Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s article for Rossiyskaya Gazeta on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, October 3, 2024
Russia and China: Partnership and friendship forged by time
This year, alongside our Chinese partners, we mark a significant milestone which is the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations.
The history of Russian-Chinese relations spans centuries, but October 2, 1949 holds a special place in it. On the second day after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union recognised the New China and established diplomatic ties with it. In the early days of China as a fledgling state, the Soviet Union provided substantial support to it.
Over the decades, the bilateral relationship has faced numerous strength tests, but, most importantly, we have shown strategic wisdom and perseverance. We succeeded in building an exemplary model of relations between neighbouring great powers rooted in neighbourliness, friendship, and cooperation.
Russia has invariably placed high importance on strengthening cooperation with its great neighbour. In 1996, the Russian-Chinese partnership has become strategic and, since then, its status has continued to rise.
On July 16, 2001, President Vladimir Putin and Chairman Jiang Zemin signed the Treaty of Neighbourliness, Friendship, and Cooperation which laid a solid legal foundation for lasting, stable, and predictable relations between our countries. The treaty laid out the foundational principles underlying the bilateral dialogue, which remain valid to this day. They include equality and mutual trust, respect for territorial integrity and rejection of territorial claims, recognition of each other’s interests, ideology-free relations, respect for the sovereign right of each country to choose its own social system and the development path, non-interference in internal affairs, mutual support on key issues of sovereignty, security, and development, pursuit of mutual benefit, and willingness to engage in comprehensive cooperation. Our friendly and neighbourly relations are not a formal alliance, yet their effectiveness surpasses the confrontation-based military-political alliances.
In 2005, agreements that resolved the border issue for good came into force and transformed our shared border into a belt of perpetual peace and friendship.
Today, Russian-Chinese cooperation has evolved to become a comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction on the cusp of a new era. According to our leaders, bilateral relations have soared to an unprecedentedly high level and never stop to be enriched with new content. We firmly believe that Russia needs a prosperous and stable China, just as China needs a strong and successful Russia.
In this day and age, as the world is undergoing truly tectonic shifts caused by the emerging multipolar international order, the Russia-China strategic partnership serves as a balancing force in international politics and contributes directly to the economic growth and the well-being of the people in both countries.
Close and trust-based contacts between our leaders are the driving force behind Russian-Chinese relations. President Vladimir Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping have held over 40 bilateral meetings. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to strengthening neighbourly relations, Xi Jinping was presented with Russia’s highest state award, the Order of St Andrew the Apostle, in Moscow in 2017. In 2018, in Beijing, Xi Jinping presented President Putin with the People’s Republic of China’s first-ever Order of Friendship.
Key historical milestones include the bilateral summits in March 2023 in Moscow and in May 2024 in Beijing. Both visits were state-level visits and marked the first foreign trips by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping after being re-elected to the top offices, which fact clearly demonstrates the special nature of our relationship and the growing importance of the Russia-China partnership in global affairs.
The high-level dialogue is further complemented by the effective functioning of a ramified set of the country-to-country cooperation mechanisms, including regular meetings between the heads of governments and parliaments, inter-party exchanges, collaboration between the Russian Presidential Executive Office and the General Office of the Communist Party of China, as well as consultations between high-ranking officials overseeing security and law enforcement agencies.
The high level of mutual trust allows us to vigorously expand military and military-technical cooperation, conduct joint military exercises, organise air and naval patrols, and maintain friendly interactions along our shared border. These efforts strengthen the security of both countries and contribute to international and regional stability, particularly in Greater Eurasia. Importantly, everything that we do is completely transparent, and is carried out in full accordance with international law, and is not directed against any third party.
It is gratifying to note that, despite various restrictive measures imposed by the United States and its allies, the economies of Russia and China continue to grow dynamically. Our countries’ economic structures are highly complementary. For many years now, China has been our primary trading partner, and last year, Russia was number one in terms of trade growth with China. In 2023, bilateral trade exceeded $200 billion and continues to expand. Notably, nearly all bilateral transactions are now conducted in national currencies, namely, roubles and yuans, with their share standing as high as 95 percent.
The Russia-China practical cooperation positively impacts the daily lives in our respective countries. Russia plays a significant role in ensuring China’s energy security. With natural gas supplied through the Power of Siberia pipeline, the environmental situation in major Chinese cities has improved. Russian agricultural products have become more popular with our Chinese friends, now ranking second only to energy in our exports to China. Meanwhile, China has become one of the main suppliers of automobiles to Russia, and the demand for Chinese machinery and consumer goods remains strong.
Our mutually beneficial collaboration transcends trade. We are deepening ties in industry, investment, transport, and the high-tech sector, including advanced areas such as space exploration, civilian nuclear energy, fundamental research, and artificial intelligence. We stand ready to further strengthen comprehensive cooperation with China and work toward integrating our countries’ potentials to ensure long-term economic and technological leadership.
We are pursuing an ambitious goal of ensuring high-quality expansion of bilateral economic relations to 2030. To this end, major efforts have been deployed by government bodies and businesses. I’m confident that our joint efforts will result in significant progress.
Mutual trust between Russia and China is further reinforced by expanding people-to-people exchanges. The number and quality of these interactions continue to grow. As part of the bilateral cross-years of culture in 2024 and 2025, hundreds of events have been planned in dozens of cities across Russia and China. More than a million tourists cross the border between our countries annually, and tens of thousands of students go to universities in both countries. Exchanges in sports, healthcare, and media are expanding as well. We are keen to maintain the high momentum of youth exchanges and to pass along the values of long-standing Russian-Chinese friendship, mutual respect, and neighbourliness to the next generation.
Regional cooperation is making a valuable contribution to our joint work as well. More than a hundred agreements have been signed between Russian regions and Chinese provinces, and over 300 sister-city agreements have been concluded at the municipal level. The Volga-Yangtze regional cooperation mechanism continues to function effectively. The Intergovernmental Russia-China Commission for Cooperation and Development of Russia’s Far East and Baikal Region and China’s Northeast is playing a crucial role in this process.
Our countries’ close interaction in the international arena is highly commendable. The Russia-China foreign policy partnership strengthens the legal foundations of the multipolar world order, takes into greater account the interests of the Global South and the Global East, helps overcome the legacy of colonialism, and counters modern neocolonial practices.
We are staunch advocates of upholding the principles of the UN Charter in their entirety and interconnectedness. We strongly oppose the flawed practice of addressing issues through threats, blackmail, or force. These methods are widely used by the collective West. This shared stance underpins our productive cooperation on multilateral platforms, such as the UN, the SCO, APEC, the G20, and BRICS. We are grateful to China for its strong support of Russia’s BRICS chairmanship. Beijing shares our perspectives on the future of the organisation, which has become a pillar of the multipolar world order. In return, we are ready to fully support our Chinese partners during their current SCO chairmanship.
We maintain close coordination on critical regional issues, including the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea and the East China Sea, as well as the developments in the Middle East and Africa. We appreciate China’s balanced and consistent stance on the Ukraine crisis. The initiatives put forward by Beijing for a political and diplomatic settlement address what matters most, which is to eliminate the root causes of the conflict, including NATO’s many years of eastward expansion which undermines Russia’s core security interests, the creation of a Western-backed anti-Russia military bridgehead in Ukraine, the US- and the EU-backed 2014 coup in Kiev, and the Zelensky-led neo-Nazi regime’s policy seeking to wipe out everything Russian, including language, culture, media, and the Orthodox Church.
Russia and China hold similar views when it comes to assessing the risks posed by the West’s efforts to push forward the Indo-Pacific project in the Asia-Pacific region, which seeks to undermine the region’s ASEAN-centric security architecture by creating limited military and diplomatic facilities. The United States and its allies are deliberately ratcheting up tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Counter to the previously recognised by them obligations to uphold the One China principle, they continue to fortify political and military ties with the island’s authorities. Russia’s stance on Taiwan in support of China’s territorial integrity remains unchanged and has been publicly stated at various levels, including the top political level, and is laid out in key joint declarations, including the Joint Statement made following the Russian President’s state visit to China in May.
The global political and economic focus is irreversibly shifting to Eurasia, which is home to new centres of power which draft and make global decisions. Promising multilateral processes are unfolding across the vast Eurasian space, and Moscow and Beijing are working effectively to integrate large-scale projects, such as the Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. We consider this collaborative effort a significant step towards realising President Putin’s vision for creating a Greater Eurasian Partnership, which is a broad-based integration network open to all nations and alliances on our continent.
Clearly, peaceful development and prosperity across Eurasia are unlikely to ever materialise without providing reliable security to the countries of the region. Since the security system in Europe and the Euro-Atlantic region has been fully discredited by United States and other NATO countries, we suggest deploying serious collaborative efforts to build new Eurasian security architecture based on the regional- solutions-to-regional-problems principle, anchored in equality and indivisibility, and grounded in the existing multilateral associations within Eurasia. We are pleased to note that President Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative aligns with Russia’s approaches in this regard.
I would like to close by emphasising that Russia-China relations have a long and glorious history. They preserve the memory of the support accorded by Moscow during the early days of the Communist Party of China, assistance during the Chinese people’s revolutionary struggle for freedom, and the camaraderie shared during World War II. The Soviet Union and China both endured grueling hardships and played pivotal roles in securing Great Victory over a common enemy. Next year, alongside all sensible nations, we will be marking the 80th anniversary of Victory over German Nazism and Japanese militarism. I’m confident that this will become another significant milestone in the long-standing friendship between the Russian and Chinese peoples.
