Agreement heralds a new era of cooperation

Moscow-Beijing accord to bring plans together breaks the mold

The agreement reached by President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin over the coordination of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union on May 8 last year will definitely build a brand new regional cooperation model and new power-disposing pattern among China and Central Eurasian core countries.

The Western media and even governments don't think such coordination will go ahead for long. In their opinion, there are lots of conflicts of interest between the Belt and Road Initiative and the role played by EEU member countries, so cooperation will be difficult.

Regardless, no one can deny that a new cooperation mechanism, which is in total opposition to what is expected by Western countries, has been established with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus to seek a strategic connection with China's Belt and Road Initiative.

This point has been approved in the cooperation agreement signed by the two leaders that China and the union will jointly construct free trade zones. We can recall in 2003, China tried to push a free trade zone among Shanghai Cooperation Organization member countries, but didn't receive many positive responses.

If we look into the cooperation in the context of the China-Russia bilateral connection, the trade volume and investment scale dropped with the slowdown of China's economy and the downturn of Russia's economy. But we can see that long-term adjustments to the structure of economic cooperation have been made by two countries.

To have comprehensive coordination between China's initiatives and the EEU, there should be more countries involved, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian countries, instead of it becoming a pure China-Russia bilateral talk.

In the future, more patience and talks will be needed for China and the EEU countries. And during the process, trust and understanding will grow, and more fruitful results will be gained.

The author is deputy director of the Center for Russian Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 09/23/2016 page8)