ABSTRACT
Russia and China's strategic partnership is unwieldy and imprecise. Weighed down by contradictory commitments, hyperbolic rhetoric and a wide variety of intersecting interests, the relationship is inherently and deliberately vague. Behind the talk of novel relations of global significance, Russia and China have been engaged since the mid-1980s in the painstaking process of negotiating a stable, normalised relationship, with demilitarised borders and open trade. Moves to develop a strategic partnership are best understood as a parallel and often incoherent effort to put gloss on this more fundamental — albeit less dramatic — process.
