Talk of PRC-Russia ‘strategic partnership’ greeted with skepticism

FORUM Staff

The arrival of a new U.S. presidential administration has brought the return of a familiar refrain from Chinese and Russian officials, who touted their nations’ “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era.”

Analysts contend such pronouncements are largely posturing, however, as ties between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia continue to be tested by domestic pressures and divergent national interests.

“Despite the warm rhetoric, the reality of Sino-Russian diplomacy is that it runs a mile wide and an inch deep,” United Kingdom-based political consultant Gabriel Gavin wrote in the online magazine The Diplomat in January 2021.

Although Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping reportedly spoke of an “unbreakable” relationship during a late December 2020 phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, there have been simmering tensions between the nations over the PRC’s territorial ambitions along its border with Russia’s resource-laden Far East. (Pictured: Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2019.)

At the same time, Xi faces global criticism over the CCP’s crackdown in Hong Kong and downplaying of the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. Putin, meanwhile, has met with worldwide backlash and nationwide protests over the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was arrested in January 2021 after returning to Russia following a monthslong recovery from a poisoning he blames on the Kremlin.

Coupled with U.S. President Joe Biden’s expected tough stance toward their regimes, such factors may be pushing Putin and Xi to present a unified front and distract attention from domestic and international challenges. According to Gavin, “the idea of a deeper, lasting alliance between Moscow and Beijing is, for both of them, more useful than the actual reality of it.”

In a series of statements since December 2020, Chinese and Russian officials have highlighted areas of common interest, including economic and security issues. They noted that 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the nations’ Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. At a January 2021 news conference, a PRC Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that “we see no limit and no forbidden zone to how far this cooperation can go.”

In October 2020, Putin said he would not rule out a military alliance with the PRC, although observers said that is likely impractical. “Such union would tie the hands of both parties and would scare the neighbors, India in particular, who would be forced to abandon partnership with Russia and cooperate closer with the U.S.,” Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Russian news agency Tass.

Trenin has written that while the nations engage in joint military training and weapons sales, their relationship is more alignment than alliance.

There are major constraints to the Sino-Russian security relationship, according to Richard Weitz, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute. Neither regime, for example, has endorsed the other’s territorial grabs, such as the PRC’s expansive claims in the East and South China seas or Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“Both countries are concerned by the risk of becoming entangled in each other’s military conflicts with third parties,” Weitz wrote in a May 2019 report for the think tank.

Further, Russia’s military and political transgressions beyond its borders have alienated it from Western democracies, leaving it at growing risk of being dominated by the PRC in a bilateral relationship, according to an August 2020 report by the Center for a New American Security. “The two countries are unlikely to form an official military alliance, and key differences in their objectives and asymmetry in their relations may ultimately drive them apart,” center senior fellows Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jeff Edmonds wrote.

Despite occasional declarations of a strategic partnership — including by Putin and Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, in 2012 — the Sino-Russian relationship is one of convenience, experts contend.

“And, given Russia’s wariness over China’s growing role in its historic sphere of influence in Central Asia, that is likely to remain the case for the time being,” Gavin wrote.

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