It does not happen very often that a prime minister acts as a sherpa preparing the presidential visit. That is mainly the Foreign Minister's task. But that will be exactly the case when the Premier of the State Council of China Wen Jiabao will meet the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on September 24.
The Premier Wen will have to talk to a lot of Russian officials, including the Prime Minister Michail Fradkov at the "prime-ministerial" summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Bishkek on the eve of his trip to Moscow. But, contrarily to many wrong assessments, the SCO is not another name to the Russian-Chinese alliance - it is strictly about Central Asia. The Sino-Russian bilateral relations is a separate entity. And these are at a crucial stage right now, before the oncoming visit of the Russian President to China.
The sources at the Chinese capital are hinting that a lot of questions have to be asked and answered by both sides before the two leaders meet face to face. Nobody is expecting to have a completely clear picture on the future pipeline pumping the Russian oil in the Eastwards direction, but carefully editing that problem out of the summit's schedule would be next to impossible now, after so many delays and hazy messages. "Who's development you are going to feed with your oil - ours or China's?" That question, put by an American politologist at the elite Valdai discussion club North of Moscow, may seem to be a bit extreme - but such questions are what we are going to hear again and again until this hurdle in the Russia-China relations is being removed.
The coherent plans of development of the Russian Far East and Siberia is another problem that may turn into a business opportunity for both Russia and China - or a problem, if no such plans are in sight. North Korea as a model example of the Sino-Russian cooperation in global diplomacy will also be discussed at Wen-Putin's talks, possibly including a problem of what to do if the North really tries to test something that may pass for a nuclear device.
And last but not the least, according to the same sources, a kind of a breakthrough in the unexpectedly hard Sino-Russians talks on Moscow's WTO entry may be in a pipeline - although not necessary the oil pipeline to China.
The scope of problems to be discussed urgently on the eve of the presidential summit shows that the ties of the two countries are as big and complicated as the countries themselves. Ever since the landmark visit to China by Michail Gorbachev in the spring of 1989, which has restarted the Sino-Russian ties after almost 30 years of suspicions and conflicts, a lot of people in Moscow and Beijing have subconsciously been trying to get their relations back to the brilliant past, minus some obsolete ideas like "elder and younger brother". But in fact everything that began to happen between the two nations since that time on meant the creation of some very new bonds. Which supposes a lot of sailing in the unchartered waters. The end of the year 2004 may steer both countries through some particularly rough seas - into more unknown spaces.
