The barely disguised secret is that India’s economy, as the historical record shows, is inherently protectionist. There’s no way a possible removal of agricultural tariffs protecting farmers would not provoke a social cataclysm....The Vineyard of the Saker
The Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok has become a crucial part of strategic integration between China, Russia and other countries in northeast Asia, a graduation assimilation set to transform the current world system…
Contrary to misinformed or manipulated Western hysteria, the current Vostok war games in the Russian Far East’s Trans-Baikal, including 3,000 Chinese troops, are just a section of the much deeper, complex Russia-China strategic partnership. This is all about a matryoshka: the war game is a doll inside the geoeconomic game.
In ‘China and Russia: The New Rapprochement’, Alexander Lukin, from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, lays down the roadmap in detail; the evolving, Eurasia-wide economic partnership is part of a much larger, comprehensive concept of “Greater Eurasia”. This is the core of the Russia-China entente, leading to what political scientist Sergey Karaganov has dubbed, “a common space for economic, logistic and information cooperation, peace and security from Shanghai to Lisbon and from New Delhi to Murmansk.”
Without understanding the Big Picture enveloping debates such as the annual gathering in Vladivostok, it’s impossible to understand how the progressive integration of BRI, EAEU, SCO, ASEAN, BRICS and BRICS Plus is bound to irreversibly change the current world-system.
The figures quoted above are certainly not yet indicative of a booming Southeast Asian presence on the Russian market. But these examples do demonstrate an important trend. The roles of Russia and its ASEAN partners are not what they used to be or at least not what we perceived them to be. When thinking about these relations we usually use a mindset where Russian policy towards the countries of Southeast Asia is in focus. We seek the reasons for underdeveloped ties in the fallacies of official Russian external action. Well, it seems that this has to change.
With great economic difficulties at hand and help from the developed West unlikely, Moscow might as well start thinking of itself as an object of action on behalf of Southeast Asian countries. In private discussions and even in some public speeches Vietnamese scholars and civil servants are bluntly pondering the idea that Russia’s economic woes are a chance for Southeast Asia to take a bite of the Russian markets, particularly in the areas where local producers are not very competitive.Russia's Asian pivot is more than just toward China. European business people musts be having heartburn watching the Russian market slipping away from them due to sanctions, a sour political climate, and Russia's consequent pivot away from Europe toward import substitution and emerging nations of the Global South and import substitution.
For decades, Asian states were seen from Moscow merely as a marketplace for Russian arms, hydrocarbons and machinery exports. This created a certain image for the relations as those of a great power and lesser-developed recipients of technology. Seems that this is no longer the case and Russia can benefit greatly from the growing capabilities of the ASEAN countries in terms of capital exports.…
Sun said the ASEAN which has a population of 600 million, of which 66% are at the age of 15-64, and most are educated, is well qualified to be the world’s next factory.
Viewed as an economic region, ASEAN is now the tenth largest consumer market in the world and its consumption now is about 46% of China.
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into ASEAN grew at an average annual 25% over the ten years from 2002 to 2011, far exceeding the 11% annual growth seen in China.Caijing (CN)
