By Fu Ying, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of China's National People's Congress.

At a time when Russian relations with the United States and western European countries are growing cold, the relatively warm ties between China and Russia have attracted renewed interest. Scholars and journalists in the West find themselves debating the nature of the Chinese-Russian partnership and wondering whether it will evolve into an alliance.

Since the end of the Cold War, two main views have tended to define Western assessments of the Chinese-Russian relationship and predictions of its future. The first view holds that the link between Beijing and Moscow is vulnerable, contingent, and marked by uncertainties—a “marriage of convenience,” to use the phrase favored by many advocates of this argument, who see it as unlikely that the two countries will grow much closer and quite possible that they will begin to drift apart. The other view posits that strategic and even ideological factors form the basis of Chinese-Russian ties and predicts that the two countries—both of which see the United States as a possible obstacle to their objectives—will eventually form an anti-U.S., anti-Western alliance.

Neither view accurately captures the true nature of the relationship. The Chinese-Russian relationship is a stable strategic partnership and by no means a marriage of convenience: it is complex, sturdy, and deeply rooted. Changes in international relations since the end of the Cold War have only brought the two countries closer together. Some Western analysts and officials have speculated (and perhaps even hoped) that the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, in which Russia has become heavily involved, would lead to tensions between Beijing and Moscow—or even a rupture. But that has not happened.

Nevertheless, China has no interest in a formal alliance with Russia, nor in forming an anti-U.S. or anti-Western bloc of any kind. Rather, Beijing hopes that China and Russia can maintain their relationship in a way that will provide a safe environment for the two big neighbors to achieve their development goals and to support each other through mutually beneficial cooperation, offering a model for how major countries can manage their differences and cooperate in ways that strengthen the international system.

TIES THAT BIND

On several occasions between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, China entered into an alliance with the Russian empire and its successor, the Soviet Union. But every time, the arrangement proved short-lived, as each amounted to nothing more than an expediency between countries of unequal strength. In the decades that followed, the two powerful communist-led countries muddled through, occasionally cooperating but often riven by rivalry and mistrust. In 1989, in the waning years of Soviet rule, they finally restored normalcy to their relations. They jointly declared that they would develop bilateral relations based on “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.” Two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated, but Chinese-Russian relations carried on with the principle of “no alliance, no conflict, and no targeting any third country.”

Soon thereafter, the newborn Russian Federation embraced the so-called Atlanticist approach. To win the trust and help of the West, Russia not only followed Western prescriptions for economic reform but also made concessions on major security issues, including reducing its stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons. However, things didn’t turn out the way the Russians had hoped, as the country’s economy tanked and its regional influence waned. In 1992, disappointed with what they saw as unfulfilled pledges of American and European assistance and irritated by talk of NATO’s eastward expansion, the Russians began to pay more attention to Asia. That year, China and Russia announced that each would regard the other as a “friendly country” and issued a joint political statement stipulating that “the freedom of people to choose their own development paths should be respected, while differences in social systems and ideologies should not hamper the normal progress of relations.”

Ever since, Chinese-Russian relations have gradually improved and deepened. During the past 20 years or so, bilateral trade and investment have expanded on a massive scale. In 2011, China became Russia’s largest trading partner. In 2014 alone, China’s investment in Russia grew by 80 percent—and the trend toward more investment remains strong. To get a sense of the growth in economic ties, consider that in the early 1990s, annual bilateral trade between China and Russia amounted to around $5 billion; by 2014, it came close to $100 billion. That year, Beijing and Moscow signed a landmark agreement to construct a pipeline that, by 2018, will bring as much as 38 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas to China every year. The two countries are also planning significant deals involving nuclear power generation, aerospace manufacturing, high-speed rail, and infrastructure development. Furthermore, they are cooperating on new multinational financial institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank BRICS, and the BRICS foreign exchange reserve pool.

Meanwhile, security ties have improved as well. China has become one of the largest importers of Russian arms, and the two countries are discussing a number of joint arms research-and-development projects. Extensive Chinese-Russian defense cooperation involves consultations between high-level military personnel and joint training and exercises, including more than a dozen joint counterterrorism exercises during the past decade or so, carried out either bilaterally or under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In the past 20 years, thousands of Chinese military personnel have studied in Russia, and many Russian military officials have received short-term training at the National Defense University of China.

As economic and military links have strengthened, so, too, have political ones. In 2008, China and Russia were able to peacefully resolve territorial disputes that had troubled relations for decades, formally demarcating their 2,600-mile-plus border and thus eliminating their single largest source of tension—a rare achievement for big neighbors. In recent years, the two countries have held regular annual meetings between their heads of states, prime ministers, top legislators, and foreign ministers. Since 2013, when Xi Jinping became president of China, he has paid five visits to Russia, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has traveled three times to China in the same time period. All told, Xi and Putin have met 12 times, making Putin the foreign head of state whom Xi has met most frequently since assuming the presidency.