Between Past and Future: Implications of Sino-Russian Relations for the United States

The “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination” between China and Russia is frequently described as making relations between the two large powers the “best in history” and as serving as a model of a “new type of major power relations.”¹ This depiction has generated sharply different assessments in the West regarding the partnership’s scope, strength, sustainability, and likely impact on the regional and global orders. The recently published U.S. National Security Strategy, for example, defines China and Russia as “revisionist powers” because they “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”² According to the report, Moscow and Beijing are “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”³ It is not uncommon for U.S. national security strategies to treat Russia and China as U.S. rivals. The 2017 version, however, repeatedly pairs the two with a heightened level of alarm. Moreover, the document discusses the challenge from China and Russia ahead of rogue powers such as North Korea and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

This alarmist view, however, is in contrast to a more cautious assessment that emphasizes the differences between the two large powers. Bilateral ties are perhaps not as solid as officially articulated. More precisely, Russia and China are in a marriage of convenience or a “wary embrace.” ⁴ Deep within the psyche of the two cultures, there are too many sociological and psychological hurdles to overcome for a normal and genuine strategic partnership.⁵ Russian and Chinese views and corresponding policies toward the outside world also indicate a more complex interactive mode of convergence and divergence.

These different assessments of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership leave considerable space for further intellectual inquiry. Regardless of whether the current relationship is best for either country or represents a threat to the West, it is entirely different from the preceding three hundred years. During the post–Cold War decades, the two Eurasian powers have transformed a largely asymmetrical and highly ideological relationship into one of pragmatic interaction and coexistence. This essay first reviews the past to understand the development of the bilateral relationship and then assesses the policy implications of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, including its potential and limitations.

A Glimpse of History

The long and tortuous process of Sino-Russian intercourse can be understood in three broad phases: imperial “fatal attraction” (the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), revolution and the curse of ideology (the “short twentieth century”), and pragmatic coexistence (1989 to the present).

Imperial fatal attraction

Until the end of the twentieth century, the Sino-Russian relationship seemed destined to be one of asymmetry, incongruity, and paradox. This was the case even when the two civilizations were briefly “integrated” by the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mongol rule, however, gave rise in Russia to a nearly permanent fixation on the East as the “Mongol yoke,” a source of fear and a threat to Russia’s national identity. As a result, successive Russian regimes, be they tsarist, Communist, or post-Soviet, all have regarded Asia as alien and difficult to engage, at times viewing it as a threat and at others as an object of contempt or puzzlement.⁶ This has been the case despite the fact that China too was a victim of Mongol rule.

Russia started its relentless eastward expansion in the sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, and barely 60 years after crossing the Urals, Russia had acquired a permanent outlet to the Pacific Ocean even before it did to the Baltic or the Black Sea.⁷ Following the initial contact with China in the seventeenth century and the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, Russia renewed its eastward drive in the eighteenth century and was poised to take advantage of the Western “scramble for China” in the mid-nineteenth century.⁸ Unlike the infamous Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) fought by the European powers, however, Russia’s huge territorial...