Introduction

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the China in the World podcast, Carnegie China is launching a series of lookback episodes, using clips from previous interviews to put current international issues in context. For the second episode in this series, the podcast looks back on ten years of China-Russia relations, one year into the war in Ukraine.

China-Russia relations have evolved significantly since the launch of the China in the World podcast. In 2014, Russia announced its annexation of Crimea, which at the time was viewed with ambivalence in China. While Beijing abstained from the UN Security Council resolution to invalidate the 2014 Crimean referendum, China simultaneously criticized the Western sanctions regime imposed on Russia. Over the course of the following 10 years, Moscow and Beijing gradually expanded their economic, diplomatic, and security exchanges to the point where, today, many view the China-Russia relationship as the strongest it has been since before the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. This episode helps shed light on how the China-Russia relationship evolved throughout Xi Jinping’s first decade in power, and during the lead-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.