A wary embrace: what the China–Russia relationship means for the world

Extract

China and Russia's deepening relationship has provoked a wide range of views on its significance, prospects and implications for the West. Bobo Lo's concise and highly readable book offers a timely and thorough review of the issues and arguments. Until almost the end, its view is consistent and unequivocal: reports of the birth of the Sino-Russian alliance are greatly exaggerated. Lo acknowledges the case for ‘authoritarian entente’ based on shared resistance to a United States-led international order and its liberal values. He notes, too, the recent catalysts of this relationship, in particular the global financial crisis, strong personal chemistry between Xi and Putin and Russia's post-Crimea crisis relationship with the West. Despite this, Lo argues that the Sino-Russian relationship remains essentially unchanged from the ‘axis of convenience’, in the phrase he coined a decade ago. It is emphatically not the official ambitious, if unwieldy-sounding, ‘comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination’.

Lo begins with the thin history of the two countries' ties: elite contacts grew only in the nineteenth century, leaving little legacy of cultural understanding or shared historical memory. Though history is not destiny, the low baseline puts into perspective the ‘best ever’ relationship the two countries enjoy today. More significant are the constraints imposed by deeper structural forces and trends. Lo invites us to look beneath the surface of effusive rhetoric and signing ceremonies at national interests, relative power and habits of strategic thought which drive the longer-term policies of a rising China and a resurgent-but-declining Russia. The picture is, inevitably, mixed: forces of convergence and divergence jostle.