China warming to new Russian mega gas pipeline
China's interest in the construction of Russia's proposed Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which would deliver gas via Mongolia, has intensified following the outbreak of the conflict between Iran and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources in Beijing.
The planned mega pipeline would allow up to 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas to be delivered annually from northern Russia to China via Mongolia.
The report said that the recent Iran-Israel conflict has raised concerns within the Chinese government about the reliability of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East, prompting policymakers to explore alternative energy sources.
China imports about 30% of its gas as LNG from Qatar and the UAE through the Strait of Hormuz – a route for about 20% of the world's oil – which Iran has threatened to close in response to the US strikes.
Chinese 'teapot' refineries have also grown reliant on discounted Iranian crude, with analysts estimating that over 90% of Tehran's oil exports now go to China – despite US sanctions aimed at curbing the country's oil sales abroad.
'The escalation of the Middle East tensions underscores the severe consequences of a potential blockade in the Strait of Hormuz,' Wei Xiong, head of China gas research at Rystad told the outlet. A blockade of the chokepoint could trigger a major shift in Beijing's LNG supply, with the country 'moving from being over-contracted to supply deficit.'
Even with a ceasefire, the recent conflict has prompted Beijing to seek alternative energy sources, according to analysts and officials. China is also looking to increase oil imports from Russia, which already supplies about a fifth of its crude to its neighbor. Moscow, in turn, is pursuing the project as it seeks to diversify its energy export markets amid Western sanctions and reduced European demand.
The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline is seen in Beijing as a strategic move to further diversify supplies and strengthen energy security in the face of rising geopolitical uncertainty, the report says.
'The volatility and unpredictability of the military situation have shown the Chinese leadership that a stable land-based pipeline supply has geopolitical benefits,' the outlet cited Aleksander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and an expert on China-Russia relations, as saying. 'Russia could benefit from that.'
China is seeking closer ties with Russia as the White House signals efforts to drive a wedge between the two nations, according to sources familiar with Beijing's policymaking. Economic cooperation has continued to grow despite sweeping Western sanctions, with bilateral trade reaching a record $245 billion in 2024.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Russia Today
4 hours ago
- Russia Today
NATO boss calls Trump ‘daddy'
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has rushed to defend US President Donald Trump's recent expletive-laden rant about Iran and Israel as merely 'daddy' using 'strong language.' Trump on Tuesday lashed out at both countries for allegedly breaching a Washington-brokered ceasefire, telling reporters before departing for the NATO summit in the Hague that West Jerusalem and Tehran have 'been fighting so long and so hard that they do not know what the f**k they are doing.' The outburst came hours after he announced the truce, which was reportedly broken soon after by both Israel and Iran. Asked about the remark during a joint press conference the next day, Trump likened the two nations to 'kids (fighting) in a schoolyard.' Rutte, seated beside him, added: 'And then daddy has to, sometimes, use strong language.' When a reporter later brought up the comment, Trump laughed and replied, 'Daddy – you're my daddy,' saying that the NATO chief had meant it 'affectionately.' 'I think he likes me, if he doesn't, I'll come back and hit him hard,' Trump joked. Rutte's flattery wasn't limited to the stage. Ahead of the summit, Trump published private text messages in which a fawning Rutte praised the US president's 'decisive action in Iran' as 'truly extraordinary' and said it 'makes us all safer.' He went on to tell Trump, 'You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,' and boasted that 'Europe is going to pay BIG.' A NATO spokesperson later confirmed the authenticity of the exchange. Rutte also used the summit itself to back Trump's controversial push for NATO members to more than double their military spending to 5% of GDP. At Wednesday's press conference, he called Trump 'a good friend' and said he 'deserves all the praise' for forcing the issue. Asked by a reporter whether such overt admiration made him look weak, Rutte brushed it off: 'I don't think so. I think it's a bit of a question of taste.'
Russia Today
4 hours ago
- Russia Today
SPIEF 2025: Russia takes on the West's biggest obsession
When Russian President Vladimir Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week that the world needs 'a new model of global growth,' many Western commentators heard only a familiar plea: lift the sanctions, drop the tariffs, stop using trade as a geopolitical cudgel. Important as those points are, they miss the larger ambition. Even if every punitive measure vanished tomorrow, the world economy would simply roll back to its early-2000s setting – fresh paint on an old engine. Putin's challenge cuts deeper: capitalism's traditional 'produce more, consume more' logic has hit its planetary and social limits, and Moscow is calling time on the illusion that endless expansion can continue unopposed. Since the first steam engines hissed into life in the 18th century, national success has been measured by rising GDP and swelling personal consumption. That linear model delivered astonishing gains –but it never cracked the problem of inequality. The gap between North and South stubbornly yawns; within many countries, the gulf between penthouse and pavement only widens. The promise that 'a rising tide lifts all boats' rings hollow for the majority still paddling in the shallows. Even starker are the material constraints. The capitalist appetite is infinite; the planet's resources are not. If the next three billion people push their consumption up to Western middle-class levels, our biosphere simply will not cope. Climate stress, ecological degradation and resource scarcity are already obvious. They will only intensify. Putin's 'leap into the future' therefore means more than de-weaponizing trade. It means replacing quantity-obsessed growth with what he called rationalization of consumption and production – a shift from bigger to better, from accumulation to sustainability. This is not a call for universal sackcloth or forced equalization. Eradicating poverty, ensuring food and energy security, and meeting basic human needs remain non-negotiable. But raw GDP will decline as a yardstick. A state's success will increasingly be judged by life expectancy, educational quality, environmental health, cultural vibrancy, scientific breakthroughs, social cohesion and the absence of corrosive political divides. That list is hardly utopian. Many governments already compile 'well-being indices' alongside budget spreadsheets. What Russia is urging is a coordinated effort – within BRICS, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union and beyond – to turn those indicators into shared development targets. Sceptics ask how any economy can thrive without relentless material churn. The answer lies, partly, in the very technologies now unsettling labor markets. Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, sixth-generation mobile networks and other breakthroughs are stripping out drudgery. They free people to pursue creative, scientific, and community-building roles – activities that enrich societies without battering the biosphere. The new growth model, in short, prizes human potential over disposable products. It values the software of civilization more than the hardware of mass consumption. That change will not come overnight, nor without friction. But the alternative is to race ever faster toward ecological overshoot and social fracture. Transitions of this scale can be smooth or cataclysmic. The best chance of an orderly shift is deliberate, multilateral coordination: • Trade that respects limits. Countries must keep markets open while discouraging wasteful, environmentally destructive patterns of demand and supply. • Shared modernization road-maps. National development plans – Russia's, China's, India's, Brazil's – should align where possible, exchanging technology and policy know-how to accelerate sustainable goals. • Cultural cross-pollination. A 'new Comintern,' as State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin once quipped, need not advance ideology but could champion anti-colonial, post-Western cultural dialogue – film, literature, research, education – that diversifies global narratives. BRICS, the SCO and the EAEU already possess the demographic and economic heft to pilot such experiments. They represent most of the world's population, a majority of global growth, and regions where consumption is still rising fastest. If these blocs can demonstrate that higher living standards need not equal higher emissions or deeper inequality, the model will sell itself. Critics in Washington, London, and Brussels dismiss Moscow's pitch as cover for its own geopolitical battles. Yet the underlying logic – finite resources, intolerable inequality, technological disruption – matches concerns voiced daily in Davos, at UN climate summits, and in IMF working papers. The difference is that Russia frames the problem as systemic, not managerial. Tinkering with carbon taxes or supply-chain 'friend-shoring' is cosmetic if the growth engine itself demands perpetual overdrive. From St. Petersburg, Putin's message was blunt: chasing an ever-rising output curve is obsolete. The 21st century will belong to states that balance reasonable sufficiency with genuine human flourishing – and that resist the temptation to weaponize economics when domestic politics falter. Building that world will test every government's ingenuity. But the alternative is a planet where growth's winners barricade themselves against a majority left behind and a climate tipping toward instability. Russia says a different path is possible. The question is whether the rest of the world is ready to step onto it – or whether we will keep sprinting along a road we know ends at a article was first published by Izvestia newspaper, and was translated and edited by the RT team.
Russia Today
5 hours ago
- Russia Today
Trump compares Iran strike to Hiroshima
President Donald Trump has compared recent US airstrikes on Iran to its World War II atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking to reporters at the NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday, Trump claimed the US strikes on Iran effectively ended their hostilities with Israel. 'I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don't want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war,' he said. 'If we didn't take that out, they would have been, they'd be fighting right now,' the US president added. Trump blasted 'fake news' for allegedly diminishing the impact of the US bombing of Iran. 'You have some great reporters, but you have scum,' he said, pointing the finger at CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times. 'They're bad people. They're sick.' The US carried out unprecedented strikes on three major Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend, supporting Israel in its 12-day campaign against Iran. Trump has since announced a ceasefire between the two sides and declared the facilities 'totally obliterated.' Iran denies that its civil domestic nuclear program was destroyed, and insists that it will continue using the technology for peaceful purposes. On Tuesday, multiple outlets cited a classified, preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report that said the US airstrikes may have only set the Iranian nuclear program back by months. According to CNN, which referenced sources familiar with the intelligence, Iran's underground centrifuges used to enrich uranium remained largely intact. The assessment also reportedly indicated that Tehran's stockpile of fissile material was likely relocated to secure locations before the strikes. The Islamic Republic will reconsider its stance on Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty cooperation, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said. As '20 years of transparency and trust-building regarding Iran's peaceful nuclear program have not yielded positive results,' the issue needs to be considered, he told the New Arab in an interview. Tehran has devoted significant effort toward its peaceful nuclear energy program, and will not stop developing it, the top diplomat said.
