China has no plans of seeking global leadership, the country’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said on Tuesday, pointing to a wrong interpretation by some media outlets of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s remarks about Russian-Chinese relations.
Some media quoted Putin as saying in his interview with three Russian federal TV channels broadcast on Monday that “Russia, unlike China, is not seeking global leadership.”
“We noticed that the media reports differ from the original text of the interview,” the spokesman said. “In fact, Putin stressed that China is Russia’s strategic partner and that he was satisfied with [our] cooperation.”
“China has neither the intention, nor the energy to struggle for global leadership,” he added.
In his interview, which took place just days after his visit to China, Putin said “China is certainly one of our most serious partners, which we can legitimately without any exaggeration consider and name a strategic partner.”
When asked by the director general of the NTV channel whether China could be viewed as a “threat” to Russia, Putin said: “I told those who have been trying to frighten us with the Chinese threat (those are mainly our Western partners) many times: in the modern world, no matter how attractive East Siberian and Far Eastern mineral resources are, the main struggle is not for them. The main struggle is for global leadership, and we are not going to argue with China here. China has other competitors here. Let them deal with this themselves.”
“For us, China is a partner, a reliable partner,” he went on. “And we see the readiness and willingness of the Chinese leadership and Chinese people to build friendly, neighborly relations with us and look for compromises on the most acute issues.”
