On Russia's Importance to China and the War in Ukraine by Zhao Huasheng

"The reality of international politics is that state relations are still largely dominated by realist thinking, and China is no exception."

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If I were to recommend two establishment intellectuals in China whose articles have helped shed light on the debate in China over Beijing’s relationship with Moscow since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, I would probably cite Feng Yujun (冯玉军) and Zhao Huasheng (赵华胜).

As mentioned last week, Feng remains an outlier when it comes to his recent public criticism of Moscow. However, his views do at the very least capture some of the unease over, if not disapproval of, Moscow’s foreign policy that is so often perceptible among China’s intellectual elite whenever the topic of Russia is broached in private. The fact that Feng’s piece on anti-Americanism in Russia is currently the most popular article on the aggregator of scholarly articles Aisixiang, is also interesting in itself.

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Anti-Americanism in Russia as Seen by Feng Yujun

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As discussed at length in an article I wrote for RUSI in May, Zhao’s views are a lot more politically correct and mainstream than Feng’s. Their main disagreement lies arguably in the priority that values or interests should be given in China’s foreign policy, with Feng emphasising the former and Zhao the latter.

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China-Russia Relations Since Ukraine: What Chinese Scholars are Saying

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Today’s edition is a summary of an article by Zhao that I recently came across and that was published, as far as I can tell, only in English. It effectively reiterates many of the arguments that he has been making since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and is well worth a read.