HIGH-level bonhomie was on display at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last December, as it invariably is at meetings between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – the irreplaceable leaders of China and Russia.
Yet the exaggerated gestures of goodwill cannot quite camouflage the underlying tensions in this presidential pseudo-alliance.
Following the party-political line, the so-called ‘Connectivity Index’, a measure constructed by researchers at Peking University for evaluating the suitability of about 100 states for China’s Belt & Road Initiative, awards Russia the first place.
Yet Russia is not formally a member in this initiative and consents only to its ‘link-up’ (sopryazhenie) with …read more
Source: Asian Correspondent
