In recent months, China has won Russian involvement in threatening military exercises near Japan. In return, Russia has won Chinese political support for its threats against Europe.
These are signposts as to how the world’s two most powerful autocracies are finding common cause.
For Vladimir Putin, China’s appeal takes on two main parts. First, closer relations with China allow Putin to build an economic and military relationship through which he can exert outsize global influence. Russia prides itself on claiming that its undermining of international law is not, in fact, a product of unilateralism but rather opposition to U.S.-led arrogance. When China supports that narrative, it finds a little added credibility. Moscow also benefits from its growing trade with Beijing, which increased 36% to $147 billion in 2021. Of particular importance is China’s growing demand for Russian energy exports, which constitute the centerpiece of Putin’s economic model.
For Xi Jinping, Russia also lends the appeal of political credibility. Where China can rely on Russia’s support at the United Nations and in other international forums, Beijing can present its policies as having broader support than they actually do. China is particularly concerned with resisting U.S. narratives that Beijing’s policies make it an exception to the broader community of cooperating nations. By pointing to Russian support against the United States, China hopes that it can consolidate its international reputation. This is why Putin’s attendance at the Beijing Winter Olympics was so important, for example.
Yet there is a limit to this rising cooperation.
Unlike NATO or the European Union, China and Russia lack the alignment of interests and sharing of trust to form a truly binding alliance. The legacy of Cold War suspicion remains real, sustained by each nation’s expansive espionage against the other. Moreover, China calibrates its support for Russia only so far as that support incurs only marginal costs to its other foreign policy priorities. If, for example, the European Union was willing to tie China’s support for Russian aggression in Ukraine to Beijing’s prospects of reaching an EU-China trade deal, Xi would quickly distance himself from Putin.
The key for the West, then, is to make the costs of this partnership prohibitive to its pursuit. This will create space for reemergent suspicions within the Sino-Russian partnership, leading to its fracturing and eventual demise.
