It can sometimes feel that the Beijing-Moscow relationship is like Churchill’s description of Russia — a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Thus, Putin’s May visit to Beijing produced many documents, but no deal on the issue that really mattered to him; an agreement on the Power of Siberia II gas pipeline was the one outcome that would genuinely have helped a Russian economy stalled by war and Western sanctions.
And yet the gap between expectation and delivery is the best illustration of how the Russia-China relationship actually works. Its economic dimension runs on hard pragmatism. China is not rushing to do favors for Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping will not invest in the Russian economy just to satisfy the Kremlin’s needs. Beijing is just fine with the additional market access Russia has provided for its goods.
But a transaction-centric reading of the Beijing-Moscow relationship has its limits, because it misses something important.
There is a dimension that both sides articulate, consistently, in their joint declarations and memorandums — a convergence of ideological positions and geopolitical priorities that matters no less to both parties than the gains from trade. Reducing the relationship to its economics means losing sight of that.
The St. Petersburg Economic Forum from June 3-6 offered a useful illustration. Some will remember it for the smoke from drone strikes that hung over the city, others for Putin’s response to Zelenskyy’s suggestion of talks. For Russia-China relations, the signal was the attendance of People’s Republic of China Vice-Chairman Han Zheng. Given that Putin had only just returned from China, the presence of the country’s nominally second-ranking official at the Forum speaks to the high intensity of top-level engagement between the two countries.
In his remarks, Han Zheng declared that Beijing and Moscow are engaged in nothing less than the transformation of global governance. For China, having Moscow as a UN Security Council ally in that project matters. The Chinese representative spoke of restoring the UN’s authority and global justice. This rhetoric will surprise no one who follows the bilateral relationship. It points directly to the joint Russia-China Declaration on a Multipolar World and International Relations of a New Type, which Putin also carried home from Beijing.
The Declaration condemns hegemonism and a world ordered by the “law of the jungle,” and advances a vision of a more just and democratic multipolar global governance system. That’s a not-too-subtle attack on the US and its allies.
A new CEPA report, The China-Russia Meta-Threat: The Architecture of Authoritarian Power, shows that this shared vision of multipolarity has become a genuine top-tier priority for both states — and that its importance is not directly tied to the character of their economic relationship. The two authoritarian regimes converge on the need to advance their model of global governance as an alternative to a Western-dominated order.
For the Kremlin, the opportunity to co-lead this ideological movement may be equivalent to regime survival. It is pitched as so important that it implicitly justifies deepening economic subservience to China. Its realization — meaning Western acknowledgment of the Kremlin’s ambitions and a loosening of Western pressure — is central to the Putin project.
CEPA’s report underscores that both states work with considerable consistency to align their positions on global governance. In the UN Security Council, they vote in near-total coordination. Within the organization, they systematically push democracy and human rights to the margins, defending this with the language of non-interference and national development pathways.
Their challenge to the Western order extends well beyond the UN. Moscow and Beijing are actively developing multilateral formats, drawing in key powers of the so-called Global South — above all through BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, both of which today attract serious interest from prospective members. Beijing and Moscow strategically emphasize development over ideology in these forums. Yet the intensity of interaction within and around these platforms is gradually turning them into the political poles arrayed against the so-called rules-based order.
This convergence constitutes a serious priority for both countries. But the report is careful to note that this does not, in the Russia-China case, mean coordination across the board. Across a range of international policy areas, differences in preference are visible, pointing to divergent ambitions and, at times, genuinely different visions of where global governance should go.
The devil, as the report shows, is in the detail and reveals where real power lies. Beijing formulates the key ideological tenets of international reform without coordinating with Moscow. Moscow has to subscribe. Even on UN reform — nominally central to the global governance agenda — the two sides pursue different strategies: China supports the debate, Russia blocks it.
The gap between a rising global hegemon and a troubled regional power also shows up in individual UN votes. Despite a general coordination in voting patterns, some votes on the Middle East and Africa reveal Russia’s greater tactical opportunism set against China’s more strategic outlook.
A similar divergence plays out in the multilateral platforms beyond the UN. The Kremlin tries to present BRICS and the SCO as a viable alternative to the Western world — even at the cost of the existing global governance system. China treats these platforms as complementary to its strategy of consolidating authority as an alternative global hegemon.
The Kremlin has failed to use these institutions to legitimize its aggression against Ukraine or make them explicitly anti-Western. And their further development is increasingly shaped by Kremlin anxieties about losing influence — visible in its approach to the enlargement of these organizations, consensus decisions, and the slow pace of building shared institutions such as development banks.
The alignment between Beijing and Moscow is now a geopolitical reality. But each side’s vision of its own role in advancing multipolarity defines both the internal limits of this new political form and the strategic openings available to its opponents.
Dr. Evgeny Roshchin leads the Democratic Resilience program at CEPA and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of “Professorial Silence”, “Exit as Voice”, “Crime and Punishment in International Politics,” and many other academic articles and media commentaries.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
