President Vladimir Putin is making a key trip to Russia’s most important ally, China, that will seek to shore up an alliance against the West and celebrate China-Russia ties.

China’s border with Russia is marked by the small city of Heihe. Many local tourists come here to peek into neighboring Blagoveshchensk, just across the river.

In an attempt to attract customers, a tour boat pumps out happy-sounding Chinese songs, but nobody seems to be buying tickets, so it’s unlikely to move.

Russian coastguard officers spend the autumn sun exercising on deck of a ship parked across the water.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a new “no limits” partnership at the beginning of last year when they visited Beijing for the Winter Olympics.

China’s state media have been celebrating the fruits of this relationship now that Russia’s leader is back in the Chinese capital.

Both governments have benefited from it in one way or another. With such powerful friends standing together, they can reassure each other when they are frozen out on the world stage, and images of their handshakes are useful for showing their own people that all is normal. They seem to be failing to live up to their political rhetoric when it comes to business activity in their border zones.

You can observe the newly-built bridge from Heihe into Blagoveshchensk for an hour without seeing a single vehicle traveling in either direction. It was hailed as a symbol of a new era in cross-border trade.

Furthermore, Xi Jinping’s administration has swung most of the Chinese population behind Vladimir Putin.

The Russian government has done this through state-controlled media, which does not speak of an invasion or war in Ukraine, but of a Russian operation that is justified to counter NATO’s expansionist tendencies, in particular the United States.

You only need to speak to people on the street in Harbin, Heilongjiang’s regional capital, to gauge the success of this propaganda strategy.