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As Chinese president Jiang Zemin put it, this treaty will "enhance efforts to build a multipolar world and establish a fair, rational international order." He means a world where the U.S. cannot simply impose its preferences on others. We should therefore expect to see Russia and China coordinate their own policies in ways that will limit our own freedom of action.

This is the status quo argument. However, China has no intention of establishing a multipolar world. They have intentions of establishing a China, India and Japan relationship. In Turkmenistan, Japan is investing in oil and gas along with China.

Russia is the one that is pushing for a multipolar concept. China will not have anything to do with this.

Countering China’s Strategic Encirclement of India

Russia and China have recently entered into a new strategic partnership for peace, ending three decades of bitterness and distrust fostered by ideological confrontation and the Sino-Soviet border war. While Russia advocates a new multi-polar world order based on a Russia-China-India triangle for peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and to counter United States (US) domination of the emerging world order, the Chinese view is that only the US, Russia and China are real global powers and that in the Asia-Pacific region, security and stability should be based on a China-India-Japan triangle [1]. Exhibiting Russian determination to play a greater geo-strategic role and to counter what it perceives as increasing US hegemony, the then Russian Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov had offered to form a "strategic triangle" along with India and China during his talks with the Indian Prime Minister at New Delhi in December 1998. While India responded in a luke warm manner to the proposal, China dismissed it out of hand.