In China-Russia relations, power speaks louder than friendship

Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping sat alongside his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to watch Moscow’s Victory Day parade wearing the symbolic St George’s ribbon. Before that, the two leaders, who have met more than 40 times, signed over 20 bilateral cooperation agreements and pledged that their countries would be “friends of steel”. There seems ample evidence supporting the oft-touted “no limits” friendship.

But a leaked memo, reportedly from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) tells a more sobering story – one of deep mistrust, strategic anxiety and growing alarm over China’s rise. The document describes China as a potential threat, even an enemy. It outlines fears of Chinese espionage, economic encroachment and cultural infiltration – especially regarding Chinese technology and creeping irredentism over former Qing territories like Vladivostok.

The memo – assessed as authentic by Western intelligence agencies – lifts the curtain on a relationship that is far more fragile than official statements suggest. As historian Sören Urbansky, an expert on Sino-Russian relations at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, told me: “China and Russia are not natural allies, but strategic partners brought together primarily by their shared opposition to the West, rather than by trust or deep mutual affinity.”

This underlying mistrust, particularly within Russian security circles, doesn’t surprise those who closely follow the relationship – myself included.

For my generation and the one before, Russia (then the Soviet Union) loomed large in our lives. Like many others, I grew up loving its literature and cinema. Later, while living in Uzbekistan and travelling extensively across the former Soviet sphere, my interest in the region deepened.

My mother also had fond memories of Russia. In the 1950s, as a young woman, she was once invited to entertain Soviet experts helping to build a Yangtze River bridge – dancing, dining and swimming with them. Back then, Russian engineers were revered. The USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was not just a close ally; it was our “big brother”.

South China Morning Post