Inside the China-Russia Partnership
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China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecs China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair. in China Studies at CSIS. This is pechyology. China may not do alliances in the American sense of the term, but if we are looking at What may be China's closest partnership, Russia is probably at the top of the list. Since Putin and Xi announced a no limits partnership together in February twenty twenty two, just a few weeks before Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, the importance of Sino Russian ties have only increased.
And this is particularly interesting for us at Packingology because it's a relationship that is so heavily leader driven. This is a story of she and Putin as much as it is a story of bilateral relations between the governments. And that was on display recently with yet another summit. Between the two men this time in Beijing, less than a week after Trump's own meetings with Xi in China. So with that said, I am really excited to be joined today by Sasha Gabuyev, an expert on the Sino Russian relationship and Russian foreign policy more broadly. Sasha is director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, and he was previously a visiting scholar with Vudan University. Sasha, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and honor. I'm a big, big fan of Pekinology.
Well, to start, hoping you can tell us a bit about yourself. How did you develop your expertise on all things China Russia?
It started with a small grant by Open Societies Foundation of George Soros that was awarded not to me but to my mom, who was recent PhD in Russia immediately after breakup of the Soviet Union. Well, intellectuals and all of the families of intelligents have been going through a hard time, and she received a seven hundred US dollars grant to write a book. and she's written a book for kids about the Orthodox calendar, and that allowed her to bring me, her only child, to very cheap tour to Europe and the first foreign country and the first big foreign city that I've seen was Vienna. Vienna is a city which is very easy to fall in love with at any age. And then I was twelfth in nineteen ninety seven and I wanted to become ambassador there.
So I then wanted to go to a Russian diplomatic university, Mgimo, And to be an ambassador. But since my family was so traumatized about the collapse of the Soviet Union and they didn't know that GIMO at the time at least was accessible for normal kids for middle class families, they thought that it's either reserved for diplomats or for people who have a lot of money, which our family was not. But there was a backdoor. There was a backdoor called School of Asian Languages, because nobody in their sane mind In the 90s, wanted to learn languages of these countries that were considered backward by the Russians, who were obviously very arrogant and so much focused on the West. So if you can learn Swedish, why would you learn Vietnamese or Chinese for that matter?
So Mgimo had to encourage kids to go learn these tough languages and then go to this university without exam. So the deal was that I pick a language that's least repulsive and a culture that's least repulsive, pick German as my second language and go into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and become ambassador in Vienna later on. So I started to read books and the first book was about the biggest country in Asia, China. And just after 10 pages, I was totally beaten by China bug. I dreamt about nothing else. Again, I was 13 at that time. And then I entered Moscow State University, Notengemo, Department of Chinese History, and was thinking about developing a career in Chinese archaeology and Asian history.
So my thesis at the university. in my B thesis was about the difference between Guo uh Guo Jiada, Guo, G Bang, Liam Bang Da Pang, of what do they mean in bronze descriptions and Xu Ching, Shu Ching and like all of that.
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