Archived
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“If we can load goods quickly, roughly it takes six days to get to Moscow. Then we turn around and come back again,” says Alex, a 36-year-old Belarusian driver, who gives only his first name. He drives the loop to Manzhouli two or three times a month.
Perched on the 4209-kilometre China-Russia border, in the remote Inner Mongolia region, Manzhouli is China’s largest land port. It has become a pivotal link in Beijing’s economic lifeline to Moscow since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
More than 100 trucks are parked in this makeshift parking lot, a few hundred metres from the Russian border, their trailers loaded with essential goods – fresh vegetables and fruit, clothes and electronics, as well as toys, according to drivers stationed there on a weekday in early May. Opposite the car park, in a fenced-off area, row upon row of new tractors and heavy equipment also wait to be exported to Russia.
It’s part of a cross-border trade stampede that hit a record $US245 billion ($380 billion) last year, having more than doubled since 2020. Much of this trade has passed through Manzhouli and headed north, as Moscow has grown increasingly reliant on its neighbour to sustain its wartime economy through the tightening noose of Western sanctions.
**“It’s difficult to imagine the Russian economy would be in the shape that it is – and it’s not in the best shape, but neither is it in a collapse – without China’s assistance,” **says Philipp Ivanov, a former Australian diplomat and founder of Geopolitical Risks and Strategy Practice, a firm specialising in China-Russia relations.
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“Certainly, it’s a lifeline [to Russia] and it’s been very important to this conflict,” says China-Russia expert Dr Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist at the Centre for Naval Analyses.
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But it’s a relationship that, many analysts argue, remains transactional and strategically superficial, and infused with distrust and pressure points despite the bromance projected by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin.
In the Manzhouli parking lot, the war is a delicate subject, and few drivers are willing to speak about it beyond the impact on their trade routes. The Chinese government is also tracking this masthead’s movements, having dispatched two local officials to monitor the interviews.
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In the Manzhouli parking lot, the war is a delicate subject, and few drivers are willing to speak about it beyond the impact on their trade routes. The Chinese government is also tracking this masthead’s movements, having dispatched two local officials to monitor the interviews.
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“If you go to Russia from this region, you can see that many young people have died. Neither Russia nor Belarus needed it,” says Alex, the Belarusian, who also used to drive routes through Europe until the war. He has two cousins, both Russian officers, who are fighting in Ukraine.
“Many people have different opinions, but the war, even the word war, is bad. Very bad.”
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China’s fossil fuel imports, including oil and gas, from its neighbour have ballooned since the Ukraine war, adding billions to the Kremlin’s cash-strapped reserves, while giving Beijing access to discounted energy supplies by exploiting the closure of the European market to Russia.
Last year, China imported a record $US62 billion of Russian crude oil, an increase of more than 50 per cent since 2021, a year before Western governments sanctioned Russian oil exports, according to an analysis by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a German think tank. As much as 40 per cent of the trade between the two countries is now done in Chinese yuan, up from 2 per cent three years ago.
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But for all the posturing and strengthened economic and military ties [between Russia and China], analysts say there remain obvious limits to this “no limits” relationship.
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Their relatively recent “brotherhood” sits against a backdrop of fractious relations, border skirmishes and mistrust for much of the 20th century, culminating in the bitter Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. Today, the two countries still compete in their spheres of influence in Central Asia and the Arctic.
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“China worries about entrapment, about getting drawn into Russia’s more disruptive actions, like the war in Ukraine, and the way they’ve been tainted by association. Russia is also reluctant to get drawn into China’s struggles in the Indo-Pacific,” says the Centre for Naval Analyses’ Wishnick.
There have also been flashes of rare dissent among respected Chinese scholars over Beijing’s support for Moscow, running counter to Chinese state media’s parroting of Russian talking points about NATO expansionism being the root cause of the war.
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“China has paid too much both economically and politically without achieving the expected results of improving China’s international stance or easing the US pressure on China,” Chinese Professor Feng Yujun said in a translated lecture in 2023.
Another prominent academic, Hu Wei, was forced into early retirement after his 2022 essay calling for China to “cut off as soon as possible” its ties with Putin went viral and was quickly scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors.
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For local Chinese traders [in the Russian-Chinese border area], many of whom speak Russian, the Machiavellian power plays of the world’s strongmen are a secondary concern to the daily reality of trying to carve out a living in a border town straddling two sputtering economies, one ravaged by war and the other by the long drag of a property market collapse. Cross-border trade might be booming, but business isn’t.
“Thanks to the war, business is getting worse and worse,” says Li Yanshan, 49, a shoe shop owner who caters to Russian tourists.
Wang Shanshan, the owner of a healthcare shop, is also feeling the pinch. In the past, Russian tourists spent lavishly in the town, she says.
“Not any more. Now they don’t buy anything that are not life necessities. It will only get better when the war comes to an end,” she says.