The Xi-Putin meetings, with Maria Repnikova

This week, a bonus episode to keep you caught up on the week's biggest China story: Xi Jinping's two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maria Repnikova, a Latvian-born native Russian speaker who is also fluent in Chinese and who teaches Chinese politics and communications at Georgia State University, joins the show again to talk about what each side hoped for, what each side got, and the asymmetries of power on conspicuous display in Moscow.

1:53 – Does Beijing look at the Ukraine War and still see the United States, as Maria argued last year?

3:06 – How Xi and Putin spoke to their own domestic audiences, and to each other’s

4:43 – How the Xi-Putin meeting was viewed in the Global South

8:10 – Why was the elephant in the room go mostly unremarked upon?

10:27 – Junior partner, senior partner, and “optionality”

16:27 – Did Putin come away disappointed from the meeting?

18:03 – How did China’s peace framework come off in the West vs. in China?

21:11 – What might the United States have done differently — and what might it still do to prevent China from drifting too close to Russia?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Maria: Solomon Elusoji, Travelling with Big Brother: A Reporter’s Junket in China

Kaiser: The Polish progressive rock band Riverside, and its latest album ID.Entity

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