Fragile Foundations: The Complex Reality of Sino–Russian Relations

Over the past decade, Beijing and Moscow have cast themselves as inseparable partners on the world stage. Despite these mutual proclamations of an “intimate alliance,” the empirical reality of Sino–Russian relations is considerably more complex than official discourse implies. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, major media outlets such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal noted that China’s ongoing oil purchases and diplomatic neutrality made it “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” underscoring Beijing’s material support for Moscow under Western sanctions. In June 2025, however, the New York Times reported that Russian counterintelligence was mining data from the Chinese messaging app WeChat to identify suspected Chinese agents—and that the FSB had branded all Chinese nationals “enemies” posing a grave security threat. Even more alarming, in February 2024 the Financial Times cited leaked classified documents showing that Russia had war-gamed tactical nuclear strikes to repel a hypothetical Chinese incursion into its Far Eastern regions—evidence of a disturbingly low threshold for escalation. These revelations reveal a deep current of mutual suspicion that belies the public façade of Sino-Russian solidarity, and which continues to reverberate through policy debates in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.

A look back at the history of Sino-Russian relations does much to explain these undercurrents of mistrust. Official contact between the two empires dates back to the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which constituted the first formal agreement between Imperial China and Tsarist Russia, demarcating the empires’ mutual border along the Argun and Stanovoy Mountains and establishing a framework for peaceful trade and diplomatic relations. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, Imperial Russia had already begun to brazenly violate this agreement. Under military duress, the Qing court was compelled to sign the Treaty of Argun in 1858—ceding some 600,000 square kilometers north of the Amur River—and then the Convention of Peking in 1860, which formalized the handover of an additional 400,000 square kilometers encompassing today’s Primorye region, including Vladivostok. Further protocols in 1864 stripped another 440,000 square kilometers from Qing China, cementing a permanent loss of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers to the Russian Empire.