Valdai Club

China and Russia are not merely deploying parallel soft power practices and instruments, but are gradually converging toward a hybrid configuration that may be described as “strategic soft power.” This emerging form of combined influence integrates infrastructure, media, key resources connectivity, and institutional platforms into a unified geopolitical architecture. Analysis of the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s RT, China’s CGTN, the TV BRICS media network, Arctic cooperation, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative demonstrates how soft power has become inseparable from material connectivity and crisis-driven geopolitical alignment, writes Hua Han, Co-Founder & Secretary General of the Beijing Club for International Dialogue.

The new space for high-quality development is right under our noses, at the moment we decide to break down barriers between energy, technology, and finance. For China and Russia, that moment offers a chance to move beyond a traditional buyer-seller relationship and toward genuine, mutually complementary growth, Nelson Wong writes.

This report is the fruit of an intellectual collaboration among a group of young authors from Russia and China, brought together by their shared participation in the Valdai Discussion Club—Next Generation programme in 2024–2025. It seeks to offer the most comprehensive picture of artificial intelligence (AI) as a contemporary international phenomenon—simultaneously pervasive and yet not fully understood.

China is a power with an economy that remains intimately dependent on foreign markets—be it energy and raw resources to fuel an extensive industrial sector, consumer markets abroad to provide demand for manufactured goods, foreign capital to stimulate growth and innovation, or other major benefits derived from unimpeded access to the international economy.

From the security realm to extensive infrastructure projects, the Sino-Russian duo has acted as a key force shaping Eurasia’s contemporary political, logistical, economic, and institutional landscape. Yana Leksyutina, Professor at St. Petersburg State University, explores the complex interplay between Russian and Chinese foreign policy outlooks

A growing feeling is taking hold that the bifurcation point of the current phase of global development has been reached—and, accordingly, passed. The world is already moving along a new trajectory, and all of us with it, of course. The only question is: what kind of trajectory is it? There are plenty of signs pointing to one or another type of development, yet their interpretation is far from obvious, writes Andrey Bystritskiy.