern Asia, especially in economic concerns.

Putin obtained from the Chinese partners the promise to invest some $1.5 billion in a Siberian aluminium smelter, and another $1 billion into a joint investment fund. Reminding a simple law of commerce, by which those who want to sell look for the highest price, whereas those who want to buy look for the lowest, Putin proposed a “win-win” outcome by compromising on prices and finding some which would be agreed upon by both sides.

In an interview for the Chinese media, Putin took the opportunity to play up the cooperation with China while lashing out at the United States and its financial policies, which he catalogued with an ancient concept of his, that of “parasitic.”

After explaining the concept in the sense that the United States are not the parasite of the world but that its US dollar monopoly is, Putin made it clear that he offered the criticism in a constructive way, in hopes that a solution could be found so that the world economy’s collapse be avoided.

Chinese prime minister said that Russia wants a comprehensive strategic partnership with China, which would lead to world stability and prosperity. This partnership comes soon after Putin announced in an article for a Russian newspaper that he wanted to create an Eurasian Union, which would comprise some of the countries of the former Soviet Union without being the Soviet Union.

All these actions of the Russian prime minister, who is expected to return in Kremlin as the president of the Russian Federation next year, after the presidential election, are intended to create a counterweight to American unipolar vision of world power structured, announced by president George H.W. Bush soon after the demise of the Soviet in 1991.

Even so, there are things that must be worked out, such as the fact that Chinese are still stealing military secrets from the Russians, which led to the capture of a Chinese citizen who was accused of attempting to buy military secrets.

On the other hand, the investments in the Russian economy are rather modest, compared to the level of growth of Chinese economy.

China and the Russian Federation, as successor of the Soviet Union, were competitors within the Communist bloc in the 20th century, and even fought a brief border war in 1969.

The relations thawed since the 1990s, when they sought ways to counterweigh the unbalance created in the world by the collapse of the Soviet Union power, which led the United States as the superpower of the world, with a military complex overdeveloped during the Cold War.

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