1. The establishment and development of the Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination

In April 1996, the heads of states of China and Russia issued a joint statement in which both sides declared the establishment of the partnership of strategic coordination based on equality, mutual trust, oriented toward the 21st century. Since then, the Sino-Russian ties have entered a new historical stage – a partnership of strategic coordination.

From syntactic analysis of political language, the concept of this partnership consists of two parts – “partnership, ” which emphasizes the friendly relations between the two as well as their respective independence; and “strategic coordination, ” which stresses the overall and long-term bilateral collaboration.“Partnership” shows the nature of the relationship, while “strategic coordination”embodies its characteristic. Therefore, as the two nations repeatedly declared to the outside, such a relationship is friendly cooperative partnership, not alliance, and it is not aimed at any third party. According to the joint statement, the range of the partnership includes strategic stability, establishment of new global political and economic orders as well as security and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, etc. Of course, these are just the initial aspiration for bilateral collaborations.

Although it was Russia who proposed to establish the Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination, the fact that both Beijing and Moscow quickly accepted this idea diplomatically mirrored that it was logically reasonable. The implementation of eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) not only ruthlessly smashed Russia's fond illusion to integrate with the West, but also prompted Russia to carry out multi-faceted diplomacy – seeking for political partners in the East to jointly oppose NATO's eastward expansion. At that time, the left-wing forces, represented by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, won the 1995 State Duma election. Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, who believed in Eurasianism, was in charge of the Russian Foreign Ministry. These factors strengthened the influence of political powers which were advocating developing close relations with China so as to regain Russia's political power as a major country. Former Taiwan “president” Lee Teng-hui's visit to the US in 1995 and the confrontation between Chinese and US warships in the Taiwan Straits manifested that Washington's two-sided policy toward Beijing, which is a combination of engagement and containment, started to tilt at containment, especially when it comes to the Taiwan question. Hence, it can be seen that the US containment policy, the serious concerns over US unilateralism as well as the international security landscape in the post-Cold War era were major reasons which had driven China and Russia to establish the partnership of strategic coordination. Undoubtedly, apart from that, jointly confronting the threat of the three evil forces, which are separatism, extremism and terrorism, both at home and in Central Asia, and developing bilateral economic and trade cooperation are also common interests of Beijing and Moscow.

Subsequently, the main mechanism of Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination, including the regular meetings between the heads of states, heads of government and foreign ministers, had been set up. Under the framework of the mechanism of regular meetings between the prime ministers, there are the Committee of the Regular Meeting (vice prime minister level), Cultural Cooperation Committee and energy negotiation mechanism. The Committee of the Regular Meeting contains subcommittees and secretariat on trade, energy, transportation, nuclear energy, science and technology, aerospace, banking, information, etc. All these consultation mechanisms have played a growingly significant role in deepening bilateral friendly relations and strategic coordination between China and Russia.

The achievements of Sino-Russian strategic coordination at the initial stage were mainly reflected on the diplomatic coordination. China supports Russia's actions on safeguarding national unity and social order in Chechnya, while Russia backs China's stance on the Taiwan question. China has signed an agreement on enhancing mutual trust in the military and mutual reduction of military forces in the border areas with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Signing the agreements not only consolidated peace and stability in Central Asia, but also turned the meeting of the five heads of state which took place in Shanghai, also known as the “Shanghai Five, ” into a regional mechanism for multilateral collaboration. The fact that China and Russia's demonstration against the Kosovo War that started by the US-led NATO, which eventually led to the political settlement of the issue of Kosovo at the UN Security Council, was a remarkable and effective cooperation of opposing unipolar hegemony.

The year of 2001 marked a milestone in the contemporary history of Sino-Russian relations–the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was set up, and the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation between China and Russia was signed. It is not only a result of pursuing common interests among the member states, such as confronting the security threats from the three evil forces in Central Asia together, but also a precursor of establishing a new fair and just international political and economic order by China and Russia. The Sino-Russian good-neighborly treaty of friendship and cooperation stipulates that the two sides must ensure a long-term and comprehensive development of bilateral relations and partnership of strategic coordination, in order to create a situation where ever-lasting peace and friendship prevail between China and Russia. These two major events happened when Russia's ties with the West were at a low ebb caused by the Kosovo War. By then, Russian President Vladimir Putin's administration continued the multipolar foreign policy from the Yeltsin-Primakov era.

However, the Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination does not cut off from the outside world. The constantly changing global situation is inevitably affecting the two countries as well as their bilateral relations. After the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the US was forced to transfer the focus of its foreign policy from containing regional major powers, such as China and Russia, to fighting against terrorism. In the meantime, Putin took the opportunity to promote a pragmatic diplomacy. The improvement of Russia-US ties largely cut down Putin's need to cooperate with China, and the strategic coordination between Beijing and Moscow was loosened. Given the fact that the strategy of jointly fighting against unipolar hegemony while promoting mulipolarization was as a matter of fact aimed at the US, the Sino-Russian strategic coordination in global affairs was weakened in the first place. Moreover, in terms of the Beijing-Moscow partnership to safeguard global stability, especially on the issue of maintaining the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT), disharmonious factors started to emerge. Previously, Russia and China used to be firmly against the US missile defense system together. Yet when Washington officially announced to withdraw from the ABMT in December 2001, Russia showed little reaction, which was incompatible with the common stance between Beijing and Moscow. After that, Russia initiated to build a missile defense system in Europe together with NATO, which made China even more confused.

Although Sino-Russian ties were influenced by those factors, still their strategic coordination witnessed development on regional and bilateral levels. The signing of the SCO Charter laid an international legal foundation for the establishment of the organization. Later, the mechanism of the SCO was established, which involves regular meeting mechanism among heads of state and government and leaders of each departments, and its secretariat and regional anti-terrorist organization have also been set up. In addition, SCO members signed a series of agreements including The Memorandum Between the Governments of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the Basic Objectives and Orientation of Regional Economic Cooperation and the Launching of a Process of Trade and Investment Facilitation and Multilateral Trade and Economic Cooperation Outline, which helped boosting cooperation in economy, trade and security. Meanwhile, Beijing and Moscow also gained quite a few achievements in bilateral collaboration on politics, economy and military. During Putin's second term, the Russian government firmly promoted neo-Slavophilism diplomacy, which includes maintaining Russia's core interests such as the country's development path. Therefore, the partnership between China and Russia strengthened once again. Both Beijing and Moscow opposed Washington for deploying National Missile Defense (NMD) system and the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system in East Asia, while jointly boycotting US plot of space weaponization. The reason why China and Russia supported Central Asian nations' measures to ensure social and political stability to prevent Color Revolution was that they were afraid of such revolution would stir up social and political turmoil in the region and might further threaten the surrounding areas. The Declaration of Heads of Member States of the SCO, issued at a 2005 summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, requested the US to come up with a timetable for withdrawing its troops from Central Asia. It piled huge political pressure on Washington's Central Asia policy. In addition, the Complementary Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation on the Eastern Section of the China-Russia Boundary was signed in 2004. The document stated that the entire boundary line between the two sides was clearly settled. The resolution of historical territorial disputes largely enhanced the political mutual trust between Beijing and Moscow and created favourable political conditions for the two sides to deepen bilateral cooperation in other fields.

During the period of joint rule by Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, the reset of the Russia-US ties as well as the development of pragmatic cooperation between Russia and Europe did not cut down Russia's interest to collaborate with China. The Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination developed steadily. After Putin went back to the Kremlin as president in 2012, Russia's partnership with China experienced huge development. In 2013, Moscow and Washington went through sharp diplomatic disputes over a series of issues including the Syrian crisis and Edward Snowden, who exposed US spy programs. In 2014, Russia's relationship with the West gravely turned for the worse because of the Ukrainian crisis. In order to ease the economic difficulties created by sanctions from the West, Russia was forced to shift its diplomatic focus to the East, especially China. This decision brought extra driving forces to the Sino-Russian ties. In the same year, Beijing and Moscow inked a deal to pipe natural gas from Russia's Far East to China. Moreover, the contract between Russia and China for gas supplies via the western route was also sealed. The volume of trade between Russia and China rose 6.8 percent from the previous year and reached $95.28 billion in 2014. China maintained to be Russia's largest trading partner, while Russia is China's ninth largest. Up to September 2014, Russia received a total of $32 billion investment from China, which made China the fourth-largest source of investment of Russia. It was reported by Russia's media that China had signed a contract with Russia in autumn 2014 for the purchase of the S-400 Triumf air defense system, which would provide driving forces for another round of military cooperation between the two countries. In May 2015, Beijing and Moscow issued the Joint Statement on Cooperation of Connection between the SREB and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which elaborated that the two sides would accelerate regional economic integration through connecting the two major projects.

As far as I am concerned, the bilateral cooperation on natural gas, expanded economic and military technology collaboration and the initiative of jointly building the SREB show that the Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination has come into an era of common development. The point of such common development is to maintain the current high-level diplomatic coordination, connect their own strategy of economic and social development as well as regional integration with each other, fully exploit the potential for bilateral cooperation and achieve common development goals.

In summary, for nearly two decades, the Sino-Russian partnership of strategic coordination has not only reached fruitful results, but also achieved a significant leap from diplomatic coordination to common development. Meanwhile, the practice of this relationship has accumulated valuable historical experiences, which mainly includes remaining independent and developing friendly relations with neighboring countries; respecting and treating each other equally; keeping mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation; being non-aligned and non-confrontational and not directed against any third country; avoiding ideological influences in bilateral relations, etc. The new pattern of relationship between China and Russia of “seeking companions without building alliances” not only serves the fundamental interests of people from both sides, but also becomes a model of relations between neighboring countries as well as major powers.