BY PETER HARRIS

Russia and China have never been so close in their relations as they are now. As affirmation of this deeper tie, in July 2023 around a dozen Russian and Chinese warships conducted naval exercises in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) and in waters near Alaska. These had the double effect of demonstrating both nations’ commitment to being the hegemon within their sphere of influence and their desire to transform the international community away from American control towards a multi-polar world in which the great powers share influence. Of course, that is not to deny that both Russia and China would contentedly replace the US as the only world power.

China and Russia’s close ties are relatively new. When both nations were Communist, the relationship was acrimonious. Stalin and Mao became enemies as each competed to be the leader of the Communist world. Mao despised what appeared to be Stalin’s compromises with the West (particularly Stalin’s refusal to send troops to aid the Communists in the Korean War) and Stalin regarded Mao as idealistic and naïve. Relations were worsened further when China responded favourably to Richard Nixon’s offer of détente in the seventies.

It was after the Cold War had ended in 1989 that China and Russia sought better relations with each other. Moscow resented its loss of world power status and Beijing suffered from the West’s sanctions applied because of the Tiananmen Square atrocity. Both nations settled long standing border disputes and China became the number one consumer of Russia’s advanced weapons exports. Both nations worked together to create global realignment towards a multipolar world through the creation of the BRICS forum and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as alternatives to America’s unipolar dominance. BRICS and the SCO also enable Russia and China to expand their influence over the developing world, although may nations in that region remain reluctant to align themselves with the SCO. However, there is no formal military alliance between Russia and China, though flashpoints in and shocks to the international equilibrium such as a Sino-American war over Taiwan might precipitate one.      

Additional events have made cooperation between Moscow and Beijing tighter. NATO’s expansion eastwards in Europe and Ukraine’s pro-western policy after the success of its Orange Revolution in 2014 provoked Russia to annex Crimea in the same year. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 has drawn Western military support for Ukraine and a wide range of economic sanctions against Russia. Although Xi Jinping’s regime maintains neutrality on Russia’s aggression, the Chinese have helped the Russians mitigate the effect of sanctions by becoming a major importer of Russian oil. From the Chinese perspective, greater collaboration with Russia makes good sense in the light of Washington’s conclusion that Beijing is its most serious military and economic challenge and the trade war that Donald Trump launched against it. China has not only taken a neutral stance on Ukraine but has also refused to censure Russia for its brutal military interventions in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria. Russia has reciprocated by supporting China’s policies towards Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The West’s response has been robust to the new era of Sino-Russian coaction. The war in Ukraine has reinvigorated NATO. Links between NATO and friendly powers in the Indo-Pacific have been formed and reaffirmed. The US has also forged bilateral and trilateral connections in Asia. The G-7 are also exploring what they have learned from sanctioning Russia that could be applied to China if required. In retaliation, Putin and Xi announced that there are no limits to their strategic partnership. What that means has not been precisely defined, apart from hostility to the US and the intention of making international relations free of US control, but that imprecision allows for the relationship to be flexible in its response to Western countermeasures. 

What does the future hold for Russia and China’s relationship progress? It is likely that their collaboration will grow stronger but that is certainly not a given. If Putin is at risk of losing the Ukraine War and his regime looks set to collapse or China becomes embroiled in war with the US and its eastern allies over Taiwan, then both nations will lean more on the other, particularly for military aid. However, diplomatic manoeuvres have the potential to move Russia and China apart. If Donald Trump wins the Whitehouse, it is possible that he would scale back American support for Kyiv and offer Putin better relations. This, in turn, would reduce Russia’s support for China against the US. For the time being, though, both powers see that there is much to gain from cooperation, yet this perception does not nullify three potentially serious weaknesses in the relationship that could blow it apart,

A Troubled History

First, there is the troubled history of Sino-Soviet and Sino-Russian relations. Both nations have long and unforgiving memories of past humiliations inflicted by other powers and on each other. The tone of Soviet victimhood was set by Stalin’s speech to an audience of factory managers in 1929 just before Stalin launched breakneck speed industrialisation. In the speech, Stalin listed the nations and empires that had defeated the Russia due to its economic backwardness. Stalin warned with ominous prescience that the Soviet Union had ten years in which to catch up the economically advanced West or be destroyed. Twelve years later, Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets, a titanic struggle determined as much by the efficiency of war economies as by strategic and tactical decisions.

Russia and the Soviet Union, however, have never been humiliated by China. China, though, has suffered at the hands of foreign powers such as the British, the Japanese and the Russians. Stalin and Mao’s rivalry was partly ideological: it was a question as to which leader understood best how to relate to the West according to Marxist theory. The roots of Russo-Chinese antagonism are colonialist and expansionist and go back to the nineteenth century. As the Tsarist empire expanded eastwards, due to China’s military and economic backwardness, Russia was able to expropriate Chinese territory through a series of treaties. By the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Treaty of Peking, China was forced to give around one million square kilometres of territory to the Tsar. The nineteenth century is therefore regarded by the Chinese as its century of humiliation, a fact that is used by the Chinese Communist Party to drive the nation on to becoming a world power. In the twentieth century, disputes between Russia and China have concerned their border. In 1969, both nations came close to full-scale conflict over the matter. Matters were worsened by Moscow’s criticism of China’s annexation of Tibet. Historically, China has played a secondary role to imperial and Soviet Russia, but now that the relationship has reversed due to China’s greater population and more powerful economy, the prospect now of having to play the junior partner irritates Russia. What is of deep concern to the Russians is what might happen if their relationship to their increasingly powerful neighbour deteriorates. From the Chinese perspective, there is the suspicion that Russia has the capacity to abandon its understanding with China to act independently at China’s expense.

The Russian Far East

 Though border disputes appear to have been resolved, the proximity of Russia and China to one another remains a potential source of rivalry and conflict. One such zone of potential friction is the Russian Far East. When the Sino-Russian border opened in 1988, many Chinese migrants flowed into the lowly populated Russian Far East to work as farmers. By 2018, Chinese farmers owned or rented around 3,500 square kilometres of land. This has caused the local Russian population to accuse the Chinese of stealing their jobs and taking Russian natural resources. According to a 2017 poll by the Russian Academy of Sciences, one third of Russian respondents regard China’s presence in Russia’s Far East as an expansion and fifty per cent believe that this is a threat to Russian territorial integrity.

Part 2 follows here.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).