A Conditional Embrace: The China-Russia Relationship and the Geopolitical Limits of Anti-American Solidarity

Edited by Phoebe Kantor

Introduction

At the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics held in Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, at the latter’s invitation. The joint statement released following the meeting stated that “Friendship between the two States (Russia and China) has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation”. The timing of the meeting was significant, held on the 4th of February 2022, while Russian forces were amassing on the Ukrainian border. Just 20 days after the meeting, Russian troops would cross into Ukraine and trigger the full-scale invasion, which is now into its third year. China’s reaction following the beginning of open hostilities was to blame the US, with former Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Hua Chunying stating, “Those who follow the US’ lead in fanning up flames and then shifting the blame onto others are truly irresponsible,” while refusing to lay the blame for the conflict at Russia’s doorstep. The sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion also failed to deter trade between the two, as the value of trade went from $190 billion in 2022 to $237 billion in 2024. This increase was driven largely by the fact that China’s exports to Russia increased by $5 billion a month between 2019-2023, while the European Union’s (EU) exports to Russia fell by $5 billion a month over the same time period. The statement in 2022 also stated Russia’s support for China over the question of Taiwan, decried the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) alliance as increasing the danger of an arms race in the region, and posing serious risks of nuclear proliferation. China, meanwhile, joined Russia in speaking against further enlargement of NATO and called on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ‘ideologised cold war approaches’. 

The situation in 2025 is different to what it was between 2022-2024; however, the return of Donald Trump to the White House and his focus on bringing about the end of the war in Ukraine have the potential to change the global situation.  A friendlier Washington, more amicable to Moscow’s interests in Europe and beyond, may reduce the incentive for Russia to continue relying on China as its main international partner. Furthermore, the relationship between Russia and China is not without its own issues, and it is unlikely that Russia will be content with being a ‘junior partner’ in the partnership unless it is absolutely necessary. Given the changes ongoing in the global order, this article will look at what the key issues and grievances in the relationship are, what has driven the two powers together and whether the momentum of the China-Russia relationship can survive a thaw in Russia-US relations.

Factors driving cooperation

Writing in 1997, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would prophesise that the most dangerous scenario that US policymakers may face would be a “grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an 'antihegemonic' coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” Today, the coalition seems to be taking shape, and while it has not matured into a treaty alliance yet, the extent of the partnership has been classified by some as a ‘growing quasi-alliance’. The aforementioned 2022 joint statement notably stated that “Certain States' attempts to impose their own ”democratic standards“ on other countries,.…to draw dividing lines based on the grounds of ideology, including by establishing exclusive blocs and alliances of convenience, prove to be nothing but flouting of democracy and go against the spirit and true values of democracy.”. While not explicitly naming the United States or the West, the joint suspicion the two hold for the US-led Liberal world order has been a key factor which has driven them together. Beyond this, however, the two have their own reasons for pursuing cooperation with the other. 

For Russia, China has emerged as an increasingly important partner in the aftermath of its war against Ukraine. Beijing has continued to supply Russia’s industry with the components needed to keep its war machine going, with Russian imports of ‘dual-use’ technology (technology with both civilian and military applications) from China going from 31 per cent in 2021 to 89 per cent in 2023. Machine tools, for instance, have long been a key foreign dependency for Russia, and it traditionally imported these from Japan, South Korea, the US and Europe. With the imposition of sanctions, it has become almost entirely dependent on China. Similar to machine tools, China has helped Moscow by supplying it with advanced semiconductors, an essential piece of technology used in everything from switches to fighter jets, that Russia cannot manufacture domestically, as well as with communications equipment. Speaking in April 2024, the then US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, remarked that while China may not be providing Russia with weapons directly, it does supply it with the components required to make these, with 70 per cent of machine tools and 90 per cent of microelectronics that Russia uses coming reportedly from China. As a result of this continued economic support, Russia’s production of weapons has not just remained steady but increased in some cases, as in the case of drones, artillery shells, missiles and more modern tanks to replace losses to its fleet of more aged tanks. Another key aspect driving the economic relationship is China’s continued purchases of Russian energy, a sector which accounts for more than half of the Russian government’s revenue. To add to this, China continues to purchase this at above the price cap set by the G7, unlike India, which buys it at a price fixed below the price cap. China’s emergence as a key source of necessary imports and a vital energy market has been a lifeline for the Russian economy and war effort, but beyond the economic benefits, a closer relationship with China also provides Russia with diplomatic and geographical benefits.

As mentioned earlier, the mutual mistrust Russia and China have of the US-led global order has been a key feature driving the two together, uniting them against what they deem as ‘undue interference’ in their internal affairs by the West. The two also share a common view of the world being divided into ‘spheres of influence’ as reflected in Russia’s stance on Taiwan and China’s stance on NATO enlargement. The joint statement also spoke of standing against “attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” and to “oppose colour revolutions,” underlining their mutual support for regime stability in both countries. This is particularly important for Putin, given the attempted Wagner group insurrection in June 2023. Russia and China are also key members of several multilateral institutions, namely BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the convergence of interests is also visible at the UN Security Council (UNSC) where prior to 2006 there was only one instance of a joint veto but this has gone up 16 since then, almost always being exercised to thwart US interests. BRICS has also been a key forum where both Russia and China have pushed for the organisation to develop alternatives to the Western-dominated Bretton-Woods institutions and have advocated for the use of local currencies in settling bilateral trade in an effort to weaken the ‘hegemony’ of the dollar. The admission of more members to the organisation since 2024 has increased the organisation’s clout and economic heft, allowing Russia (and indeed China) to further their views of the global order. 

The partnership also secures Russia’s vast eastern flank, which is vulnerable due to the vast distances and relatively poor connectivity. The region also houses key Russian defence factories, and ensuring its security is likely a major reason why Russia has been keen to grow closer to Beijing and invite greater Chinese investments in the region, which numbered around 49 projects worth $9 billion at the end of 2023. Moscow will also be keenly aware of the historical grievances some in China may have about Russia continuing to occupy territories in the Far East, which were once part of the Qing Empire, lost during the ‘century of humiliation’ through the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 which ceded parts of Manchuria to the Russian Empire and formed the modern Sino-Russian border While there has been little official-level talk from China about the return of these territories, keeping relations with Beijing friendly ensures that this part of Russia is secure, allowing Moscow to keep its attention focused on the West. 

For China, the relationship with Moscow is important, but China is more important to Russia than Russia is to China, a fact reflected by the growing difference in the economic and technological trajectories of both states. Even still, China seems to understand the benefits of continuing to engage with Moscow in a friendly manner; it provides a powerful, nuclear-armed partner to secure China’s northern flank and a partner on the global stage united in opposing the United States. Economically, Russia is important to China for largely two reasons: the development of China’s northern regions and access to a cheap and reliable source of energy. China is clearly the superior partner in the relationship when it comes to economic considerations, and while militarily, Russia can claim a level of parity with the PLA, China’s superiority in the economic sphere is clear. As discussed earlier, Russia’s economy depends on Chinese imports for the production of various goods, but this does not necessarily mean the relationship is entirely lopsided. The northern Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Inner Mongolia have a key stake in trade with Russia. In 2021, for instance, around 24 per cent of all exports from Heilongjiang province, 7.4 per cent from Inner Mongolia, 8.4 per cent from Jilin and 6 per cent from Hebei went to Russia; for Heilongjiang, a massive 78 per cent of its imports came from Russia. Jilin and Heilongjiang also have closer access to the sea through Russia than from within China, allowing for shorter timeframes in getting goods to a port for shipment. The trade with Russia is an important part of the economy of these two provinces, known as China’s ‘rust belt’, given that they have struggled to advance as quickly as their coastal counterparts, and the loss of Russian trade may become a source of discontent, something Beijing will be keen to avoid. 

China is also the world’s largest consumer of energy and imports most of its energy needs from overseas. Russia recently emerged as the largest supplier of oil to China, thanks to the cheaper prices, but beyond the prices and sheer volume of energy being imported, here too, geography has played a major role. In Russia, China has access to a supplier of energy that is secure and free from the threat of interdiction by foreign powers. While China’s naval power has grown and its ability to protect its ships is better than it has ever been, the vast majority of its energy imports, which sail through the Indian Ocean, were vulnerable to instability in the Middle East and the threat posed by pirates. Above these, however, the ships carrying this oil are at risk of being interdicted by the naval forces of a hostile power in times of conflict, a risk that China cannot take. In Russia, China has a supplier free from these threats and one which shares its goal of reshaping the global order and moving away from a US-led system, making it free from the influences of the Western powers. Geographically, Russia provides China a stable strategic rear; their joint partnership in the SCO (along with the Central Asian Republics) allows them to coordinate on actions against radical groups, which may present a threat to China’s control over the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and the conduct of regular joint exercises across the armies, navies and air forces of both countries allow China to learn the lessons Russian forces have to offer given their experience in conventional warfare in Ukraine. In fact, the Russian experience against American and NATO weapons would undoubtedly be of major interest to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), given Taiwan’s arsenal of these weapons. 

Despite these wide-ranging convergences, the partnership is not without its irritants, which are discussed below.

The Irritants: Minor distractions or papering over larger cracks?

Going back to Brezenski’s assertion in his 1997 writing that Russia would be the ‘follower’ in a joint Sino-Russian challenge to US hegemony, we find that this may be true in the sense that Beijing is clearly the bigger player in economic and technological terms, but it does not necessarily mean that Moscow accepts or is happy with the arrangement. 

In the economic realm, China accounted for almost 36 per cent of Russia’s external trade, but Russia only accounted for around 5.6 per cent of China’s external trade. This trade is also characterised by Russia’s role primarily as a resource exporter and China as the consumer. While on paper this is a nice complementary partnership, it also shows that Russia is more replaceable (in the economic realm) for China, while Russia has few alternatives to turn to for the advanced goods that it imports from China. Furthermore, while China has long been reliant on Russian arms imports to keep parity with the more technologically advanced armies of the US and its allies, these sales have declined sharply as China has moved from being reliant on foreign arms imports to being able to produce these domestically, further eroding Russia’s leverage in the economic realm. Finally, Russia has been frustrated with China’s unwillingness to invest in setting up manufacturing facilities in the country. In the Russian electric vehicle (EV) sector, for instance, Chinese brands have taken up a lion's share of the market as Western and other Asian carmakers have departed the country in the face of sanctions. But Chinese carmakers have so far refused to set up manufacturing within Russia, continuing to export the vehicles from China. Russia is not alone in this, and fellow BRICS member Brazil has also imposed tariffs on the imports of cars to protect its domestic auto industry, as has the EU, and the US has banned the entry of Chinese EVs into the US market. 

Finally, while Russia and China have publicly portrayed a level of convergence on the war in Ukraine, with Beijing blaming NATO expansionism and the US as the ‘main instigator’ of the crisis, there are reasons for China to remain cautious on the level of support it gives Moscow on the issue. China, along with Brazil, spoke against the use of nuclear threats over the war in Ukraine, and unlike Iran and North Korea, China has refrained from providing large amounts of weapons or military support to Russia. This is largely because, unlike Pyongyang and Tehran, both of which are already under crippling sanctions, China has much to lose should relations with the West and its allies break down. Consumption as a percentage of China’s GDP was 53.4 per cent in 2023, far lower than what may be considered ‘normal’, meaning that it still needs foreign markets to sell the goods its factories produce. Most of these exports go to ASEAN, the US or the EU, with the latter two accounting for over one trillion dollars of Chinese exports in 2023. Even so, increased traffic at checkpoints across the Sino-Russian border, surging infrastructure development to facilitate the movement of people and goods, and growing volumes of trade suggest that economic issues on their own are unlikely to derail the partnership in the short or even long term, as long as the two share a common vision for the world. For China, the temporary pause of US tariffs does not mask the fact that it needs to move its economic focus to advance domestic consumption or find alternative markets for its goods. The prioritisation of continued access to Western markets shows that China’s support to Russia when it comes to Ukraine is not entirely without limits. 

On the political front, while Russia may have found a valuable ally in China to assist it in opposing the Western-led world order, it does not mean that Russia’s leaders have accepted Chinese ‘leadership’. Yevgeny Primakov, appointed Russia’s foreign minister in 1996, formulated what came to be known as the ‘Primakov doctrine’, which stated that Russia would not accept a unipolar world order led by the US, the primacy of Russia in the ‘post-Soviet’ space and the opposition to NATO expansionism. While China’s assistance in opposing a unipolar world order is certainly in the Kremlin’s interests, it is also an issue of concern given the power disparity between Russia and China, as well as the fact that the two may be in contestation for the same strategic space when the threat of the US no longer drives the two together. In Central Asia, which is made up entirely of post-Soviet states, China is moving to fill the vacuum left by Russia by engaging in a slew of economic, institutional and high-level engagements with the region, such as through expanded economic engagement under the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI). In June 2025, President Xi Jinping travelled to Astana for the second China-Central Asia summit, where the “Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation” was signed, furthering China's engagement with Central Asia in economic and energy cooperation. The signing of agreements worth around $25 billion is a further indication of the region’s shift to China as the preferred economic partner and owing to Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine. While China prefers to refrain from military intervention in the region, as seen several times between 1997 and 2020 and leaves the handling of such issues to Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), it is unlikely that Moscow will continue to be agreeable to China expanding economic clout in the region, especially at Russia’s expense. 

In Northeast Asia, however, the signing of the “Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” between Russia and North Korea in 2024 re-established Russia as a key player in the region’s security landscape. While the treaty itself is unlikely to shift the nature of bilateral ties between China and North Korea, it is emblematic of a larger divergence in how the two powers view the world order. China prefers to maintain North Korea as a strategic buffer to its Northeast, keeping American and South Korean troops away from China’s border. The fear of an American or American-aligned military presence on its Northeastern border was a key factor which drove the Chinese leadership to intervene on North Korea’s behalf during the Korean War. Even so, China may not be a keen supporter of Pyongyang’s nuclear programme given the instability it causes and the justification it provides for the deployment of US strategic assets close to China. For Russia, however, this instability is a welcome development as it ties up American assets away from Europe. 

It is here where both Russia and China also diverge in their views on how to bring about a change in the global order. Russia prefers instability; it provides it the window needed to manoeuvre diplomatically and further its own interests. A rapid and unstable upheaval of the world order would provide Russia the chance to present itself as a pole of power, so long as it retains domestic stability and a potent military. Russia has repeatedly shown its willingness to get involved in unstable regions across the world, from military interventions in Syria to the deployment of Private Military Companies (PMCs) to West Africa. China, however, is likely to prefer a slower reworking of the global order; economic instability would threaten its exports, and political instability has the potential to spill over into China itself in the form of calls for political liberalisation or support for secessionist forces in Xinjiang and Tibet. A slow, gradual change allows Chinese leadership to ensure that its economy and domestic political situation are kept stable and China continues to benefit from the world, which has allowed it to prosper while giving it a greater say in how this order is run. This is largely in line with China’s policy of avoiding involvement in unstable situations and not risking drawing undue attention to itself or allowing its policies to be painted as ‘aggressive’ or ‘expansionist’. While China’s military power and appetite for aggression have certainly grown recently, particularly in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, it is not anywhere near Russia’s appetite for instability, and this divergence may be a key hurdle when it comes to cooperation on how to work against the US and shape a post-unipolar world order.

Post-Ukraine outlook for the partnership

When Russian President Vladimir Putin met President Donald Trump in Alaska in August 2025 to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine, the meeting ended without an agreement or even a larger way forward. It did, however, raise questions on what the future of the China-Russia partnership will look like if there ends up being a thaw in US-Russia ties. While Russia does have concerns about China’s continued espionage to steal Russian weapons technology and even the potential that China may be eyeing Russian territories in the Far East, it is unlikely that the momentum of the partnership will come to a halt. As President Putin heads to China to attend the celebrations for the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War Two and to join the upcoming SCO summit in Tianjin, the partnership is unlikely to stop advancing even if ties between Moscow and Washington improve. 

While President Trump has tried to use his personal relationship to end the war in Ukraine, there has been little to no progress on a ceasefire, let alone a larger peace deal and attacks by both sides continue unabated. More importantly, however, is Russia and China’s grievances with the world order at large, an issue reflected in comments made by President Putin, who called for the end of ‘financial neo-colonialism’ on the eve of his China visit. Even if the US under Trump has made attempts to try and make amends with Russia over Ukraine, there are deep-rooted contradictions in how the two view the world today and the Kremlin will be aware that the next US administration may go back to an anti-Russia policy as happened with the election of President Biden in 2020. For China, even if the US tariffs have been paused, America’s ‘pivot to Asia’ continues, and the presence of US troops in Asia and its ‘alliance network’ to prevent Chinese action against Taiwan is reason enough to continue to cooperate with Russia to balance against the United States. 

While the main factor driving Russia and China together may be a shared suspicion of the US, it is unlikely that an improvement in Russia-US ties will have the opposite impact on Russia’s ties with China. While the two may be suspicious of each other and wary of the other’s intentions and ambitions in their immediate strategic space, the immediate concern they both face is bringing about a change in the global order, and the ‘no limits’ partnership is likely to endure until that goal has been achieved. 

Conclusion

The growing China-Russia partnership, a product of their shared grievances against the US-led world order and mutual strategic interests, has weathered significant geopolitical headwinds between 2022 and 2025 and emerged with its momentum intact. Despite differing strategies and growing asymmetry, particularly in the economic and technology domains, the partnership has proven resilient due to overlapping needs such as Russia’s reliance on Chinese technology and energy trade, and China’s requirement for a secure rear and a diplomatic counterweight to Western pressure. While irritants such as Russia’s discomfort with its status as a ‘junior partner,’ regional competition in Central and Northeast Asia and China’s issues with Russia’s adventurism in Ukraine persist, the depth of institutional, economic, and diplomatic entanglements through mechanisms like BRICS and the SCO ensures continued cooperation. Changes in US leadership may spur a thaw in US-Russia ties, but they are unlikely to cause an unravelling of China-Russia ties. As long as both Moscow and Beijing perceive existential threats emanating from Western policies and alliances, their ‘no limits’ partnership will endure, driven less by affinity and more by necessity and global ambition.