As eyes across the world turned to renewed turmoil in the Middle East last week, two ‘old friends’ were holding a meeting in Beijing with major geopolitical significance.

On a rare trip abroad since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Vladimir Putin was received with fanfare after he journeyed to the Belt and Road Summit. The Russian leader met with President Xi Jinping, reaffirming the ‘no-limits’ partnership between the two men’s nations while displaying a united force against Western power.

Political rhetoric is not the only thing binding Russia and China together: economic ties between the two countries have reached record levels in recent months, despite a global sanctions regime aimed at isolating Russia from the world economy. From January to September of 2023, Sino-Russian bilateral trade totalled $176 billion, according to Chinese customs data, up more than 120 percent compared to the same period in 2020. 

[China is] balancing a perceived need to be supportive to Russia… also with some concern about the reputational costs and the other costs they might incur if they went really across the line.

Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia

Yet beyond the data and elaborate dinners, the state of the relationship is more nuanced. The U.S. government has recently expressed its belief that China is proving reluctant to fully back its northern neighbor in its conflict with Ukraine. In particular, China has appeared unwilling to provide major lethal aid to Russia, revealing the delicate balance China is attempting to strike in supporting its ally, while avoiding complete alienation from the U.S. and Europe.

“It is, of course, not really a completely unlimited partnership,” Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, said at an Atlantic Council event on Monday. “We have seen that with respect to China’s support for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, that they are balancing a perceived need to be supportive to Russia… also with some concern about the reputational costs and the other costs they might incur if they went really across the line.”

The China Military Power Report, an annual review of the strength of China’s forces released by the Defense Department last week, further explained that China has taken “a discreet, flexible, and cautious approach to providing material support to Russia.” That has included Chinese companies exporting civilian, dual use, and some “minor military items” to Russia. The U.S. government, however, has yet to publicly accuse China of providing significant military equipment to Russia, unlike countries like North Korea and Iran.

China’s economic bolstering of Russia has meanwhile taken many forms: In the first nine months of 2023, China imported more than $70 billion worth of Russian mineral fuel, primarily crude oil and natural gas, according to Chinese customs data — already exceeding imports for the whole of 2021. Meanwhile, exports of Chinese vehicles to Russia in September reached $2 billion, up from $336 million in September of 2021. 

Even here, the headline figures mask how China is flexing its strength in the relationship. Russia’s GDP is 10 percent of China’s and it has few other large trading partners given its economic isolation. China’s purchases of crude oil from Russia have come at a steep discount, and it can drive a hard bargain with its ally — Beijing, for example, is pushing for favorable conditions in negotiations with Moscow over a massive proposed natural gas pipeline between Siberia and northern China, known as the Power of Siberia 2.

Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and editor of the newsletter China-Russia Report, says that China will only agree to the project if they get “a really good deal for it.” He adds that he was struck by how the Chinese side repeatedly brought up its renewable energy resources in discussions with Russia last week. 

“China is the renewable superpower,” he says. “That renewables industry will, at the margins, reduce their need for Russian energy imports. Through constantly mentioning renewables to Putin, at several points, the Chinese side really emphasized their leverage over Russia.”

The picture around China’s military support for Russia is complex too. China’s exports to Russia of ‘dual use’ items, which have both military and civilian potential uses, have surged. Semiconductors, necessary both for smartphones and missile systems, are one example: In 2021, before the invasion, only 27 percent of Russian integrated circuit imports came from China and Hong Kong, according to the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington, D.C. think tank. In the year and a half after the invasion, that number increased to 83 percent. Between March 2022 and 2023, Chinese firms also exported more than $12 million worth of drones and drone components to Russia, according to the China Military Power Report.

The appearance of Chinese items on the Ukrainian battlefield has led some to question whether China’s stance that it is not providing military equipment to Russia is meaningful. 

“The Chinese say that ‘oh, these are drones used for medical purposes,’ but the Russians decided to use those drones for military bombing. I think that definitely qualifies [as military support],” says Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “More broadly, the Chinese economic support of Russia… creates tremendous revenue for Russia to be able to sustain this war. And why would that not be qualified as support?” 

China and Russia’s military cooperation has also continued through joint exercises: The pair conducted five of these in 2022, according to the China Military Power Report.

“One of the most significant things we’ve seen is a more pointed use of military exercises to push back against the United States and to signal resolve against the U.S. and its allies,” says Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), pointing to the two countries’ joint exercise near Japan as leaders from the Quad met there last May. 

On June 7, 2023, two Chinese H-6 bombers (left) and two Russian Tu-95 bombers (right) flew from China into airspace over Pacific Ocean near Japan, according to Japan’s Joint Staff Office of the Ministry of Defense. Credit: Japan Ministry of Defense

Yet others point to China’s unwillingness to provide overt military support to Russia as evidence of its desire to maintain plausible deniability and avoid cutting off its relationship with Western powers — especially when the U.S. and China are attempting a tentative thaw in relations. Washington has made it clear that providing lethal support to Russia would be crossing a red line, and would likely result in extensive sanctions.

“Russia has basically given up on its relationship with Western countries,” says Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But China understands it has a major interest in maintaining that relationship, because China’s continuous development is still very much reliant on access to Western technologies, markets and investments. So China has to strike a balance between Russia and Western countries.”

Defense is certainly another area where the shift in relative power between Russia and China has become clear. 

…China’s continuous development is still very much reliant on access to Western technologies, markets and investments.

Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Starting in the 1950s, Russia sold China advanced military equipment, such as aircraft engines and air defense systems. From 1990 to 2005, more than 80 percent of China’s arms imports were from Russia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Those imports have ebbed in recent years as China has pushed to become more self-reliant for critical military technologies, and it is now Russia that is keen to import more Chinese hardware. 

Though China’s overall support for Russia hasn’t been as extensive as some feared, Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says that few people think that China will break from Russia, even as the Ukrainian invasion drags on without clear victories for Russia. “It’s not that the Chinese are making 100 percent bet on Putin, that’s clearly not what they’ve done,” he says. “But I think there are very few people who believe now that it’s possible to peel China away from Russia, or at least anytime soon.”

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