Enriched and emboldened by its oil and gas wealth, the Russia of President Vladimir Putin is acting like a bully. It wants the oligarch Boris Berezovsky extradited from Britain, on evidence that has yet to convince the British courts. And it refuses to extradite one of its own citizens on rather stronger charges of the plutonium poisoning of one former KGB spy (who also worked for Berezovsky) by another.

Pressure of various unpleasant forms is being applied, particularly against the British Council (traditionally part of the cultural arm of the British Embassy) on the grounds it is teaching English to Russians "illegally," though Russian authorities happily accept the taxes the Council pays on the fees earned.

Russian employees of the British Council have been visited in their homes by the KGB's successor, the FSB, making pointed inquiries about the health of their families. The British, whose ambassador has already withstood a siege of his home and office, have pointed out that Russia is in breach of several international agreements and dug their heels in.

There will be no winners in this kind of spat, since even the wimpiest of Britain's partners in the European Union are getting tired of Russia throwing its energy weight around. Russia's latest attempt to cement its dominance of the EU gas market with the planned new Southstream pipeline through Bulgaria is blatantly designed to pre-empt the EU's own Nabucco pipeline to the Caucasus. Russia may have lots of customers these days, but few friends.

That seems also to be the case with China, that other great nation that is doing well economically through a form of very authoritarian and illiberal capitalism. China, despite its avowed policy of "peaceful rise," finds it difficult to be neighborly, and not only toward Taiwan, its so-called "renegade province" at which some 1100 missiles are now pointed.

The weekend's latest spat between Vietnamese and Chinese "fishermen" over disputed islands that may lie over big energy supplies, like the similar argument with Japan over a different group of islands, is the kind of confrontation that makes other countries nervous because border disputes is one area where Beijing seems to have set its face against compromise.

Take, for example, this month's official visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Beijing. It is in China's interest to have good relations with India, if only to dissuade Asia's other rising economic power from turning its strategic partnership with the United States into something approaching an alliance. Accordingly, one might have expected some flexibility over the disputed border area in Arunachal Pradesh, near Tibet, where China had initially accepted India's proposal that there should be no exchange of territory that ignored the "settled populations."

China has now reversed itself, rejected this proposal and reaffirmed its claim to the whole of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. On the grounds that all its inhabitants are thus Chinese citizens, it refuses to grant a visa to any Indian passport holder from the state. And so despite booming trade links between India and China, there is a distinct coolness in the relationship, which is not helped by China's reluctance to support India's understandable bid to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

It may be a hangover from Communist traditions, but the leaders of both Russia and China seem to believe that the capitalist countries are interested only in money and that booming trade and profits trump all other problems. They may be right. Just like previous European visitors, Brown brought with him an entourage of businessmen including Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin group and Richard Lambert, head of the Confederation of British Industry.

In Beijing Friday, Britain's Brown and China's Hu Jintao announced a joint target of increasing two-way trade by 50 percent to $60 billion over the next two years. Brown added that his goal was for Britain to be the "No. 1 destination" for investment and set a target of getting 100 new Chinese companies to invest in the United Kingdom over the next two years. That might help balance last year's $35 billion in bilateral trade, which was running at 5:1 in China's favor.

"It's not one way, there are imports into Britain but we are selling China banking, services, financial services, luxury goods, environmental technology, sports goods -- a whole range of things," Brown told reporters in Beijing. "Yes, we will see more low-cost manufacturing done outside Britain, but yes also we have got the skills, the ingenuity, the high-value-added goods and products that we can now sell to what is the biggest consumer market in the world."

The British media and opposition parties are asking waspishly whether Brown raised any questions about human rights amid all the trade talk and Brown's open welcome for China's national investment funds to buy into British banks and stock markets.

So if the China trip took him away from the Russian row, Brown will be even more relieved to fly on to his next stop in India, where human rights are not on the agenda and where he will unveil a project to train 750,000 new English teachers, which may be the best investment of all.

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