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Hu and Putin: Birds of a Feather
By MARTIN SIEFF, Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 (UPI)-- "Birds of a feather stick together." President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Vice President Hu Jintao of China fulfilled the truth of that old saying this weekend.

The leaders of the world's largest nation in area — Russia — and its largest nation in population — China — appear to have gotten on splendidly when they met for 90 minutes in Moscow Saturday.

So eager was Hu to make contact with putin that he traveled by motorcade straight to the Kremlin from Sheremetovo Airport as soon as he landed. Both men took pains to shower praise on each other and on the strategic cooperation between their vast nations that, between them, dominate Eurasia.

U.S. coverage of the Putin-Hu meeting was largely superficial and casual, overshadowed by the growing military conflict in Afghanistan. Putin and Hu in fact discussed Afghanistan, and the kind of regime they would like to see installed there if the United States succeeds in its goal of toppling the Muslim extremist Taliban who rule the country now, according to Putin's deputy chief of staff Sergei Prokhidko. But he made clear they talked about a lot of other things as well.

As Putin and Hu met, thousands of miles to the east the Chinese parliament was formally ratifying a sweeping new Russian-Chinese Friendship Pact that Putin and Hu's boss, President Jiang Zemin, agreed upon in July.

The previous month, in June, Putin and jiang, meeting with four Central Asian presidents in Shanghai, launched an important new Shanghai Pact strategic and military cooperation organization. Its clearly expressed purpose was to prevent any other power-- in other words, the United States — from dominating the Eurasian heartland.

The Shanghai Pact and the Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation against the United States it embodies has been largely ignored or even derided by American commentators in recent weeks, as Putin has hastened to help the Bush administration deploy its military forces in Central Asia to topple the Taliban for protecting Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization.

The U.S. government holds bin Laden and al Qaeda responsible for the Sept. 11 slaughter of thousands of Americans in the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City.

Many conservative U.S. commentators have even stated as fact that China has received a stinging geopolitical setback by Putin's alliance with the United States and that it has left Beijing more isolated than in many years. There appears to have been in any case no real evidence to support such wishful thinking. But the warm reception putin gave Hu gave the lie to it anyway.

Putin has many reasons for seeking cooperation with the United States and different, more fundamental ones for improving his ties with the nations of Western Europe. But he has made clear that neither move will be at the expense of Russia's relations with China. And increasingly that, means, with Hu.

At age 58, Hu is 17 years younger than Jiang and is expected to smoothly succeed him as Communist Party leader at the party's 16th Congress next year, and then to take over the formal reins of government as president the following year in 2003.

If he does that, he will be following in Putin's footsteps in serving as the highly effective, but self-effacing and low profile deputy of an aging leader before sliding smoothly into power as his annointed successor.

In fact, the parallels and common bonds between the two men go far further.

Hu is around a decade older than putin. But in general they are of the same generation. Both men rose as the heirs of grandstanding, aging leaders who were in general pro-Western. Hu has remained a man in the shadows as far as Western experts and diplomats are concerned, even after rising to the number two post of the world's most populous nation.

Putin was virtually unknown in the West when Yeltsin plucked him from obscurity in St. Petersburg, Russia's second city, to occupy key posts including ultimately head of the Federal security Service, the FSB, and then as his last prime minister.

Hu and Putin are both economic and social policy pragmatists. They are far from being communist ideological true believers. But they also believe that unrestrained free market capitalism can prove destructive for their respective countries. They are also both advocates of centralized authoritarian rule and of creating a strong nationalist identity to hold together their respective vast nations together. And they both resent and fear the global domination of the United States.

Hu and Putin are both cautious pragmatists. Both of them look unlikely to turn the clock back to hard-line economic communist policies in both great nations. Both are tough and able authoritarians who had extensive experience of repressing dissent on their rise to the top. Putin's career until the collapse of communism was a rising officer in the KGB, the Soviet secret police and intelligence service. Hu made giant career strides for his energy and effectiveness in crushing anti-Chinese protests in Tibet in 1988-89.

Both of them succeeded leaders who were obsessed by either maintaining the support or avoiding the anger of the United States, the overwhelming global superpower of the 1990s. Both of them have a far more cautious, detached and potentially hostile attitude towards America. Putin before Sept. 11 had worked with great energy and skill to diplomatically detach the nations of Western Europe from the United States.

Hu on his first trip as a major Chinese leader to the West is pointedly ignoring the United States but is taking nearly two weeks to visit the major nations of Western Europe.

Putin and Hu are both patriots concerned with dealing with the massive domestic economic and social problems they face. Putin inherited a Russia in crisis and literal demographic collapse. Two years after he became prime minister, his country appears to be cautiously recovering and, indeed, possibly beginning its most substantive economic upswing in a quarter of a century, since the death of Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin.

Hu, by contrast, may inherit a China which after two decades of unparalleled economic growth at the astonishing average rate of 8 percent a year appears to be on the brink of massive economic crisis and social upheaval.

Putin has stepped up Russian military spending, especially on the regular army, reversing the pattern of the Yeltsin years when scarce resources were poured into maintaining the Strategic Rocket Forces but the Army was allowed to wither on the vine. Hu too has focused on building military power, using the powerful platform of China's Central Military Commission, on which he sits as its vice president and dominating figure.

Hu and Putin are both deeply worried about problems of democracy and national self-determination plunging their giant nations into chaos. Both of them fear that U.S. efforts to spread democracy, free speech and concepts of national self determination throughout Eurasia could set off a firestorm of destabilizing secession movements in the remoter areas of their vast nations.

But both of them have also sought excellent relations with Iraq and Iran in part for reasons of economic gain but above all to counter-balance U.S. influence in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Even in their personalities, Putin and Hu are remarkably alike. They are both quiet, self-effacing men in their public personas. But both of them have repeatedly shown ambition, exceptional administrative ability and quiet, shrewd, even masterful political skills in their rise to the top.

Both of them have both very misleading been described as gray and colorless men. In fact, they are, rather, discreet and prudent ones. Both of them rose up in systems — the KGB for Putin and the Chinese Communist Party for Hu — that were authoritarian, anti-democratic and prone to conspiracy theory interpretations of the way the world worked. And both of them were filled with conspiracies of their own that ambitious men had to master and survive in order to rise to leadership.

Putin in Russia had spent years in East Germany, watching the West, as a rising officer in the Soviet KGB intelligence service. But Hu has never traveled in Europe or North America. Unlike earlier generations of Chinese Communist party leaders like former Premier Li Peng, he never studied in the Soviet Union either.

In Hu's case, his longstanding familiarity with poor regions in the west of China that were left out of the southern and coastal regions free market boom of the 1980s and 1990s seem to have left him with a distrust of putting the same kind of faith in unregulated free market growth that Deng and Zhu did. Putin has moved to strengthen the central government at the expense of the billionaire oligarchs who ran rampant under Yeltsin.

Putin took power in 1999 a year after the rampant speculative financial bubble of post-communist Russia collapse in August 1998. Hu faces the danger that he may take power as the Shanghai banking sector collapses on a scale that would dwarf the Moscow crisis of three years ago.

Putin won popularity as a stabilizing figure who cared, or appeared to care, about the well-being of ordinary people after years of inflation and and rampant greed by the country's movers and shakers. If China topples into fiscal and economic crisis, Hu may seek to consolidate power on a bandwagon of party and popular disillusionment with the free market policies of the past 20 years.

Putin has repeatedly said his greatest challenge is to improve ordinary people's living conditions in order to reverse Russia's vanishing birth rate and appallingly high death rates. Hu, like Deng Xiaoping before him, is concerned about improving the standard of living of poor peasants in China's vast hinterland. Unlike Deng, he does not believe unregulated economic growth is the way to do it.

Hu and Putin even share similar traits on the world stage. Unlike the extroverted jiang and Yeltsin, they are low key, even shy. Yet beneath that misleadingly self-effacing veneer, both men are inwardly confident and forceful, energetic and aggressive.

Putin represents a superpower on the rebound from more than a decade of disastrous slump. Hu is coming to the fore in a rapidly rising potential superpower with stormy challenges just ahead. The bond between them appears to be a strong one. They have far more in common with each other than either of them has with U.S. President George W. Bush.

Between them, they rule almost a quarter of the human race stretching over well over a sixth of the land service of the planet and 11 of its 24 time zones. The destiny of billions beyond their borders may in large part depend in how well they get on, and in what direction they chose to lead their vast nations, especially if they do it together.

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