China–Russia relations

• 1. Introduction

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  China and Russia officially describe their relationship as "Not allies, but better than allies." That formulation captures something genuinely strange about one of the world's most consequential pairings. Two nuclear-armed powers with a shared border stretching more than 4,000 kilometers, a history that swings between open hostility and deep embrace, and a present in which annual trade reached $234 billion as of 2025. Yet neither government will call the other a formal ally.

  How did two countries that nearly went to full-scale war in the early 1960s, and did fight a brief border conflict in 1969, end up signing a statement in February 2022 declaring their partnership "superior to the political and military alliances of the Cold War era"? What does it mean to be better than allies without actually being allies? And what does the deepening of this relationship since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 mean for the rest of the world?

  The answers run through a shared land border that took decades to demarcate, an energy trade that now reaches across Siberia in pipelines that did not exist twenty years ago, and a military relationship that has shifted from China buying Russian weapons to China potentially supplying Russia with components for its war in Ukraine.

• 2. Four Centuries of Friction

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  The Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed when the Qing dynasty pushed Russian settlers out of Manchuria, marked the first formal boundary agreement between the two civilizations. Russia pressed further in the 19th century, annexing parts of Chinese Manchuria between 1858 and 1860. Those territorial grievances never fully dissolved.

  When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, a brief period of alliance followed. The Sino-Soviet split of 1961 ended it. The two countries became rivals for leadership of the worldwide Communist movement, and by the early 1960s a major war between them was a genuine possibility. Armed skirmishes along their shared river border erupted in 1969. The enmity persisted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, with only a slight thaw following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

  One thread from that era runs quietly into the present. In the 21st century, the Chinese Communist Party's official version of the 1969 border conflict describes it as Soviet aggression against China. Russia remains the only country still controlling territory it acquired from the Qing dynasty through treaties China considers unequal. Teachers in China continued to instruct students about those annexations. The memory is not quite dead, even as the two governments publicly celebrate their partnership.

• 3. The 1990s Pivot

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  Boris Yeltsin's Russia initially looked West. His foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev criticized China's human rights record during a visit, and Russia moved to strengthen informal ties with Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party internally called Yeltsin a traitor and anti-communist. A leaked Politburo document from January 1992 captured the pragmatic calculation: "Even if Yeltsin is very reactionary we can internally curse him and pray for his downfall, but we shall still have to maintain normal state relations with him."

  By the summer of 1992, Yeltsin was already adjusting. He visited Beijing in December of that year, meeting CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin and Chinese president Yang Shangkun. Notably, former leader Deng Xiaoping refused to receive him. The two governments signed twenty-five memoranda covering technology and space cooperation, and declared each other "friendly countries."

  The upgrade came in stages. "Friendly countries" became a "constructive partnership" in September 1994, then a "strategic partnership of equality and mutual trust for the 21st century" in April 1996. The joint opposition to NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia further cemented the alignment. Yeltsin and Jiang met regularly; Yeltsin visited Beijing in November 1997, and Jiang came to Moscow in 1998. The pattern of summitry that would define the relationship for the next three decades was already in place. Former head of Fudan University's Shanghai Cooperation Center, Zhao Huasheng, later argued that economic cooperation would prove the long-term glue keeping the partnership functional.

• 4. The Border That Took Seventy Years to Close

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  On the 29th of May 1994, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin visited Beijing, and the two governments signed an agreement on the Sino-Russian Border Management System to ease trade and reduce crime. A demarcation agreement followed on the 3rd of September that year, resolving a 55-kilometer disputed stretch of the western border. A further agreement in November 1997 narrowed what remained in dispute to three specific features: Abagaitu Islet, Yinlong Island (also called Tarabarov), and Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island.

  The 2004 Complementary Agreement resolved the last of these. Russia agreed to transfer part of Abagaitu Islet, all of Yinlong Island, about half of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island, and some adjacent islets to China. These Amur River islands had been administered by Russia and claimed by China since before Japanese forces entered Manchuria in 1931. The National People's Congress in China and Russia's State Duma both ratified the transfer. The official ceremony on-site took place on the 14th of October 2008.

  After final demarcation was completed in the early 2000s, the shared land border was measured at 4,209.3 kilometers, making it the world's sixth-longest international border. That number matters: two countries whose militaries clashed along this line in 1969 now share one of the planet's longest peaceful frontiers.

• 5. Pipelines, Debt, and Dependency

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  China turned from a net petroleum exporter to a net importer for the first time in 1993, the same year the Russian economy was in free fall. The geographic logic of connecting a rising energy consumer to a resource-rich neighbor was obvious. Executing it took two decades of negotiation, false starts, and the occasional arrest.

  In 2001, the Russian oil firm Yukos proposed an Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline linking its Angarsk refinery to Daqing in northeastern China. Japan then offered to finance a rival pipeline to the Pacific coast, and Russia's attention shifted. The Chinese project effectively stalled in October 2003 when Yukos chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested and the Russian government began seizing the company's assets. Despite public reassurances from China's Foreign Ministry that the investigation would not affect pipeline plans, the uncertainty dragged on for years.

  In February 2009, China signed a "loans for oil" agreement, paying $25 million toward pipeline construction in exchange for 300 million tons of Russian oil delivered over 20 years. The 1,000-kilometer Russia-China Crude Pipeline was completed on the 10th of September 2010, the first direct pipeline ever built between the two countries, and began pumping oil into China in 2011.

  The 2014 gas deal that followed was the largest in the history of Russia's gas industry: a 30-year contract worth $400 billion. Deliveries through the Power of Siberia pipeline began in late 2019. By December 2024, that pipeline was fully completed. The same month, China became the first buyer of post-sanctions liquefied natural gas from Russia's Portovaya plant, when a Gazprom tanker delivered cargo to the Beihai terminal. As of 2024, Russian crude accounted for nearly 20% of China's total energy imports.

• 6. Arms Deals and Shifting Leverage

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  After the European Union imposed an arms embargo on China following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, China turned to Russia as its primary military supplier. Between 1992 and 1994, China bought 97% of its military imports from Russia. From 1990 to 2005-83% of China's arms imports came from the same source. China spent $5 billion on Russian weaponry between 1993 and 1997 alone.

  In 1992, China contracted to buy seventy-two Sukhoi Su-27 advanced fighter jets, a sale finalized in December 1996. In 1996, China acquired two Sovremenny-class destroyers fitted with surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, along with four Kilo-class submarines. The scale of Chinese purchases was economically significant for Russia's military industry, which had been starved of domestic orders since the Soviet collapse.

  The relationship shifted as China built up its own defense sector. By 2004, the Russian Foreign Ministry was blocking sales of the Sukhoi Su-35 and Tupolev Tu-22M bombers over concerns that China was copying the Su-27 design for domestic production under the name Shenyang J-11. From 2000 to 2006, Chinese military imports from Russia fell from $3.2 billion to near zero. Then, after the 2014 deterioration of Russia's relations with the West, the arms channel reopened: Russia provided China with the S-400 missile defense system and twenty-four Sukhoi Su-35 jets under 2015 deals worth around $5 billion.

  By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the flow had partially reversed. In March 2023, a news organization reported that Chinese state-owned weapons manufacturer Norinco had shipped assault rifles, drone parts, and body armor to Russia between June and December 2022. Norinco is also a major supplier of nitrocellulose, a key ingredient in gunpowder, for the Russian military. In October 2023, the US Department of Commerce added 42 Chinese companies to its Entity List for supplying Russia with microelectronics for missile and drone guidance systems.

• 7. The Ukraine War and What It Changed

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  On the 4th of February 2022, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing as Russian forces massed on the Ukrainian border. Their joint statement declared the partnership "superior to the political and military alliances of the Cold War era" and announced "no limits" to their commitment to each other. Less than three weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

  China abstained from United Nations votes condemning the invasion and objected to international sanctions against Russia. China's total trade with Russia reached a record $190 billion in 2022. In the first half of 2023, Chinese car brands accounted for more than a third of all vehicle sales in Russia. By 2025, Chinese brands held a 57.2% market share in Russia's car market, up from 18% in 2021. The Jamestown Foundation estimated in 2026 that roughly 90% of Russia's machine-tool imports came from China.

  The financial story was just as striking. The share of Russian exports paid in Chinese yuan rose to 16% by December 2022, from 0.4% before the invasion. By the end of 2023, more than 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in yuan or rubles. Russia also used the yuan for more than 25% of its international trade with countries outside China.

  Yet strains appeared. In June 2024, the Bank of China halted payments to sanctioned Russian banks, concerned about secondary sanctions exposure. By August 2024, as many as 98% of Chinese banks were rejecting direct yuan payments from Russia. Xi Jinping's foreign affairs director Wang Yi was reported by the South China Morning Post in July 2025 to have told European officials that China did not want to see Russia lose in Ukraine, fearing that a U.S. freed from the European conflict could focus more attention on Asia.

• 8. Mutual Suspicion Beneath the Partnership

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  In December 2019, officials at Rostec, the Russian state defense conglomerate, accused China of stealing intellectual property across a range of military technologies. In June 2020, Russia charged one of its Arctic scientists with passing sensitive information to China. On the 30th of June 2022, laser scientist Dmitry Kolker was arrested on suspicion of handing material to Chinese contacts. Two months later, hypersonic scientist Alexandr Shiplyuk was arrested; Reuters reported that Russian authorities accused him of sharing classified material at a scientific conference in China in 2017.

  In June 2025, the New York Times reported that a leaked internal FSB memorandum expressed concerns about Chinese industrial espionage of sensitive Russian technologies. The same document stated that Chinese academics were laying groundwork for territorial claims against Russia. In May 2026, Kaspersky security researchers identified a "malicious backdoor" planted in Daemon Tools by Chinese-speaking hackers in what they described as a coordinated supply chain attack targeting organizations in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.

  Also in May 2026, three European intelligence agencies reportedly believed that more than 200 Russians had been covertly trained in drone warfare at military facilities in Beijing and Nanjing. And leaked documents seen by the Financial Times in 2024 described a threshold for Russia's use of tactical nuclear weapons that was lower than previously disclosed, with training scenarios that included a possible invasion by China. The partnership that both governments publicly celebrate contains within it a quiet institutional awareness that the two countries' interests do not perfectly align, and that the other side is watching.