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ABSTRACT
Will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bring China and Russia closer together or drive them farther apart, or will it be business as usual? This article addresses this question by conceptualizing the main characteristics of the China–Russia strategic partnership. It argues that a strategic partnership, characterized as it is by informality, equality, and inclusivity, is essentially different from an alliance or alignment. These characteristics allow Beijing to distance itself from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. This makes it unlikely that China will attempt any simultaneous aggression in East Asia or that it will be able to mediate in the conflict. This effectively rules out the rise of a China–Russia axis. As China strives to balance its close ties with Russia and its economic engagement with the West, Beijing is more likely to maintain, rather than strengthen or weaken, its strategic partnership with Moscow.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For the theorizing of strategic partnerships in the case of the European Union, see Blanco (Citation2016), Ferreira-Pereira and Vieira (Citation2016), Renard (Citation2012).
2 Similarly, Sautenet (Citation2007, p. 706) examines the European Union-China strategic partnership and finds that it allows “the two partners, without binding engagements, to exchange on specific subjects and to advance political dialogue step by step in a supple manner.”
3 For example, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg described the “two authoritarian powers” as “operating together.” See Economist (Citation2022, p. 56). Also see Kendall-Taylor and Shullman (Citation2021).
4 The China-Russia strategic relationship has been full of surprises (Rozman, Citation2022). For example, China was not informed in advance of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Moscow did not have prior knowledge of Beijing’s agreement with Washington on sanctions against Pyongyang in 2016 (Lukin, Citation2018, pp. 133–134).
5 It should be noted that Russia did not join China’s recent military exercises targeting Taiwan.
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Nien-Chung Chang-Liao
Nien-Chung Chang-Liao is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taipei. He received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies at the National Chengchi University. His research interests include international trust, East Asian relations, Chinese foreign policy, and cross-Taiwan Strait relations. His work has been published in multiple Chinese and English academic journals, including International Affairs, Global Policy, Survival, and The Washington Quarterly.