Political and Diplomatic Relationship between Russia and China

Since Russian Federtion and People’s Republic of China have been long time allies and geographical neihbours, the two countries have developed a close relationship. Development of a politic relationship between these two countries has been quite stable (Лукин & Иванов, 2011). In 2017 the Chinese ambassador in Russia made a speech about Russia-Chinese relations. He said: “The China-Russia relations of strategic cooperation and partnership are the most important bilateral relations in the world and, moreover, the best relations between the major countries. China and Russia are steadily supporting each other's efforts to protect key interests such as their own sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.” (Риа, 2017).

Based on Горовикова & Кормильцина (2017) China is a very important partner which Russia cherishes a lot. Russia’s relations with the West have been and remain tense,

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especially with Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland who feel threatened by Russia. Also, most of the countries criticized Russia for its actions in Ukraine. At the same time, while other countries were condemning Russia’s involvement in the Ukrainian crisis, China did not want to participate in any sanctions and even tried to increase its trade relations with Russia (Горовикова & Кормильцина, 2017).

According to Vladimir Putin these relations are the model of relations between two major countries in today’s world. Since 2013 these two countries have had more than 20 official meetings and sent to each other more than 50 official letters. China and Russia have direct engagement in many international organization groups like the G20, APEC, BRICS, SCO, East Asian Cooperation, among others (Риа, 2017).

Western and USA based scholars assume that these relations won’t go anywhere further than partnership and are not a threat to USA because China and Russia do not share enough strategic interests thus the relations between these two coutnries are primarily utilitarian and instrumental (Blank, 2011).

According to Miheev, Shvidko and Lukonin (2015) Russia does not fully trust China and with the growth of its economic, military and innovative power this untrust will grow. Also, these two countries are not ready to fully support each other. For example, China did not diplomacy” against China than it can lose everything. Another fact is that in the past Russia supplied China with its military equipment’s, however these years China made advances on developing its own equipment and is not dependent on Russian technology anymore. Another example is that Chinese entrepreneurs and state-owned financial institutions actually are not

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willing to invest into Russian market due to corruption and also discrimination against Chinese people, in other words for the Chinese businessman Russia has “low standards of business ethics” (Nojonen, 2011).

E. A. Leksina in her article analysed the main aspects of interaction between Russia and China as well as positive and negative aspects of mutual cooperation. She also questions whether the relationship between the two countries can really be viewed as positive or if all the common slogans about the success of the relationship are only of a declarative nature and whether it is a good choice for Russia to continue developing close relations with China. She noted that the main reason why Russia has such a close relationship with China is due to Crimea issue, because China unlike Europe, stayed neutral during the takeover of the Crimean Peninsula (Лексина Е. , 2015).

The evolution of Sino Russian relations as of today is a a success story. However, how long these “good” relations can last? China is developing much faster than Russia and this can change the correlation of power potentials. As of right now, Russia with its “one-dimension-energy-based structure of exports”, worsening relations with the EU and US mostly depends on China (Moshes, 2011).

The relation has limited sense of shared values. Though in the past few years a modest success between the two countries has been the Russian year in China and the China year in

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Russia² “They can stitch together their foreign policies based upon basically similar positions on many world issues, even if the styles of implementation may vary. But unless the West, and especially the US, become overbearing, “soft power” is the main catalyst for cooperation between Russia and China.” (Ferdinand, 2011).

Since the researcher was studying in Taiwan for almost nine years it is also very important to mention about China- Taiwan relations. This research is mostly about China because Russia’s relations with Taiwan are not strong, since Russia supports One China Policy. Due to the weak relationship, there are almost no education exchanges between two countries. There is no real number of how many Russian students are studying currently in Taiwan; however, it is known that every year about five russian students get scholarship from Taiwanese government. Maybe this number would be different if Taiwan would promote itself in Russia, because there is not much information about this country and scholarships. Even though the researcher is based in Taiwan, however it was essential to make research about China since it is the main education connection for chinese language learning in Russia.

2 The parties agreed that the decision to hold the Year of the Russian Federation in the People’s Republic of China in 2006 and the Year of the People’s Republic of China in the Russian Federation in 2007 was of strategic importance. National Years have no analogues in scale and intensity of events. They strengthened political mutual trust, deepened the cooperation of the Parties in political, trade, economic, scientific, technical, humanitarian and other fields, strengthened the social base of Chinese-Russian friendship, and gave a powerful impetus to the comprehensive development of partnership relations and strategic interaction between China and Russia.

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