- Building on the United States’ economic and technological lead will be key in addressing the challenges of the China-Russia partnership.
By Bobo Lo
Executive Summary
- While Moscow and Beijing remain strongly committed to their strategic relationship, the war in Ukraine has exposed major differences in their views on the international order.
- China and Russia are strategically autonomous actors that pose different challenges to US interests. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, seeks to undermine US global primacy, yet values stability in the international system as key to China’s prospects.
- On the other hand, Russian President Vladimir Putin thrives on disorder and conflict. The more anarchic the global environment, the better. That involves disrupting US goals at every opportunity.
- Attempts to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow are futile. The partnership is too important to both sides to jeopardize for the nebulous hope of better relations with the United States.
- Instead of harboring unrealistic hopes of an accommodation with the Kremlin, Washington should focus on strengthening key alliances, building on the United States’ economic and technological strengths, and pursuing selective engagement with China.
Impact of the Ukraine war on the Sino-Russian partnership
Although Putin almost certainly informed Xi of his decision to invade Ukraine in 2022, the Chinese were taken aback by the scale and brutality of the “special military operation.” They were even more shocked by the Russian failure to secure a quick and decisive victory. And they are disconcerted by Putin’s nuclear rhetoric. For their part, the Russians have been disappointed by the lukewarm nature of Chinese support, and by Beijing’s opportunism in securing Russian oil at heavily discounted prices.
However, these tensions are manageable, and the relationship remains strong. The course of the war has underlined that China and Russia are the closest each has to a friend. Both sides retain a vital interest in making the partnership work. For Putin, the relationship is a force multiplier, enhancing Russia’s strategic credibility and standing with the so-called Global South. China also provides an economic lifeline that considerably weakens the effect of Western sanctions. Without the partnership, Russia — and Putin himself — would be much more vulnerable.
For Beijing, the advantages of a good relationship with Moscow are less obvious, given Putin’s flagrant disregard of international norms, but they are significant. Xi values Russia as a partner in challenging US dominance (“hegemony”) and countering the Western narrative of a “rules-based international order.” This matters all the more when US-China relations are at a 50-year low, Beijing’s fears of strategic containment are acute, and the Chinese economy is struggling.
There is a further reason for Beijing to nurture a partnership with Russia: the alternative is far worse. The last thing China needs is an alienated, vindictive neighbor that might disrupt its interests in Central Asia, the Arctic, and in the Indo-Pacific. That is why Beijing continues to exercise restraint and to treat Putin with respect. It is not Moscow’s active cooperation that it needs so much as a sense of comfort and the freedom to pursue its goals without Russian hindrance.
The Sino-Russian Partnership and Global Order
At their Beijing summit three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Xi and Putin proclaimed that Sino-Russian friendship had “no limits.1 ” Developments since then have demonstrated otherwise, however. The single most important limitation on the relationship is that the two sides have very different worldviews. Although they are committed to challenging US global primacy, and their interests converge in some areas, their respective approaches to the international order diverge fundamentally.
Despite its criticisms of the US-led post-Cold War order, China has benefited hugely from it. Accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 turbocharged China’s economic growth by opening the way to large-scale Western investment and technology. Crucially, China depends more than ever on central features of this order, such as a globalized economy and unitary financial system.
Moscow, by contrast, is committed to overturning the current order. Whereas once Putin aspired to a global balance between the United States and China, with Russia being the geopolitical pivot, this was a non-starter well before the invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Xi, Putin has neither the patience to play the long game nor the tools with which to advance Russia as a global player. Anarchy is his friend. In a disorderly world, Moscow has greater scope to maneuver and exert an influence that would be impossible to achieve through more normal means (economic power, political authority, technological innovation).
Beijing hopes to “reform” the international order so as to maximize China’s influence at the expense of the United States and the West. But it seeks to do so by working the system from within. It is a revisionist, not a revolutionary, power. Its priority is to create the best possible external conditions for China’s continuing rise, not to bring the system down. That is why its support for Putin’s war against Ukraine has been half-hearted. Much as Beijing values strategic partnership with Moscow, international stability matters still more, both as an intrinsic good and because it facilitates Chinese access to essential resources, markets, and technologies.
Western fears that China and Russia aim to impose an “authoritarian model of governance” on the world are wide of the mark. Not only are their attitudes to the international order different, no such alternative model exists. The “multipolar order” (or “polycentric” system) is a vague abstraction. Xi’s “shared future for humanity,” as embodied in his global initiatives for development, security, and civilization, is essentially declarative, a loose set of general principles rather than a blueprint.
China (let alone Russia) has neither the means, stature, nor desire to translate an idealized vision of global governance into reality. It is one thing wishing to be a global player, it is quite another to be the global leader. The former is about asserting China as a sovereign and independent center of power. The latter means taking on the responsibilities of global leadership. Beijing’s enthusiasm for the task, never great in the first place, has waned further in light of the slowdown of the Chinese economy and pressing priorities closer to home, above all, reunification of Taiwan with the mainland.
Looking ahead, Beijing and Moscow will attempt to leverage their partnership to maximize their international influence and undermine US primacy. To this end, they will seize on failings in Western policymaking, such as political dysfunction in the United States or a weakening of transatlantic resolve and unity over Ukraine. But the differences in their approaches to the global order will persist. Russia will double down on its aggressive and disruptive foreign policy, behaving more than ever like a super-rogue power. China will continue to operate largely within the existing international system, keeping its options open and ensuring that it does not become hostage to the Kremlin’s reckless agenda.
Implications for US Policy
US policymakers need to grasp two essential truths about the Sino-Russian partnership. The first is that this is no alliance, but an unsentimental great-power relationship shaped by realpolitik and with real limits. The ties that bind are those of mutual necessity, not ideological affinity. Second, China and Russia are strategically autonomous actors. While they oppose a dominant United States and regard liberal values as subversive, they do not operate as a coordinated force in international politics and have little influence over each other’s decision-making.
Bracketing China and Russia as if they were a conjoined entity is therefore misguided. The two countries present markedly different challenges that need to be addressed in their own right. China’s aggressive behavior in the western Pacific and vis-à-vis Taiwan, its mercantilist trade practices, cyber and technological espionage, and efforts to subvert international institutions threaten US interests. But these challenges should not be conflated with Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, the direct menace it poses to European security, and its outright repudiation of the international order.
The notion, popular in Washington, that China poses a greater danger to the international order than Russia is deeply flawed. Notwithstanding the limitations of Russian power, Putin has demonstrated a growing appetite for risk, one nourished by Western equivocation and hesitancy. By comparison, Xi has become markedly more cautious over the past 18 months, conscious of the weakness of China’s domestic and international position. Russia poses an existential threat to the West, China does not.
It is delusional, too, to imagine that Russia can be enlisted as a counterweight to China. There is no evidence to suggest that Putin might be persuaded to loosen ties with Beijing. The partnership is too important to the Kremlin to jeopardize for the nebulous promise of a “better” relationship with Washington that no US president could deliver. Putin knows that Russia cannot afford to alienate China, a country with which it shares a 4,300 km border, and on which it is more geopolitically and economically dependent than ever.
Putin will, however, look to dupe Western leaders, holding out the chimera of a more “even-handed” Russia in return for an accommodation over Ukraine; in other words, an end to Western support for Kyiv. If the United States and Europe go down this path, they will not achieve a weakening of the Sino-Russian partnership, but instead concede critical leverage. Such a course would vindicate Putin’s aggression and discredit the very principle of a rules-based international order.
Recommendations
- A serious response to the challenges of the Sino-Russian partnership should eschew crude attempts at balancing in favor of a more realistic agenda.
- The US should center its policy around consolidating key institutions and partnerships including NATO, the Quad, India, Japan, and ASEAN
- Building on the United States’ economic and technological lead will be key in addressing the challenges of the Sino-Russian partnership
- The US should pursue a more pragmatic, less ideological approach to China. Such an approach would combine strategic containment, economic engagement, and cooperation in selected areas (security confidence-building, technology policy, counter-narcotics).
- These policy objectives should be based on the premise that US-China competition and rivalry are unavoidable, but that direct confrontation is by no means inevitable.
About the Author
Bobo Lo is an independent international relations analyst and Non-Resident Fellow with the Lowy Institute, Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was Head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and Deputy Head of Mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow. Dr Lo is the author of The Disorderly Society: Rethinking Global Governance for the 21st Century (forthcoming in 2025). His previous books include A Wary Embrace: What the China-Russia Relationship Means for the World (2017), Russia and the New World Disorder (2015); Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing and the New Geopolitics(2008); Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy (2003); and Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era: Reality, Illusion and Mythmaking (2002).
@Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)
