Valdai Club

Yevgeny Buzhinsky openly called for “truly allied relations ” between Russia and China, while many Russian participants of an April 2017 meeting of Russian and Chinese experts under the aegis of the Kremlin-funded Valdai Club “came out in support of a Russian-Chinese military alliance,” according to an account of the event in Russia’s Kommersant newspaper. Sergei Karaganov, a former Russian presidential advisor who attended the event, penned an article in which he notes that “Russia and China have built allied relations de facto but not de jure ”; the Russian Embassy in London has posted the article to its website. Russian influentials’ recent musings about a potential alliance with China have been welcomed by some of their Chinese counterparts. Prominent Chinese political scientist Yan Xuetong also spoke to Kommersant in favor of such an alliance: “China has half approached the status of a superpower. Therefore, this principle [of not entering alliances] is no longer in our interest,” Yan declared in a March 2017 interview. “I do not understand why Russia does not insist on forming an alliance with China.”

Read more on https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/sino-russian-military-political-alliance-would-be-bad-news-am...