Capping off a summit dominated by shared suspicions of U.S. motives and resentment of American global influence, Jiang and Putin put in writing their mutual antipathy to U.S. plans to build anti-missile defenses to protect North America and Asia. The document also slammed U.S. plans to build a TMD system in Asia, which China fears cover Taiwan. China regards Taiwan as a rebel province and has threatened to invade if the island declares independence or drags its feet on reunification talks. The joint Chinese-Russian statement comes just after last week's visit to China by Defense Secretary William Cohen to put back on track military ties frozen after NATO's bombing of the Beijing embassy in Belgrade last year. The United States has urged Putin, who flies Wednesday to North Korea on the first visit by any Russian or Soviet leader to the Stalinist state, to press Pyongyang about its missile program.
China says Washington exaggerates the North Korean missile threat.
The coziness of ties between Jiang and Putin was underscored by a closed-door which ran nearly double the allotted one hour and opened with banter in Russian. Opposition to the U.S. anti-missile schemes and a mutual desire to check American influence appeared to be the glue binding the two nuclear powers as the leaders met for the second time this month, following a summit in Tajikistan. Beijing and Moscow have found further common ground in opposition to international intervention in domestic conflicts on humanitarian grounds, as it happened last year in Kosovo. The two countries, which have frequently joined hands at the United Nations to back Iraq and Yugoslavia, are both keen to counterbalance U.S. influence over world affairs. Both China and Russia have been targets of Western criticism over their human rights records, especially in Chechnya and Tibet.