1 Analyzing Beijing’s strategic calculations at the Xi-Putin summit
Russian president Vladimir Putin made a state trip to China — his 25th such visit — from May 19 to May 20. On May 20, Putin and PRC leader Xi Jinping held formal talks at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Prior to the talks, the PRC held a welcoming ceremony for Putin at the East Gate Plaza of the Great Hall, including a 21-gun salute and the playing of both countries’ national anthems. Putin and Xi also reviewed an honor guard of the People’s Liberation Army and watched a military parade.
Per PRC state media reports, the two leaders agreed to extend the “Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation,” and signed two joint statements on strengthening comprehensive strategic coordination and promoting a multipolar world order. Officials from both sides also signed 20 bilateral cooperation agreements covering trade, energy, education, and other sectors.
The summit was conducted in both small-group and expanded-session formats. During the talks, both sides reviewed the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the China–Russia strategic partnership and the 25th anniversary of the signing of the good-neighborly friendship treaty. The PRC side emphasized that, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and Russia would continue developing their comprehensive strategic partnership based on equality and mutual respect, while deepening coordination within multilateral frameworks such as the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
Putin said at the talks that Russia–China relations had reached a high level, with bilateral trade maintaining steady growth. He noted that the two countries had achieved mutual benefit in energy supply and demand, while also advancing deep cooperation in transportation, logistics, and technology. Putin further stated that Russia would support China in hosting the upcoming APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, which U.S. President Donald Trump might attend.
After the talks concluded, Putin and Xi heard reports from both sides under the China–Russia Prime Ministers’ Regular Meeting mechanism regarding cooperation in investment, energy, trade, Far East development, and people-to-people exchanges, before jointly meeting the press. Both sides later issued a joint statement that explicitly called for promoting a multipolar world and building a new type of international relations together.
On May 20, Xi and Putin attended the opening ceremony of the “China–Russia Education Year” event. This marked the first time the PRC and Russia had organized a national-level themed year focused specifically on education. Official data shows that the number of students studying in each other’s countries has now exceeded 80,000. Under the previously signed “Roadmap for Russia–China Humanitarian Cooperation Through 2030,” both sides aim to expand bilateral student exchanges to 100,000 by 2030. Russian ambassador to China Igor Morgulov stated that this target may be achieved ahead of schedule.
Beyond higher education, educational cooperation between the two countries now spans multiple levels:
- University alliances: Fifteen specialized university alliances have been established in fields including engineering, medicine, and arts and culture, covering more than 800 universities in both countries.
- Vocational education: In June 2025, the jointly established Russian “Lu Ban Workshop” (魯班工坊) was officially inaugurated, incorporating 5G technology into its vocational training programs.
- Primary education and language cooperation: Through the “1,000 Schools Partnership” initiative, both countries plan over the next five years to promote teacher and student exchanges and curriculum sharing among approximately 1,000 primary and secondary schools. Currently, 185 Chinese universities offer Russian-language programs. As of 2025, enrollment at Confucius Institute branches and classrooms operating in Russia had reached 27,000 students.
During Putin’s visit, both leaders also exchanged views on international and regional hotspot issues, including the situation in the Middle East. Senior PRC officials, including Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, Wang Yi, He Lifeng, Zhang Guoqing, and Shen Yiqin, attended the various diplomatic activities.
Backdrop
At the recent meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Beijing, Xi announced a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability” that will “provide strategic guidance for China-U.S. relations over the next three years and beyond.”
The “constructive strategic stability” formulation calls for “positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.”
Our take
Putin’s Beijing trip took place just five days after President Trump concluded his state visit to China. The scheduling and developments reflect the Xi leadership’s finely calibrated balancing of the U.S.-Russia-China “great power” relationship, as well as reveal deeper interest conflicts, strategic suspicions, and economic bargaining underlying the supposedly “limitless” China-Russia partnership.
1. Beijing appears to be “using the U.S. to pressure Russia, and using Russia to counter the U.S.”
On the eve of Putin’s arrival in Beijing, the PRC established its “constructive strategic stability” framework with the Trump administration in what appears to be an attempt at extending the post-Busan summit “détente” between both sides. Yet the outcomes of the Xi-Putin meeting suggest that Beijing is making plans for further competition and confrontation with the U.S. and its allies.
In official propaganda, the PRC and Russia emphasized principles of “non-alliance, non-confrontation, and not targeting third parties” (不結盟、不對抗、不針對第三方), while issuing joint statements advocating “multipolarity” and a “new type of international relations” — all pet agendas of Beijing for advancing its hegemony. Politically, Beijing even endorsed Moscow’s hardline position of “eliminating the root causes of the Ukraine conflict” in the joint statement, implicitly supporting Russia’s strategic goal of dismantling Ukraine’s pro-Western government.
Behind this highly confrontational strategic messaging lies Beijing’s carefully calculated dual-hedging strategy. On one hand, the Xi leadership views strategic cooperation with Russia as leverage against the United States. If Washington attempts to get tough on China on critical or sensitive areas such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, or the Taiwan issue, Beijing can deepen substantive ties with Moscow by supplying more dual-use items necessary for Russia’s war effort and other bilateral initiatives anathema to the U.S. and its allies, thereby increasing pressure on Washington.
Meanwhile, Beijing also appears to be leveraging its recently solidified “goodwill” with the U.S. as a tool to weaken Russia’s bargaining power in energy negotiations. By demonstrating to Moscow that China is not fully isolated internationally, and that China and the U.S. share overlapping interests in issues such as reopening navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, Xi is holding off scenarios where the PRC might be pressured into forming an anti-American military bloc with Russia. Xi could also be parlaying his “goodwill” with the U.S. to allow the PRC to retain firm control over pricing power in subsequent bilateral economic negotiations.
2. One issue that was not touched upon at the end of the summit yet was closely watched was the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline project. This planned 2,600-kilometer pipeline would pass through Mongolia, linking Russia’s Arctic Yamal Peninsula to northern China’s industrial heartland, with a designed annual capacity of 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas. For Gazprom, which faces severe fiscal distress after the indefinite closure of the European market, the pipeline is vital for replacing lost exports and earning foreign currency revenue.
However, despite Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov publicly claiming after the talks that both sides had reached a “common understanding” regarding the pipeline’s route and construction parameters, Vladimir Putin appeared to have failed to persuade Xi Jinping to sign a final legally binding agreement during the visit. This deadlock hints at a division between the two countries over strategic energy pricing and security boundaries.
The fundamental reason for the prolonged stalemate is that Beijing, leveraging its monopoly position as effectively the “only buyer,” has pushed Russia to the extreme in price negotiations. The PRC has firmly demanded that natural gas prices be reduced to levels close to Russia’s heavily subsidized domestic rates. This is far below what Gazprom can financially tolerate and has effectively placed the company in a situation where signing the contract would guarantee losses. Furthermore, although instability in the Middle East and the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz have increased the PRC’s urgent need for overland energy supplies, Beijing’s long-term energy strategy remains focused on avoiding excessive dependence on any single supplier, so as not to face future geopolitical supply blackmail similar to Europe’s experience.
To counterbalance Russia, Beijing has simultaneously used the Central Asian “Line D” gas pipeline as a major bargaining chip. This pipeline, planned to originate in Turkmenistan and pass through Kyrgyzstan into Xinjiang, has a designed annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters and would source gas from the world-famous Galkynysh gas field. Turkmenistan already exports nearly all of its extracted natural gas to China, and its pricing remains more competitive than Russian supplies. By carefully balancing Russia against Central Asia and delaying the signing of the Power of Siberia 2 agreement, Beijing has demonstrated a cold and highly calculated commercial pragmatism even toward its so-called “ally.” This contrasts sharply with Beijing’s official rhetoric of “mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.”
3. One of the focal points of the China-Russia talks was the issue of access to the sea through the Tumen River. On this strategic issue involving national security and territorial boundaries, the mutual suspicion and hostility among China, Russia, and North Korea were fully exposed.
From the PRC side, the Jilin provincial government and other local governments have for many years sought to promote the development and opening of the Tumen River basin, hoping to secure access to the sea through this waterway located only 15 kilometers from the Sea of Japan. The goal has been to overcome Northeast China’s long-standing strategic disadvantage of lacking direct maritime access. PRC official discourse has also frequently promoted the “constructive dialogue” language regarding Tumen River navigation found in China-Russia joint statements, portraying it as a major geopolitical breakthrough.
The real geopolitical picture, however, has been shaped not by diplomatic rhetoric, but by irreversible facts constructed from concrete and steel. Russia and North Korea are using physical infrastructure projects to permanently block the possibility of large Chinese vessels entering the Sea of Japan through the Tumen River. The core of this containment strategy lies in the layout of Russia–North Korea cross-border infrastructure. On April 30, 2025, Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin and North Korean prime minister Pak Thae-song officially announced via video link the launch of construction on a new “Russia–North Korea Tumen River Highway Bridge” spanning the river. This new bridge is located only 415 meters east of the historic Russia–North Korea railway bridge (the “Friendship Bridge”), approximately 15 kilometers from the mouth of the Tumen River and just around 1 kilometer downstream from the end of China’s territorial reach along the river. The bridge has a total length of 1,005 meters, consisting of concrete supports and steel spans, with an estimated total cost of roughly 9 billion rubles, fully funded by the Russian federal budget.
The “Russia–North Korea Tumen River Highway Bridge” project’s most consequential and geopolitically revealing feature lies in its height specification. Notably, the roadway elevation of the new bridge was deliberately designed to be one meter lower than the already extremely low Russia–North Korea Friendship Bridge. Built in the 1950s, the Russia–North Korea railway bridge, with a clearance of only 7 to 11 meters above the water and densely packed bridge piers, restricted navigation on the Tumen River to fishing vessels below 300 tons. Large commercial cargo ships, which typically require drafts of around 9.3 meters, channel depths of 10 to 15 meters, and much greater vertical clearance, were fundamentally unable to pass.
For years, PRC academic circles and local governments had hoped that they could persuade Russia and North Korea through diplomatic negotiations to either dismantle the old railway bridge or jointly rebuild it into a higher bridge capable of supporting maritime navigation, combined with dredging downstream channels to achieve a strategic breakthrough linking river and sea transport. However, the new highway bridge completed on June 19, 2026, together with the old railway bridge, has created an irreversible “double-bridge lock” configuration. This low-clearance bridge physically eliminates any future possibility of raising the bridge height or allowing passage for large oceangoing vessels.
Geopolitical calculations doubtless had an influence on this engineering choice. Russia and North Korea appear to have reached a shared strategic understanding that the PRC’s expansion toward the Sea of Japan must be jointly contained. If the PRC were to gain meaningful deep-water access through the Tumen River, Chinese coast guard vessels — and potentially even naval auxiliary ships — could freely enter and exit the Sea of Japan. This would fundamentally alter the regional balance of power in the Russian Far East, threaten Russia’s military dominance in Vladivostok, and weaken North Korea’s security control over its eastern maritime zone.
As a result, Russia and North Korea have been willing to spend substantial amounts to construct a low-clearance bridge in order to use technical realities on the ground to permanently block Beijing’s maritime ambitions. This demonstrates that when issues of geopolitical spheres of influence and concrete security control are involved, Moscow and Pyongyang’s strategic suspicion toward Beijing is fundamentally no different from their distrust toward Western countries.
4. The lack of strategic trust between China and Russia extends beyond large infrastructure projects and also runs through bilateral trade, financial settlement systems, and military-security cooperation.
In the automobile trade sphere, Chinese automakers increasingly viewed Russia during the 2024–2025 period as their primary outlet for absorbing excess production capacity as Western markets tightened restrictions on Chinese electric and conventional vehicles. This flood of Chinese vehicles, however, quickly angered Russia’s domestic automotive industry, prompting Russian policymakers to adopt a series of highly aggressive protectionist countermeasures. Beginning in October 2024, Russia sharply increased vehicle recycling fees on imported cars by 70 percent to 85 percent, while also committing to continue annual increases of 10 percent to 20 percent through 2030. Shortly afterward, in January 2025, tariffs on imported Chinese vehicles were further raised from 20 percent to 38 percent.
To completely eliminate opportunities for tariff arbitrage, Moscow also imposed strong intervention measures. For instance, beginning in April 2024, any Chinese vehicles entering Russia through re-export routes via Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan were forced to pay the full amount of import duties and consumption taxes retroactively. The various tariff and non-tariff barriers were designed to protect domestic Russian brands such as Lada, and caused Chinese automobile exports to Russia to shrink sharply in 2025. As a result, Chinese companies such as Chery and Geely were forced to shift toward low-profit local assembly and joint-brand production models inside Russia, despite the associated risks of technological leakage.
In the financial sphere, the PRC and Russia are struggling to overcome external sanctions. For instance, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of State significantly intensified enforcement of secondary sanctions in 2025 against entities assisting Russia in evading sanctions. Because China’s major state-owned banks possess enormous interests tied to dollar and euro settlement systems, large Chinese financial institutions broadly severed direct settlement channels with Russia in order to avoid being blacklisted by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control. This forced China-Russia bilateral trade settlement into what could be described as a “financial dark web.”
According to publicly available information, the institutions currently sustaining trade payments between the two countries are mainly small rural commercial and regional banks located along China’s northeastern border, including banks in Hunchun, Suifenhe, Dongning, and Harbin. These border banks avoid direct integration with Western-dominated international clearing systems and instead operate through a closed bilateral settlement mechanism denominated in yuan and rubles. Although this system allows trade in non-sensitive goods to continue, its settlement capacity is extremely limited, operationally cumbersome, and highly vulnerable to secondary sanctions tracing. It is fundamentally incapable of supporting large-scale, high-value technological or industrial cooperation between the two countries.
In military-security and technology spheres, mutual suspicion between the PRC and Russia is even more explicit. According to disclosures from Western intelligence officials, despite the two countries publicly displaying top-level strategic unity, Russian security agencies are secretly investigating at least one sensitive case involving alleged Chinese espionage targeting Russian military and scientific institutions.
What has angered Moscow even more is Beijing’s “double-sided profiteering” behavior during the war in Ukraine. Russian military analysts have expressed serious concern over China’s simultaneous role as a key supplier of components for Ukraine’s drone industry. Over the past year, Ukraine has reportedly procured large quantities of Chinese-made motors, chips, and carbon-fiber structural components through various channels, enabling explosive growth in drone production capacity and facilitating precision strikes on Russian oil refineries and military bases. Although Russia itself also depends on these Chinese components to sustain its own weapons production lines, Beijing has refused to fully cooperate with Moscow in imposing a comprehensive embargo on drone-related supply chains to Ukraine. This has reinforced Russia’s perception that the PRC’s support is fundamentally transactional, highly self-interested, and lacking genuine strategic loyalty.
5. Beijing’s diplomatic restraint and careful bargaining stem not from moderation, but from severe domestic economic pressures. China’s macroeconomic indicators during 2025–2026 suggest that its long-standing growth model is approaching systemic dysfunction. This has left Beijing facing severe fiscal constraints, fundamentally limiting its ability to provide unlimited support to Russia on the international stage.
First, the PRC’s core pillar of local government finance — land sales revenue — has effectively collapsed (for example, see here). Second, at the microeconomic level, China’s domestic corporate sector is experiencing widespread financial distress and increasing polarization. Among roughly 5,500 listed companies in China’s domestic market, as many as 1,443 were expected to post losses during fiscal year 2025, representing approximately 26 percent of all listed firms. This broad deterioration in corporate profitability and asset values has translated at the macro level into deep structural deflation. In April 2026, China’s GDP deflator recorded negative growth of 0.60 percent, indicating ongoing contraction in overall price levels. Meanwhile, Fitch Ratings projected that China’s real GDP growth for 2026 would remain constrained at a relatively low 4.1 percent, due to extremely weak domestic demand and the inability of local governments to provide major stimulus support.
Under conditions of collapsing domestic demand, widespread corporate distress, and fragile local government finances, Beijing appears to be prioritizing the prevention of domestic defaults while maintaining external stability. Beijing’s financial realities also mean that it cannot provide Russia with unlimited financial or economic assistance in the manner often portrayed in Western narratives. Rather, the PRC has to make seemingly contradictory geopolitical moves such as aggressively pushing down Russian energy prices to reduce domestic industrial costs (harming an “ally”), while simultaneously preserving export access to the U.S. and Europe in order to earn foreign exchange revenue (helping “adversaries”) to preserve regime survival.
6. In reviewing the recent Xi-Putin summit and the broader economic and geopolitical data, several conclusions about the future trajectory of U.S.-Russia-PRC relations.
For one, the “neighborly friendship and strategic cooperation” heavily emphasized in official China-Russia propaganda is fundamentally highly performative and transactional in nature. In practice, Russia and the PRC are mutually suspicious and distrustful, and have acted in various ways (see the “Russia–North Korea Tumen River Highway Bridge” project) to hedge against the other. Notably, the stalemate over the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline shows that Beijing’s friendship with Moscow is truly “without limits” as claimed. The PRC appears to be exploiting Russia’s isolation under Western sanctions by using its position as Russia’s only major large-scale buyer to force extremely aggressive price concessions. Beijing’s actions or lack thereof reveal a fundamental lack of mutual trust and genuine alliance between the two sides.
Meanwhile, the PRC’s own structural problems — including the real estate crisis, collapse of land finance, soaring local government debt, and systemic deflation — make it impossible for Beijing to build a genuine anti-Western economic bloc comparable to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. To ensure that its “15th Five-Year Plan” proceeds without disruption, Beijing remains deeply dependent on consumer markets in the United States and Europe. Consequently, the Xi leadership has adopted a pragmatic strategy toward Putin characterized by “political goodwill in rhetoric, economic exploitation in trade, and financial risk avoidance.”
The PRC-Russia relationship can be described as “sharing the same bed while dreaming different dreams” (同床異夢), that is, there are fundamental divergences between the two powers’ core interests. Under the pressure of escalating geopolitical tensions around the world, Beijing, Moscow, or both could be in for a rude wake-up call when the limits of their “no-limits” partnership are truly put to the test.
