The China-Russia Relationship: The Dance of the Dragon and the Bear
(Robert Hamilton, June 10, 2025)
Transcript available below
About
Col. (ret.) Robert Hamilton takes a new approach to examining the relationship between China and Russia, departing from the standard debate over whether the relationship is a true strategic partnership or merely an axis of convenience. Instead, he argues that the best way to gain an understanding of ties between Beijing and Moscow is to watch how they interact âon the groundâ in regions of the world where they both have important interests at stake. Hamilton provides an in-depth analysis of Chinese-Russian interaction in Africa, Central Asia, and East Asia, as well as an analysis of Chinaâs response to Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine. The picture of the relationship that emerges portrays its dynamic, complex, and contingent nature, and reveals areas of convergence and divergence between these two powers. In doing so, he provides a new perspective useful to both scholars and policymakers.
Transcript
Introduction
Robert R. Reilly:
Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Robert Reilly, its director, and today I am happy to say we have with us Dr. Robert Hamilton, who is the Head of Research of the Eurasia Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia. He has also worked as an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the US Army War College. Dr. Hamilton is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
He is a graduate of the German Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy and a Masterâs Degree in Contemporary Russian Studies, and a PhD, both from the University of Virginia. He is a retired US Army officer who served in Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, and Pakistan, among other places. Today we are here to discuss Dr. Hamilton’s new book, The China-Russia Relationship: The Dance of the Dragon and the Bear. Dr. Hamilton, welcome to the program.
Robert Hamilton:
Bob, if I may, and I am also Bob, thank you so much for the invitation. I am really excited to be here to talk about the book and China-Russia relations more generally.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I would just simply say if you look at the book, it looks fairly short, compact, but when you open it up, you see the pages are jammed and the type is small, and the amount of incident or detail is close to staggering. As I mentioned to you before we began taping, I think that aside from the wonderful analyses you do in here, I think you have produced a reference work because everything is here, everything you want to know about that relationship. So let me turn the floor over to you to introduce the subject of your book and the particularly unique angle that you took in addressing the material from it because it is not the usual treatment.
The Reemergence of Russia and China
Robert Hamilton:
Sure, so thanks, Bob, and again, thank you for the opportunity to talk about the book. For at least 20 years, 25 years possibly, we have had a debate about what the nature of the Russia-China relationship was, right? As soon as Russia recovered from the 90s, and you know China recovered from the after effects of the Tiananmen Square incident and sort of re-entered the global stage, both of them reentered the global stage in the early part of this century I would say, and not long after that we started to have discussions in the West, especially about what is the nature of their relationship. This is in China’s case a growing and expanding power, in Russia’s case a recovering power, and so this debate emerged in Western academia about whether it was a true strategic partnership or sort of a thin transactional alliance or partnership of convenience. And you have people that would debate this in the academic and policy worlds in the West.
I watched this debate go on for a couple of decades. I do consider myself a Russia expert, not a China expert, so I had a lot to learn about China for this book. As you said, my army career, my academic career, has been largely focused on Russia and Eurasia, so as I started to watch this relationship develop and I started to read the academic debates about it, I sort of came to the conclusion that neither side was going to win the strategic partnership-axis of convenience debate. While it was useful in terms of framing the limits of the relationship, whether is it a true alliance or is it not at all, just an axis of convenience, I think those are ideal types, and I think the actual relationship is neither of those things.
Like most bilateral relationships, especially among big powerful countries, it is very complex. It operates across what we would call the instruments of power. There’s a diplomatic, a military, an economic component to it. It is dynamic in that it changes in response to changes in the world situation, right? I mean, the best example of this I think is Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, [which] occurred less than two weeks after Xi Jinping and Putin signed the declaration of the no limit strategic partnership, right? They called it that when Putin visited Beijing in February of 2022 for the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
The invasion of Ukraine, I think, arguably has changed the relationship. I am not one of those people who believes it has made it necessarily deeper, and I am not one of those people that believes China is an essential contributor to Russia’s military effort in Ukraine. It is a contributor, but it is a contributor in ways that lots of other countries, including Western countries, are by selling Russia things that are dual use items. And so anyway, the point is that the relationship is dynamic, and it changes in response to changes in the global situation.
It is changing now in response to things like the war in Ukraine, things like the increasing U.S. China competition in East Asia, things like the emergence of Central Asia as a region that sort of has its own identity and is not purely a Russian vassalage region now, which China is aware of and is moving into that region. So the idea with the book was to look at the relationship in regions of the world where both China and Russia have important interests at stake because my argument was you can actually tell more about the relationship by watching how they interact on the ground in regions of the world than by reading their summit communiques or analyzing the trade data between them and things like that, so that is the approach the book took.
I looked at four different regions of the world where Russia and China interact: Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and here I focus especially on China’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and then East Asia. And you certainly come to the conclusion that East Asia is the area of greatest interaction between the two. East Asia is the area in which if a convergence of interests or an actual alliance is to emerge, it is more likely to emerge there or emerge in response to events there than probably anywhere else in the world, and that is because the region of East Asia is increasingly bifurcating into these two mutually exclusive security blocks, one centered on the U.S., and one centered on China.
Russia is a player, a major player, in the region, but I think would prefer to continue to hedge its bets and continue to sort of maneuver in the region, protecting its own interests by supporting China in its confrontation with the U.S. rhetorically, by integrating with China more economically, especially since Russia has lost access to all the Western markets that were so important to it both for exports of hydrocarbons and for imports of finished goods. It has lost those markets, and now China is more important in that sense, but I think Russia would like to sort of play a double game in East Asia by supporting China informationally, supporting Chinese positions on the major issues in the region like the Korean Peninsula, East China Sea, South China Sea, Taiwan, and diplomatically supporting China, but sitting out any sort of burgeoning military confrontation between the U.S. and China because Russia just does not have the high level interests at stake in that region that it sees itself as having in Eastern Europe.
But my point is I do not know that Russia will be able to sit out a U.S. China confrontation in East Asia because there is less maneuver room for countries that would prefer to sit in the middle. People are picking sides in East Asia, and I think the Russians, especially given that they need and want more Chinese support in Ukraine, are going to be forced to pick a side if the U.S. China competition here really heats up.
Robert R. Reilly:
You repeatedly make the point, particularly in the economic sphere, that China is achieving a position of dominance vis-Ă -vis Russia in the development of its interests. I do remember when I used to go to the Soviet Union fairly often in its last days, I would often discuss with my Russian hosts their concerns about China. Weren’t they worried about the dominance of China? Indeed, they were. They would talk about that, you know, prudently, somewhat guardedly, but nonetheless it is a subject that would be hard for anybody to miss as it was clear even by then that the Soviet Union was not going to survive as an entity. I mean, China has greater dominance now than it did at the end of the Cold War. Is Russia more worried about that? Do they see a kind of permanent inferiority, their dependence on China developing so that they will not be able to work their way out of?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, Bob, this is a great question. You are exactly right that there has been long been a deep-seated fear of China and an over powerful sort of overbearing China within the Russian security elite, and that fear has been focused really on sort of the geo-economics and geopolitics of the Russian Far East, which you know in the demographics of the Russian Far East where China is emerging as the regional economic hegemonic power, the Chinese side of the Russia-China border is far more densely populated than the Russian side.
Chinese people are already moving across the border, legally, but moving across the border to farm and things like that, and so there has been a long and deep-seated fear of that in Russia. But I think that has been eclipsed in the last probably 20 years by the sense in the Kremlin, the deep sense, that Russia is in an existential war with the West, and the U.S. has been called the binding agent in the China-Russia relationship.
Now, look, the U.S. and NATO do not threaten Russia in any way. NATO enlargement never threatened Russia. It was never directed at Russia. NATO never moved any forces east. It institutionally enlarged by admitting new members, but it did not move any military forces into those new members until the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbas, and then NATO prudently started to put some forces farther east.
But the sense, I think, in Moscow that it is in an existential struggle with the West. The West has eclipsed longstanding Russian fears of growing Chinese power in East Asia and Central Asia. The Russians have just had to put those on the back burner for the time being, I think, while they focus on what they considerâagain, they are wrong, but what they consider the greatest security and economic threat to themselves, which is Europe and North America, the United States especially, but the U.S.-led alliance system in Europe, in the same way the Chinese see the U.S.-led alliance system in East Asia as their greatest threat.
And so I will not say that this historical Russian-Chinese animosity will not reemerge at some point. In fact, I had a senior Chinese official tell me when I interviewed him for the bookâhe did not want to be quoted by name or position, but he was happy being quoted on background, and he said, “Look, it is great that you are looking at contemporary Chinese-Russian relations. You know, that is good, you should do that, but do not forget the historical precedent.” He said, âThroughout our history, even when we have looked to be aligned ideologically, there are always tensions, often historical tensions, below the surface that have made the relationship not nearly as durable as it appears on the surface.â So this is coming from a senior Chinese official here in the U.S., so it is worth bearing in mind, worth keeping in mind, that not all is as it appears on the surface of this relationship sometimes.
Robert R. Reilly:
Bob, how would you say demography is affecting the situation, because both China and Russia are in demographic decline but Russia far more dramatically than China. And I think this was true some years ago before they were doing it, let us say, officially, or with permission, Chinese were simply moving into Russian territory where there were no Russians and sort of assimilating parts of Russia unofficially. I mean, with the continuing demographic decline is that likely to continue?
Robert Hamilton:
I think it will, yeah. I mean, that has beenâ as you noted, that has been going on for a couple of decades now. I think it will keep going on. The other thing you have is a lot of Chinese traders, day traders, and you know short-term traders, have come across the border. And again, with Russia’s economic isolation from the West as a result of its invasion, its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its economic dependence on China, I think, is only going to increase. I mean, in the book I characterize the China-Russia economic relationship, at least in East Asia, as increasingly in a colonial style relationship where Russia exports raw materials to China, and it imports finished goods, and you know that is not often the foundation of a sustainable, equitable economic partnership where one side exports raw, sort of low value added raw materials and even lower value added.
Now, because the Chinese are able to sort of get a bargain on Russian oil and gas, because the oil at least is subject to a price cap imposed by the Western countries that have sanctioned Russia, and so while China does not have to respect that price cap, the price cap still factors into the prices. It can negotiate with Russia, so China is getting raw materials, and getting them at a discount from Russia, and increasingly it is exporting finished products, including vehicles and aircraft and machinery, all things that the Russians before the war, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were getting mostly from Western trade partners. And those just are not available now.
Robert R. Reilly:
It is, of course, an elementary strategy not to put your enemies together. In other words, do not put them in an even closer relationship than they otherwise would have been by your behavior, yet it seems that is what we have done regarding Russia and China, or at least many critics make that point, that we have sort of driven Russia into the arms of China, and therefore the two most significant strategic threats to the United States are together facing the United States and the West rather than as discrete threats. Is there any merit to that?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, so the short answer is yes. I do not know that we have driven Russia into China’s arms as much as we have given both sides reasons to see us as their primary security threat and economic threat, and each other as a preferable partner or as the most preferable partner in confronting the threat that the U.S. represents to them. Again, we do not threaten the Chinese or the Russians. The United States has no military or economic or territorial designs on either of those countries, but you know, as I used to say aboutâ I still do about NATO enlargementâ all the time, look, if you think NATO enlargement threatens Russia, you do not understand NATO. If you think Russia is not threatened by NATO enlargement, you do not understand Russia, so it is one of those things where two sides can look at an objective fact and come to totally different conclusions about the reasons for it and the results of it.
Whenever I hear an American policy maker say we need to drive a wedge between Russia and China, it makes the hair in the back of my neck stand up because every time we do that, often the problem is our policy is just sort of not nuanced enough and we approach them as dual great power competitors or dual great power threats, but they are very different. They represent very different challenges, at least in my view.
China is a long-term, primarily economic, challenge with a military component to it. It is the only country with both the capability and the desire, the will, to remake the rules of global order in a way that benefits China more and the U.S. less. That is the Chinese intent, that is their objective. Russia, though, is an acute militarized threat to Europe and North America, and you know it has been basically since the end of the Second World War.
It has been a core tenant of U.S. national security policy that, given the size, population, and resources of the super continent, Eurasia, whatever we want to call it, Europe and you know the former Soviet Union, the emergence of a hegemonic power in that region would be a grave threat to U.S. interests, and so it has been a core tenant of U.S. security policy to try to prevent that from happening.
We can argue about whether Russia has the capability to become a hegemonic power in that part of the world. Again, it certainly has the intention, and if it wins in Ukraine, it will have a greater capability, so my sense is we need to treat these like different types of challenges and meet them in different ways. Russia is a short-term, acute militarized challenge. China is a long-term sort of chronic challenge that plays out over security, economic, and diplomatic fields, so we just, I think, need to treat them differently to avoid driving them together more than we already have.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, certainly in terms of the NATO powers, they are primarily concerned for obvious reasons with Russia, and are apparently about to undertake serious rearmament after a free ride on the United States for so many decades because the war in Ukraine has sort of awakened them to the fact that Russia is willing to use its powerful military resources, though you mentioned several times in the book, Bob, that Russia’s difficulty in achieving its goals in Ukraine has shown some Russian military vulnerabilities that would otherwise not have been seen had Russia not invaded. Is that right?
Robert Hamilton:
That is right. I mean, I think in at least three major areas we have seen real significant failures of the Russian military, one in planning the operation. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine was planned on some very, very optimistic, even fantastic, assumptions about the capability of the Russian military, the capability of the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian will to resist, how the Ukrainian people would respond, all of which turn out to be wrong.
It is not uncommon that militaries get things wrong in their planning, but you then need to have branches and sequel plans to deal with the fact that some of your assumptions in your base plan turned out to be wrong. The Russians did not appear to have those either, so you had a major planning failure, you had a huge intelligence failure, just absolutely misunderstanding again the Ukrainian will to resist, Ukrainian force structure, Ukrainian military capabilities, misunderstanding what the West would do to support Ukraine even though the West was very clear that it would give Ukraine significant military support.
And then there was also a logistics failure, which was predictable, right? We know Russian logistics has never been that good. We know that it gets about 90 miles from a rail line, and it essentially runs out of steam because it is just very rail based, it does not have the truck type of assets that Western militaries have. And then over and above those failures of planning, intelligence, and logistics, there were some chronic failures that we really, I think, need to link back to corruption in terms of the way Russian equipment performed abysmally badly.
[They had] abysmally bad performance in a lot of cases. Some of that was baked in corruption in the acquisition and procurement process where the aircraft and vehicles being delivered were not capable of the things that they were alleged to be capable of, just because there were shortcuts taken in the production process. And then some of that was probably due to maintenance just bad maintenance of vehicles and aircraft people pocketing money.And I have heard people say, “Look, Ukraine is corrupt as well, so why was it its military able to sort of perform a little better?” It is a good question. I think part of the reason is Ukraine was fighting and is fighting for its life, whereas it was never all that clear, I think, to a lot of Russian commanders and soldiers what the reason for the invasion of Ukraine was, aside from the propagandistic reasons that the Kremlin keeps promoting about Nazi detoxification, demilitarization, denuclearization, and all these other things. But nevertheless, yeah, the Russian military underperformed significantly, but the Russian economy and military have displayed a resilience that I do not think many people saw coming.
The Russian military is far larger now than it was when it invaded Ukraine. It has far more people inside Ukraine than it did when it initially invaded. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has been damaged heavily by the Ukrainians, but the rest of the Russian Navy is at historical levels of activity. The Russian Air Force took a blow within the last week with the Ukrainian drone strikes on strategic bombers, but before then only about 10% of the Air Force had been had been lost or damaged in the war, and so the Russian military has got some serious problems, but it is also an incredibly formidable force that is determined to continue to fight in Ukraine, so I think we have to acknowledge that and treat it that way.
Robert R. Reilly:
Also, one might say that this resilience is a historical character of Russia. It has always been resilient. It has a great ability to come back from military disaster and fight its way back successfully. It appears that it is doing that in Ukraine today. By the way, since we mentioned the subject of corruption, and corruption may be more endemic in Russia than it is in Ukraine, since as you said it is facing an existential threat, what about the problem of corruption in China and its military?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, it is a great question, and I will admit that I am not an expert on corruption in the Chinese military. I believe I just got back actually within the last month of doing field research for another book project, which is on U.S. military assistance, and among the countries I am studying are Philippines and Taiwan, so I was in the Philippines and Taiwan, basically, and the question I am asking is how effective is U.S. military assistance at helping you develop the capability to deter or defeat aggression from your biggest threat, which for both of those countries is China, and especially in Taiwan where they know the People’s Liberation Army better because they came from it. Much of the Taiwanese security establishment, you know, you go back a generation or two, that is where their roots are, in the PLA, and they are confronted right across the street with it every day.
I would ask the question aboutâhey, you know, the Russian military really seemed to underperform in Ukraine due to a combination of factors, corruption being one, the leadership system, which is very hierarchical and fear and punishment based, it does not encourage junior initiative and things like that, I said, and I would ask people, do you think the Chinese military would underperform in a similar way? Almost everyone said yes, almostâand again, these are actual experts in the regionâand almost everyone I asked said yeah, we think they would underperform in a similar way, maybe not exactly the way the Russians did, but the problems of punishment based, fear-based leadership which does not allow junior leaders to exercise initiative, which means that Western militaries can always operate at a faster speed.
And the Ukrainian military operated that same way because in the early days of the invasion, one of the reasons Ukraine was successful is you had junior leaders, and I mean sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, making decisions on the spot rather than calling up, asking for permission to take an action, whereas on the Russian side you had the latter, you had commanders not wanting to make decisions or take actions until they had top cover from their commanders, and so Chinese military operates in a similar way.
I believe that the corruption problem in ChinaâI know they have been combating it a lot recently, there have been some high-profile corruption cases and corruption trials and firings and things like that, but again, the Russians did the same thing after the 2008 Georgia war, right? They launched this big anti-corruption campaign. It clearly did not have much of an effect because by 2022, we are at this point 14 years after the 2008 Georgia war, the problems of corruption were still very much endemic in the Russian military. I think the Chinese military would face similar problems.
Robert R. Reilly:
Yeah, we certainly have heard stories, not recently, but that for instance to obtain a general officer’s commission in the Chinese military depends on the size of your purse. You basically have to buy the position. I do not know whether in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign he has addressed that problem because you never know in a totalitarian regime like China whether it truly is an anti-corruption drive or simply a means to get rid of one’s political enemies, probably both.
By the way, I want to repeat a statement by a Ukrainian, made not recently, you know, probably a couple of years ago but well after the war began, addressed to Russia, saying, “You are 12 years too late,” meaning during that period we were trained by NATO forces, and that is why the Ukrainian military has outperformed the Russian. Do you think that influence from NATO is that significant, that it has made that big of a difference?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, I think after 2014, when NATO actually got serious and the U.S. got serious, and to be fair Ukraine got serious, about building territorial defense capability inside of Ukraine after 2014, especially after 2018 when the Javelin sale was approved, and so we started to sell Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine, and then in 2021 when the invasion was clearly [going to happen], the Biden administration had made the conclusion the invasion was going to happen and were able to use presidential draw down authority to push a lot more equipment to Ukraine quickly.
But so I think you have a confluence of factors. You have the equipment that the U.S. provided, which up until 2018 was generally non-lethal but still significant after 2014, then the 2018 inflection point where the first Trump administration authorized lethal aid to Ukraine, and so you have got Javelins and stingers, and then the training, the training done not only by Western partners for Ukraine but what Ukraine learned by fighting Russian backed separatists and sometimes the Russians themselves in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas war, which, you know we forget but it started in the spring of 2014 and was still going on, although largely frozen, but was still going on in February 2022 when Russia launched the full-scale invasion. So Ukraine was qualitatively and quantitatively a different military in 2022 than it was in 2010 or 2014, or even 2018, absolutely.
Robert R. Reilly:
But does that change the Russian strategy of attrition, that they simply have more resources, they have more people, they can take greater casualties, they can replenish, and that just keep it up long enough, and Ukraine cannot keep up because it does not have nearly as large a population, and its suppliers, its partners, may get tired?
Robert Hamilton:
So I think the latter part of that, Bob, is that is the Russian theory of victory in a nutshell, not to outlast Ukraine [but] to outlast the West. I think the Kremlin has revised its sort of intelligence assessment of Ukrainian will to fight and Ukrainian capability, and they understand that especially if Ukraine continues to get significant Western support, they cannot win, they cannot beat that Ukraine, or at least they cannot achieve their objectives through military force alone. It just is not possible.
And I know a lot of ink was spilled over the last year and a half over Russian territorial gains in Ukraine, but they were almost [insignificant]. I mean, they still control less than 20% of the country. At one point after the Ukrainian Kursk salient, the Kursk invasion, you know when Ukraine came across the border in the Kursk region of Russia, Ukraine had actually conquered more Russian territory in 2024 than Russia had conquered Ukrainian territory because the Russian strategy is very attritional, as you mentioned, it has grinded out a few square kilometers a day, whereas the Ukrainian move into Kursk was largely unopposed, and it grabbed a lot of territory.
But now the Russians did what, you know, you mentioned earlier they do. They adapted, they showed some resilience, they eventually figured out how to drive the Ukrainians out of Kursk, and they have continued to gain ground in eastern Ukraine, although the pace of gains since November of last year has slowed every month, and the rate of casualties per square kilometer gained by the Russians has gone up significantly.
I saw some analysis in February from Ukrainian National Defense University that indicated that in the battle for Pokrovsk, which is this town in eastern Ukraine the Russians have been trying to capture for a year and a half, Russia’s losses, killed and wounded, per square kilometer were 154 soldiers, so they were losing, killed and wounded, 154 soldiers per square kilometer gained, so that is not a strategy that wins the war. It just is not, because war is not a math problem, but if you do the math, at that rate of casualties, to conquer the rest of Ukraine it would take Russia over 76 million casualties, and even Russia does not have the capability to generate that much military manpower.
So if Russia is going to salvage a victory, it is not going to be through this grinding, attritional strategy because Ukraine has been pretty good at, yes, giving ground but keeping its lines intact and not allowing the Russians to break through or exploit, not allowing Ukrainian lines to disintegrate the way Russian lines did in the fall of 2022 up in Kharkiv and then the south around Kherson. That is the only way, I think, in this war you are going to have significant territorial gains, if one side’s defense falls apart and then the attacker can grab a lot of territory as the defender falls back to better prepared lines and regroups. To this point that has not happened, and so I do not really see it happening.
China and Russia by Region
Robert R. Reilly:
Bob, let us not neglect the larger part of your book which surveys the nuances in the China-Russia relationship in four major regions of the world where the local circumstances are very different, and therefore they reveal different aspects of what the character of this relationship between Russia and China is. And you break the book into those four large regions: Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. Do you want to give us a brief tour d’horizon of those areas?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, I use those four regions, I use what we people in U.S. government are familiar with, the instruments of power, instruments of statecraft, you know DIM and E, diplomacy, informational, military, and economic instruments, and I sort of tried to characterize their interaction as either cooperative, compartmented, or competitive, cooperative meaning they are both in this region and they overtly cooperate to achieve mutually agreed upon goals. Often that is in opposition to the West or the U.S. Compartmented is where they are both in a region and each is sort of doing its own thing. They are generally aware that the other is there. They are aware of what the other is doing. They just try to stand out of each other’s way. And then competitive is obviously where open competition is emerging.
China in Africa
In Africa, I think what I saw mostly was what I would call compartmented interaction. China and Russia are both on the continent, China and Russia both have fairly important interests at stake there, but they are both functionally and geographically doing different things. China is focused on the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, which are important because they are export routes, so you know the whole Belt and Road Initiative, which Africa is a major player in, BRI. But the Belt and Road Initiative is about enabling global trade. It is about building the infrastructure of a global trade network with China at its center. Africa matters for that, and within Africa, the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa are important export routes, and so China is focused there with a lot of its infrastructure development and a lot of its security presence as well.
The second Chinese base outside of China is in Africa. It is in Djibouti, and officially it is only a PLA Navy refueling point, but obviously it has got other logistical capabilities and probably intelligence capabilities. But China is mostly in Africa focused on on Belt and Road initiative economic development. They are focused on diplomatic engagement, and n terms of the security presence, they are focused mostly on protecting their their infrastructure investments in Africa.
Russia in Africa
Russia is focused primarily in the Sahel, you know, so that region between the Sahara and Central Africa countries like Mali, Niger, some of these other countries where Western or international peacekeepers have been kicked out in the last several years, and the Russian Wagner group, or other private military and security contractors, have replaced them. So Russia is focused on mostly providing security and extracting sort of resource concessions in that part of the country or that part of the continent in the Sahel, whereas China is mostly focused on economic infrastructure development. And they are really focused on the Gulf and the Horn of Africa.
Central Asia
In Central Asia, their security interests are very aligned. Central Asia matters to these two countries because, one, it is geographically contingent to both, it is the backyard for both Russia and China, it sits between them, [and] two, they both have very high order interests at stake. And for Russia, they have got a very high order sort of their identity as a great power is also very [important to them]. Central Asia is important to that.
The Russian view of being a great power is you get to modify, or moderate, or get a veto over the foreign security policy choices of countries in your region, and they have long had that right in Central Asia, so terms of security they are mostly aligned. They mostly see things alike, what they call color revolutions, which are democratic revolutions and what they both call the three evils of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism as the primary threats [to them].
They are both concerned about those types of threats emanating from Afghanistan, and then transiting Central Asia, and entering China or Russia, and so China has its second base foreign military base outside its borders there in a remote region of Tajikistan. [It] will be interesting to see how that develops because Russia has long been called the sheriff in Central Asia, and China has been called the banker, and with the banker moving into the sheriff role, it will be an interesting development, to see how the sheriff reacts, to see how the Russians, who have been the primary security managers of Central Asia, react to an increased Chinese security presence there.
But it is in the economic realm where they are becoming open competitors in Central Asia, and a lot of this is due to the effects of Western sanctions on Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has caused the Chinese to look hard at Central Asia as an alternative export route to Europe, so they are building infrastructure in Central Asia, across the Caspian, and in the South Caucasus. You will hear people talk about the middle road or middle corridor, but it is a way to get Chinese goods to Europe without going through Russia, so you bypass the sanctions, so there is that.
And then there are also hydrocarbon projects, so the Chinese are increasingly drawing Central Asia into the Chinese economic orbit by building pipelines and things like that, which all used to go out through Russia as a legacy of the Soviet economic system. More and more now they are going out through China to Eastern Europe. And how China has responded to the Ukraine war I can say very succinctly. It is a combination of support for its partner, Russia, and self-interest, Chinese self-interest.
So in the diplomatic and informational realms, they are saying things supportive of Russia. They are echoing Russia’s justifications for the war. They are reminding the world and their own people that, you know, the U.S. pushed NATO towards Russia’s borders and that caused Russia to do what it has done in Ukraine. Diplomatically, they are mostly abstaining from Security Council resolutions and General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion militarily. And economically, they are benefiting from it in a couple of ways.
Militarily, they are learning from the Russians. They are watching the Russians. We know there are Chinese officers in Russia, possibly in Ukraine, watching how the Russians are fighting there, because the Russians [have] the only country, the only military in the world, fighting a Western trained and equipped adversary. The PLA thinks it may have to do that someday, so they are learning.
Economically, China is benefiting by buying Russian oil and gas at very cheap rates and exporting finished goods back to Russia. And then East Asia is the place where I see the greatest forces of convergence. If you were ever to get an actual alliance between China and Russia, I think it would emerge in East Asia and over the security issues in East Asia, which, again, it is the U.S. China competition is the major security issue there.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, that was highly succinct, to say the least. There is an observation you make in relation to almost all these regions, and that is that Russia is primarily interested in disruption and that China is primarily interested in stability because its interest is in economic development, for which you have to have stability. It would seem those two things are obviously incompatible, yet, nonetheless, you have shown they do find areas in which to cooperate. But in the long term, to what extent is Russia’s interest in disruption ideologically motivated, or just sheer political advance taking, political advantage because it gains you some leverage if it can exacerbate a situation with military violence?
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah, that is a great question, and I do not have a simple answer. I think where this Russia as a disruptor and China as sort of a builder needing stability for all of its projects to come to fruition, where the tension between these two roles, I think, is greatest, of the regions I looked at, was in Africa. China needs stability in Africa for its Belt and Road Initiatives to flourish, for trade to flourish and to make money. I ran across this over and over in my research. There is this mental link among a lot of CCP decision makers between economic development and political stability, and there is a strong belief that the former is a necessary component to the latter, that without economic development you will never have true political stability.
And in Africa, political stability is necessary for Chinese economic infrastructure projects to make money, and so China has a vested interest in stability in Africa. Russia has a vested interest in creating instability or exploiting instability and then offering itself as the antidote or as the cure for the instability. You have seen this across the Sahel. You saw it in Mali, you saw it in Niger, you have seen in other countries where the Russians, the Wagner Group or anotherâthe Russians have reflagged it now, called it the Africa Corps, but it is still essentially the same private military organization.
The Kremlin will convince some of these countries that the Western peacekeepers are either ineffective, or are spying on them, or doing things that they do not want, or come with a whole bunch of human rights and anti-corruption caveats that African countries do not really want to deal with. The Kremlin will convince them that we have got a better model, and the Wagner Group is it, and so they will send these PMSCs in to do training, to do regime protection, and they will usually try to extract payment in the form of concessions, material, economic concessions, often mineral or rare earth or hydrocarbon concessions.
China and Russia in the Middle East
Robert R. Reilly:
Why didnât you have a fifth region to look at for the Chinese-Russian relationship in the Middle East?
Robert Hamilton:
I actually did, to start, and I was going to look at the Arctic, too. It just became a time and resources constraining factor. And I had done some of the Middle East, Middle East and Arctic research, but once I had done it all, I decided that the four regions I ended up with in the book were what could really tell the story. I was looking for variation, like because theoretically, if the relationship is not sort of homogeneous, constant, and monolithic, if it does change according to the context in which they interact, then you need to have regions that tell a story.
If you have four regions that all tell the same story, they all do exactly the same thing in those four regions, that then arguably the regional dimension was not really important to begin with, so I could have added Latin America as well. But you just eventually run out of time and resources, and so I had to neck it down to these four regions that I thought there was enough variation among them that they told the story of what are the factors that cause convergence and divergence of interests between China and Russia.
Robert R. Reilly:
Just to make a quick remark about Latin America, it is interesting how active China is in Latin America, particularly in the communications field. I worked for years for the Voice of America, and they had a Latin American service, and the thing about which they were most worried was exactly the Chinese penetration because China would move in with broadcast hardware, which they would give the country, but also software.
They would develop programming for them so that the whole thing was Chinese, or tailored by China, and that is a major effort compared to what the United States has been doing. In fact, you are probably aware that the president has abolished the Voice of America, so that leaves us without any informational strategy in Latin America and, well, in other parts of the world as well.
You also do mention that subject of information and its influence, though with a kind of a light touch.
Robert Hamilton:
Yeah.
Robert R. Reilly:
You do not give it the same kind of major center stage treatment that you do the economic and military items. Is that because you do not think it is as important?
Robert Hamilton:
It is not [that]. It is for a couple of reasons. One, it is very hard to operationalize and analyze when you talk about diplomacy, military, and economic instruments. Well, in diplomacy you can count embassies, you know, how many embassies does this country have in this region? What is their size? You can count diplomatic visits. You can count treaties. [With a] military, you know, you can count exercises, you can count arms sales, all these things. [With] economics, [it is the] same thing. You can count development aid, you can count loans, you can count trade information. There is not a lot to quantify and operationalize, and also a lot of it ends up being contained under the deep, deep economic and diplomatic instruments, and that the governments are promoting what they are doing economically and diplomatically.
But one area where I really was able to dive deep into the informational instrument, and see how they were using it, was in the chapter on Ukraine and China’s response to the Ukraine conflict. One of my research assistants is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. I had her listen to or watch Chinese news broadcasts on the war in Ukraine for about six weeks straight, and to just give me a summary of every one so I could see how the Chinese government, through its government controlled or government affiliated media, was presenting the war in Ukraine. And it was a template.
Eventually, as we were talking, it emerged that, you know, every Chinese newscast on the war in Ukraine followed a pretty similar script. It was, okay, the Kremlin says this, the Ukrainian government says this, here is a reminder that the war is all the fault of the U.S. and the West, which you know ignored Russia’s legitimate security interest. Here is a reminder that, you know, the U.S. defense industry is pocketing, you know, huge gains on this war while Ukrainians die and Europeans go without heat. Here is a random American or Western expert to tell you why the war is really all the fault of the United States, and then the conclusion, right? And every newscast followed a really similar structure, so that was a way in which I was able to sort of get into, okay, how is the government using information on this specific issue to promote its interests?
Conclusion
Robert R. Reilly:
Yeah, well, Bob, we are just about out of time, and I would like to thank you for joining us today to discuss this topic in such depth and with such reach. Obviously, people have to get this book if they want to understand the level of nuance and detail that you provide to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the Russia-China relationship is different in these different regions because it is contingent on local circumstances, and obviously on the interests of those respective countries. So I want to highly recommend to our viewers your book, The China-Russia Relationship: The Dance of the Dragon and the Bear.
Our guest, Dr. Robert Hamilton, is Head of Research of the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). And I would like to thank our viewers for joining us today at the Westminster Institute for another one of our programs. I invite you to go to the Westminster Institute website and see the other programs we have hosted on a wide variety of subjects, many of them, of course, on China, some on Russia, Japan, Asia, and the war in Ukraine. So please indulge yourself in that array of subjects with very interesting speakers. Again, thank you for joining us today. I am Robert Reilly.