Huge trade deals elevate Sino-Russia ties

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin inked on Tuesday, October 13 the Joint Communiqué of the 14th Regular Prime Ministers' Talks between China and Russia. They also witnessed the signing of 12 agreements, including agreements on natural gas and petroleum oil, transportation, aerospace industry, customs clearance and with regard to humanitarian studies.

Among these agreements, five are the documents relevant to fuel energy cooperation. In this realm, the two sides have agreed to work together to make sure that the 1,030-kilometer pipeline project, running from Skovorodino, Russia, to China's northeastern city of Daqing, could be completed by the end of 2010 and start stable oil supply in 2011 and moreover, both sides would go in for nuclear energy cooperation.

The Chinese Ministry of Railways' memorandum of understanding on a high-speed railway system in Russia signifies that China's one-sided importation of technology from Russia has come to an end. Nowadays, it is China's turn to help Russia build high-speed railways. Besides, China can also import nuclear technology from Russia, while exporting to it the related technology for liquefying high-quality coal at high temperatures.

This adds new connotations to the complementation of the two economies, and bilateral economic cooperation has scaled a new height. Recent developments in Sino-Russian bilateral cooperation indicate that the governments and enterprises of both nations have gone into actions and are striving to promote bilateral cooperation in such spheres as energy, investment, aerospace, forestry, transport and communication, infrastructure construction, resources development and finances.

Marked, considerable advances have been recorded in all-round bilateral cooperation since the two nations set up their strategic partnership of cooperation in 1996 and signed the Good-Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 2001. Take bilateral trade, Russia's trade with China soared to 56.8 billion US dollars in 2008 from 9.3 billion dollars in 2002. The share of oil in Russia's exports stands at 56 percent, with metals at 5 percent, while the share of machinery stands at 4.4 percent, statistics show.

At present, China is Russia's third biggest trade partner while Russia became China's 11th. Despite a rapid growth in Sino-Russia trade, bilateral economic cooperation seems to be trailing behind, given huge potential for economic cooperation in a wide rage of important areas and sound political relations between the two nations. As a matter of fact, the Sino-Russian trade volume is only one third of that between China and the Republic of Korea.

The current regular meeting mechanism between the Chinese and Russian premiers, a series of documents on enhancing bilateral cooperation signed during the current meeting as well as trade deals worth four billion US dollars struck between them signifies that the strategic partnership of bilateral cooperation between China and Russia has become highly enriched and much more improved.

Comprehensive Sino-Russian cooperation is of vital global significance. "Russia-China cooperation is one of the most important cornerstones of the world stability," said Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in an interview with Chinese reporters in Beijing on Tuesday

Meanwhile, noted Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the celebration on the 60th anniversary of China-Russian diplomatic ties and concurrently the closing of the "Russian year" in his country, China and Russia, as the great neighbors to each other and both permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, should work hard to bring about a just, fair and rational new world order and contribute more to the world peace and development.

Indeed, China and Russia represent the most powerful countries among the BRIC nations, namely, Brazil, Russia, India and China. As far as their foreign exchange reserves are concerned, China ranks the first and Russia the third worldwide.

Their cooperation in the financial sector is of an extremely vital importance for the establishment of a new global economic order that is fair and rational, making the international relations more democratic, the global setup more multi-polarized and the entire world even more harmonious.

If viewing or approaching bilateral relations from such a height, a few temporary problems and frictions in bilateral trade, such as the pricing of natural gas, can be overcome or resolved, provided fuel enterprises of both nations are able to come to terms acceptable to both sides. So, people are now fully convinced that the equal, mutually-trustworthy and cooperative relations could surely benefit the people of both countries and help promote the world peace and development.

By People's Daily Online and contributed by Shen Jiru, a noted researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics Research under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.