Interdependencies

Cambridge University Press eBooks, pp. 99–122

Abstract

Chapter 4 focused on leaders’ attributes and dispositions to demonstrate the incompleteness of rationalist explanations for Sino-Russian gas interdependence variations. The chapter presented evidence of significant trends. In 2014, Russia and China concluded a thirty-year, $400 billion deal to ship Russian gas to China. The chapter emphasizes the importance of historically contextualizing such turning moments and deals of large geopolitical value. Second, the culmination of Sino-Russian gas cooperation in 2014 was undergirded by important personal relationships between Presidents Putin and Xi and between Russian and Chinese corporate partners. The chapter highlights the role of political entrepreneurs to shape worldviews. The international and domestic contexts in which states are embedded shape their societies’ identities in powerful ways. It suggests how China’s rapid adoption of net-zero targets fits a broader normative turn in global climate governance and Russian gas is bound to play a bridge role in Beijing’s low-carbon future. Finally, it considered the war in Ukraine and the further deepening of Sino-Russian gas trade.

Authors 1

1. Morena Skalamera corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University