IMHO, Xi does a lot of "fence sitting". If you look at China, the CCP was originally created by Rothschild money. It was that funding that provided Mao Zedong with the weapons to overthrow imperial China. If you want to know who is behind a coup d'etat, look no further than the banking system that's immediately set up afterwards. In Libya even before Muammar Gaddafi was impaled and murdered, a Rothschild bank was set up in Benghazi. It was a dead giveaway as to fomented the coup. China is no different. If you look at the list of nations having Rothschild national banks, China is one of them. What does this mean when China is also a member of BRICS? That question has puzzled me for a long time. To me, Xi would love to throw down the Rothschild banking system because it has controlled China financially from the start. BRICS seems to play as an option for using leverage against the Rothschild banking system. This way China is in a much more favorable position for success. China's relationship with Russia is pretty much the same way. It is only out of necessity that China has any military relations with Russia at all. In fact, the same border disputes China has with India and all other conterminous nations also exists with Russia. China uses its relationship with Russia as leverage against the Rothschild's Anglosphere of influence. It's essentially more 'fence-sitting'. There's many more examples of this. Nevertheless, the bottom line is China cannot ever be trusted by anyone. The Russians know this too.