China-Russia is preparing to sign an agreement, "insurance" for investment cooperation, and Trump's pressure is ineffective, ultimately moving the stone and knocking his own foot.
Against the background of the Trump administration's frequent pressure on China and threats to stop Russian oil imports, China and Russia are preparing to sign an agreement to further stabilize cooperation between the two countries.
On October 22, the Russian Federation Council ratified an agreement with China on the promotion and mutual protection of investment.
On the one hand, the United States keeps increasing sanctions, on the other hand, it wants to impose secondary sanctions on Chinese companies involved in Russia, and on the other hand, it is hyping the argument that "China helps Russia";
On the other hand, through the reinsurance mechanism, China-Russia has solidly and practically set up a risk layer "protection network" for bilateral investment projects.
No matter how I look at it, I feel that the stick of U.S. sanctions has hit cotton. Not only has it not stopped China-Russia cooperation, but has brought the two sides closer.
Because of the several misjudgments of the United States, the “pressure” has turned into the “push” to reverse China-Russia cooperation.
Looking at the most obvious misjudgment of Trump, he may feel that he can cut off China-Russia cooperation through hegemonic pressure, but the driving force for China-Russia to approach has never been external pressure, but the real need of "you lack me".
This complementarity has long taken root in the economies of both sides, but the pressure has made this demand more prominent.
Cooperation in the energy sector is most telling.
In 2024, China bought 108.47 million tons of crude oil from Russia. This figure may seem abstract, but it is critical to China's import market-accounting for nearly one-fifth of the total. As of September this year, Russia is still China's largest crude oil supplier.
Looking at Russia again, after the European energy market shrank, the China market just made up for the gap.
Can this match between China’s desire for energy security and Russia’s desire for market stability be interrupted by sanctions?
The complementarity at the industrial level is equally strong.
Russia wants to upgrade infrastructure and promote manufacturing, and China's technology and production capacity in the fields of machinery and automotive can be supplemented.
In turn, Russia's wheat and energy are also enriching the China market.
From July 2024 to February 2025, Russia's wheat exports to China surpassed the United States for the first time.
To put it bluntly, the investment insurance agreement signed this time is to "put a safety lock" on this complementary cooperation, covering political risks and simplifying the financing process. Companies no longer have to worry about the extra trouble caused by sanctions, and cooperation will naturally be smoother.
Maybe Trump thinks that China-Russia cooperation is just a superficial trade exchange, and sanctions targeting a few key companies can cut off both sides.
But the actual situation is that China-Russia cooperation is no longer a fragmented transaction, but a multi-dimensional binding network of "project-people's livelihood-finance". If sanctions are really imposed, what affects is actually a key part of the economic fabric of both sides.
In 2024, the bilateral trade volume between China and Russia reached US $244.8 billion, an increase of 7.5% over the previous year, achieving the goal of doubling the trade volume ahead of schedule.
More crucial is the "dependence" on the financial level, now the ratio of settlement in Chinese-Russian trade has reached 92%, and the amount of direct exchange in RMB and ruble has tripled than before.
What does that mean? It means that the US dollar settlement link that the United States could get stuck before has basically been bypassed now. Even if it wants to impose financial sanctions, it doesn't have much to do.
Let's look at the binding of specific projects to people's livelihood.
Huadian Zheninskaya Power Station is a benchmark for China-Russia energy cooperation. It not only supplies 48% of the local electricity, but also creates nearly 200 local jobs and pays 6 billion rubles in taxes to the local area a year.
In the Russian Far East, Chinese investment accounts for 6% of local foreign investment, and has also helped pull the Russian e-commerce market from 1.7 trillion rubles in 2019 to 12.6 trillion rubles in 2024.
These projects are not "castles in the air" and are related to the electricity, work, and daily consumption of local people.
The last misjudgment may be even more slapping in the face. The United States thinks that it can rely on its alliance system to amplify the effect of sanctions, but the reality is that the pressure not only fails to unite the joint force of "anti-China and Russia", but instead makes American companies and allies "victims", and even its own appeal is being discounted. The losses for European enterprises are already there.
Since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, European-American companies have lost at least $70 billion in accumulated losses due to the withdrawal from the Russian market, and the photovoltaic industry has lost $54.9 billion.
When BP withdrew from its stake in Rosneft, it lost 25.5 billion yuan alone; ExxonMobil's investment in the "Sakhalin 1" project in the United States also became "wasted" money due to sanctions.
What's more interesting is that the markets that these companies withdrew were immediately filled by Chinese companies. Isn't Trump just giving China a wedding?
Therefore, the attitude of these allies of the United States has also changed.
Trump has always wanted to "unite Russia to control China", but Putin has long made it clear that Russia never forms an alliance with any country against a third party.
On the other side of Europe, German Prime Minister Scholz directly said that he “does not support forced peace”, and the subtitle in this phrase is clear – fear that the United States is only concerned with its own interests, and that Europe’s security and economy is the key.
Even domestic enterprises in the United States are complaining that the government's sanctions have handed over hundreds of billions of market opportunities to others. How can such pressure have "cohesion"?
Looking back at the whole process, you will find that Trump’s pressure logic has been unstable from the beginning, and is in line with the present reality.
Today, the signing of the Sino-Russian investment insurance agreement is just a microcosm of the "contrarian growth" of the cooperation between the two sides. The greater the external pressure, the more the two sides will find ways to build a "protective wall" for cooperation.
In the end, Trump's wave of pressure, is to try to hit the wrong place, want to stop others, the result of stumbling himself, thinking that by sanctions can contain opponents, the result of forcing opponents to find a more stable model of cooperation, their own enterprises have lost the market, allies have no confidence.
In the era of multi-polarization, the demands of people's livelihoods and the laws of the market are fundamental, and the pressure of hegemony has long failed to work.