Putin Visit to China Shows Potential; Now They Need the LaRouche Plan

Economic cooperation between China and Russia, including joint projects to develop Russia's vast northeast Asian mineral resources and joint construction of high-speed rail projects in eastern Russia, are being discussed during Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's three-day visit to China, which began Oct. 12. Putin will also attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization heads of government meeting on Oct. 14.

Lyndon LaRouche has often pointed to the economic potential of this region, and the necessity of using the most advanced technologies to exploit the huge mineral reserves, as well as the necessity of building infrastructure projects such as the Bering Straits tunnel, which would expand Eurasian projects into intercontinental ones. In addition, the extreme weather and geological conditions of much of this huge region present useful scientific challenges. As LaRouche has emphasized, it will be necessary to achieve a Four Power agreement of sovereign nations to dump the bankrupt current financial system, to ensure there is credit for such development.

Russia and China certainly are not anywhere near there yet, but the agenda of Putin's China visit points to what the world should be doing.

On Sunday, China's Global Times reported that Putin "wants a high-speed rail system," and wants China to help him build it, noting that Putin and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will sign a memorandum to do just that. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union had helped China build railways, Zhou Shijian, senior researcher at the Institute of Sino-U.S. Relations at Tsinghua University, told Global Times. "Now, it's our turn to help them build railways," Zhou said. China has developed trains which can travel at 350 kph, and a new train that can run on both normal and special high-speed track.

Among the 34 agreements worth $5.5 billion that will be signed, are deals in natural gas, oil, and nuclear power, including constructing the Sino-Russian crude-oil pipeline, and joint projects in transport, infrastructure, construction and mineral extraction.

An article published Monday in the Russian business daily Vedomosti announced that a comprehensive document, the "Russia-China 2018 Co-operation Program," for building 205 joint projects in the Russian Far East, west Siberia and the northeast China, was approved by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao in New York Sept. 23. The article was datelined Vladivostok, where Putin stopped on his way to Beijing. There, he announced that construction of new infrastructure to ready the city for the 2012 APEC summit, was making Vladivostok Russia's "Pacific Gate," and was creating tens of thousands of jobs.

The critical problem with the 2018 program, as Vedomosti correctly pointed out, is that it keeps Russia locked into exporting raw materials, in what President Medvedev has called a "primitive economy."