BEIJING -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's likely next President Hu Jintao will discover what they have in common and how they can work together when they meet here Monday.

Putin, to visit China for two days, will be the first world leader to meet Hu since he was made secretary general of the ruling Chinese Communist Party last month. Hu is expected to inherit the presidency in March.

The men appear to share many career characteristics and adopt similar approaches to political issues -- crucial at a time when China-Russia ties stand at a crossroads, according to observers.

"There seems to be a lot of similarity in their backgrounds, the way they rose through the system," said Brian Bridges, an expert on Sino-European relations at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.

"They may find some meeting of minds in terms of moving forward Sino-Russian relations," AFP reported.

On the face of it their biographies and histories have much in common.

Both were born into relatively modest conditions, Hu's father being a tea merchant and Putin's a factory foreman, but managed to enter elite schools, Beijing's Tsinghua University and Leningrad State University respectively.

Upon graduation, they both entered into vast bureaucracies -- Hu China's Communist Party and Putin the KGB -- and slowly climbed the career ladder, reportedly never refusing an assignment.

"Putin rose up the ranks of the KGB. He's a loyal guy the way Hu Jintao is also portrayed," said Elizabeth Wishnick, a Hong Kong-based political scientist, who has written a book on Sino-Russian ties. "Both seem pragmatic and act in a way to serve their own political interests."

Partly through luck, partly because others had failed, they were picked by their mentors -- Russian ex-president Boris Yeltsin for Putin and late Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping for Hu -- to eventually assume power.

The parallel career paths may explain why their roles and functions in their respective societies appear strikingly similar.

Almost a decade separate 50-year-old Putin and 59-year-old Hu, but they are both considered young by their respective standards and both represent a new more pragmatic, less ideological generation.

To many observers, they also seem slightly bland compared with their predecessors, a perennially thirsty and bear-hugging Yeltsin and a karaoke-singing Jiang Zemin. "Neither of them sees to be an extremely outgoing personality," said Bridges. "They may be more interested in the mechanics of carrying out policies."

Even though diplomacy is moved by large impersonal forces such as economics and strategy, the historical record suggests that personal chemistry does matter.

In late 1949, communist China's founder Mao Zedong visited Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in Moscow, but talks on a friendship treaty dragged on for weeks amid an atmosphere of posturing and mutual distrust.

If, by contrast, Hu and Putin can talk and work together, they have a long bilateral agenda needing attention.

The most important issue is how to move forward the relationship, crucial to Beijing because of Russian supplies of gas, oil and relatively advanced military hardware China cannot build itself.

"Hu will try to find out how committed Putin is to the partnership with China," said Wishnick.

That partnership has been thrown into doubt after the U.S. war on terrorism brought new warmth and energy into Moscow's relationship with Washington.

But even before that, the U.S. superpower was the big looming factor over much Sino-Russian interaction, according to "China's new rulers," a book edited by U.S.-based scholars Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley.

"When it comes to relations with the United States, we should not use each other as cards to play against the Americans," Hu is quoted as saying in the book.

The importance of Russia in Chinese foreign policy may have been particularly pronounced in recent years.

The people in charge in Beijing were young in the 1950s, when Russia was China's best friend, or in the 1960s, when it was its worst enemy.

"Increasingly, we'll see leaders in China who are more interested in ties with the Western world than with Russia," said Wishnick.