China’s behaviour is becoming a problem not for only India and US, but also for its friends

Jammu, Aug 5: In the regular drumbeat of arrests of alleged Chinese spies, one case last month stood out.It did not intricate the United States or another rival of China, but Russia, whose security services accused a prominent arctic scientist of selling classified data on technologies for detecting submarines.

Meanwhile a court in Kazakhstan in October convicted the Central Asia nation’s preeminent China specialist of espionage, a move widely interpreted at the time as a warning against increased meddling by the superpower next door.

Both men maintain their innocence and if China is spying on Russia, Moscow is surely doing the same. Even so, the fact the two cases were made public suggests an more assertive China has become a concern for nations considered its partners, too.
Countries such as Russia, Iran and Kazakhstan need to still get the investment, trade and in some cases diplomatic support they want from Beijing, while preserving some economic independence and pursuing foreign policy goals that at times conflict.
“These are all fragile relationships,” James Dorsey, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said of the web of ties between China, Russia and Iran, plus Turkey. “They have been extremely good at finding common ground and managing differences, but it is very opportunistic.”

Most of the focus has been on China’s economic partners in the so-called Global West — from the US to Europe to Australasia — as they roll back once enthusiastic engagements amid growing alarm at President Xi Jinping’s heavy handed response to coronavirus, including the emergence of so-called wolf-warrior diplomacy, plus Beijing’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

The UK recently reversed a decision to let tech giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd build parts of the nation’s sensitive 5G networks, and suspended an extradition treaty with Hong Kong. France and Germany are pushing for greater scrutiny of foreign — especially Chinese — investment in the European Union, which last year labeled China a “systemic rival.” Supply chains are being shortened.

There’s no such recoil among China’s strategic partners. Russia is working with Huawei on a 5G rollout. Iran is trying to close a deal that would pledge $400 billion of Chinese investment, as well as arms sales, in exchange for discounted oil, according to as-yet unverified leaks of the draft agreement.
Russia doesn’t feel threatened itself, because right now China can ill-afford to alienate a neighbour that’s an important military and resource power in its own right, according to Vasily Kashin, a senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies.

Still, “Russia’s government and experts have of course noticed a significant change in Chinese diplomacy and behaviour, which sped up during the last several months and especially during the Covid-19 crisis,” Kashin says, adding there’s potential for China’s greater risk-taking to create problems in Russia’s relations with third countries. “We’re watching.”

Take India, Russia’s biggest market for arms sales, where fighting along a disputed border with China led to the deaths of at least 20 Indian troops in June, the worst such incident in four decades. While that flare-up has since moderated, “it’s quite possible that the new politics on the Chinese side contributed to the behaviour of Chinese commanders in the field,” Kashin says.Iran, India, Russia and Azerbaijan this year took two essential steps toward completing the long delayed International North South Transport Corridor — a Belt and Road-style initiative of their own — for a ship-and-rail cargo route from India to Northern Russia.

That corridor would also connect Kazakhstan, often described by China as the “buckle” in the Belt and Road Initiative. Even so, the Kazakh government found itself on the receiving end of the wolf warrior diplomacy that has emerged from some Chinese embassies since the pandemic. Most recently, the embassy in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan’s capital, claimed an unknown pneumonia more deadly than Covid-19 had broken out in the country.

Tensions were already growing last year over what China saw as Kazakhstan’s harboring of some Muslims who had escaped across the border from Xinjiang’s Uighur re-education camps. Then came the arrest and conviction for espionage of Konstantin Syroyezhkin, a China specialist at the Kazakh presidency’s Institute for Strategic Research.