What will China want to talk about during Vladimir Putin’s state visit?
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to China is part of the great power politics currently being played out between the West and the global south.
In this arena, China’s President Xi Jinping is promoting his multipolar view of the world, a realignment of the world’s geopolitical centre away from the US and Europe, to Asia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, China. Sputnik/Sergei Bobylev/Pool via Reuters
Xi sees China front and centre on the stage, with a coterie of countries to back him up.
China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are at one end of the spectrum, but widen out the view and there is also Brazil, India and South Africa, who all see the world through a lens at odds with the West.
Added to that is the so-called “no-limits” friendship between Russia and China. It has been tested to the limit as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. But there is no sign China has any plan to abandon its neighbour.
So what will China want to talk about?
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First, the Russia-Ukraine war. China is under growing pressure from the US and Europe to rein in exports of dual-use items like semiconductors and machinery tools that Russia can use on the battlefield.
But if China is feeling the heat, you wouldn’t know it. Its exports to Russia surged last year. The way Xi Jinping sees it, Russia is another market for China’s export driven economy, and with Western companies banned from doing business with Russia, China has stepped in to take advantage of it.
China is also resisting pressure from the West to use its leverage to force Mr Putin to wind down the war.
While President Xi doesn’t want to see Russia in the grip of collapse, after all they share a 2,500-mile-long border, a long, grinding war in Ukraine has benefits for China.
It drains European energy and resources, distracts the US and allows China to get on with its territorial claims in Asia and its ambition to dominate international trade in EVs, solar panels and batteries.
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In this Sino-Russian relationship, China has the upper hand. It’s receiving cheap raw materials from Russia and paying 30% less for natural gas than Europe did before the war. China is calling the shots.
While Mr Putin and Mr Xi have an enduring friendship, this alignment is a thorn in the side for the West. But there seems little Europe and the US can do about it. Threats aren’t working, sanctioning Chinese banks might.
For Beijing, it’s all about balance. China needs the US and Europe to remain open to its exports. So far, it has been able to have it all. However, it’s becoming increasingly untenable for the West to stand by while China stands with Russia.
A time may yet come when President Xi Jinping is forced to make a choice.
A woman walks up to the security guards outside a shuttered USAID-funded sexual health clinic in Johannesburg’s inner-city district.
She looks around with confusion as they let her know the clinic is closed.
She tells us it has only been two months since she came here to receive her usual care.
Now, she must scramble to find another safe place for her sexual health screenings and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) – her regular defence against rampant HIV.
On the day he was sworn in as US president for a second time, Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid for a 90-day period.
That is being challenged by federal employee unions in court over what it says are “unconstitutional and illegal actions” that have created a “global humanitarian crisis”.
However the order is already having an immediate impact on South Africa’s most vulnerable.
Her eyes tear up as she processes the news. Like many sex workers in town, free sexual health clinics are her lifeline.
An HIV-positive sex worker shared her patient transfer letter from the same closed clinic with Sky News and told us with panic that she is still waiting to be registered at an alternative facility.
South Africa is home to one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics. At least 8.5 million people here are living with HIV – a quarter of all cases worldwide.
Widespread, free access to antiretroviral treatment in southern Africa was propelled by the introduction of George W. Bush’s US President Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003.
PEPFAR is considered one of the most successful foreign aid programmes in history, and South Africa is the largest recipient of its funds.
A sign for USAID on the clinic’s window
A shuttered USAID-funded sexual health clinic in Johannesburg
The programme has now been halted by President Trump’s foreign aid funding freeze – plunging those who survived South Africa’s HIV epidemic and AIDS denialism in the early 2000s back to a time of scarcity and fear.
“That time, there was no medication. The government would tell us to take beetroot and garlic. It was very difficult for the government to give us treatment but we fought very hard to win this battle. Now, the challenge is that we are going back to the struggle,” says Nelly Zulu, an activist and mother living with HIV in Soweto.
Nelly says access to free treatment has saved her and her 21-year-old son, who tested positive for HIV at four years old.
“It helped me so much because if I didn’t get the treatment, I don’t think I would be alive – even my son.
“My concern is for pregnant women. I don’t want them to go through what I went through – the life I was facing before. I’m scared we will go back to that crisis.”
Nelly Zulu, an activist and mother living with HIV
South African civil society organisations have written a joint open letter calling for their government to provide a coordinated response to address the healthcare emergency created by the US foreign aid freeze.
The letter states that close to a million patients living with HIV have been directly impacted by stop-work orders and that a recent waiver by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio continuing life-saving assistance explicitly excludes “activities that involve abortions, family planning, gender or diversity, equality and inclusion ideology programmes, transgender surgeries or other non-life saving assistance”.
The shuttered clinic we saw in Johannesburg’s central business district (CBD) comes under these categories – built by Witwatersrand University to research reproductive health and cater to vulnerable and marginalised communities.
An activist and healthcare worker at a transgender clinic tells us everyone she knows is utterly afraid.
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USAID in turmoil: What you need to know
“Corner to corner, you hear people talking about this. There are people living with chronic diseases who don’t have faith anymore because they don’t know where they are ending up,” says Ambrose, a healthcare worker and activist.
“People keep asking corner to corner – ‘why don’t you go here, why don’t you go there?’ People are crying – they want to be assisted.”
South Africa’s ministry of health insists that only 17% of all HIV/AIDs funding comes from PEPFAR but that statistic is offset by the palpable disruption.
On Monday, minister of health Dr Aaron Motsoaledi met to discuss bilateral health cooperation and new US policy for assistance with US charge d’affaires for South Africa, Dana Brown.
A statement following the meeting says: “Communication channels are open between the Ministry and the Embassy, and we continue to discuss our life-saving health partnership moving forward.
“Until details are available the minister called on all persons on antiretrovirals (ARVs) to under no circumstances stop this life-saving treatment.”
A demand much harder to execute than declare.
“There is already a shortage of the medication – even if you ask for three months’ treatment, they will give you one or two months worth then you have to go back,” says Nelly.
“Now, it is worse because you can see the funding has been cut off.”
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