Russia and China discussing 32 joint projects - Russian deputy PM

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and China are discussing more than 30 joint economic projects in a variety of areas from petrochemicals to banking, Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said on Saturday after visiting China last week. As Russia was hit by new sanctions by the United States and the European Union on Friday over its involvement in Ukraine, Shuvalov said Asian countries such as China did not support the Western sanctions and were keen to cooperate with Russia. "Yesterday in China we discussed 32 projects. And they cover absolutely everything: petrochemicals, the banking sector, work in the area of food products, and very, very varied projects," Shuvalov said during an appearance on "Vesti on Saturday with Sergey Brilev", a TV discussion programme. "It isn't just gold, oil, gas and copper that we discussed yesterday," Shuvalov said. "And in general many people in Russia are under the impression that China is only interested in natural resources." Shuvalov visited China and Singapore last week to meet investors and government officials. Faced with Western sanctions, which are damaging Russia's economy, Moscow has been playing up opportunities for economic cooperation with Asia. "China announces every time at the beginning of any meeting that they categorically do not accept any sanctions, which they consider illegal," he said. He also said Russia was studying China's own experience of sanctions imposed against it after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, arguing that China surmounted them with the help of liberalising economic reforms which Russia should copy. "If one looks at the experience of '89 after the events on Tiananmen Square we, of course, have noticed what happened and how it happened. Therefore this thesis about greater economic freedom is in part (based on) the experience of the People's Republic of China," he said. (Reporting by Jason Bush and Alexei Anishchuk; Editing by Susan Fenton)