ABSTRACT
Although not formal allies, China and Russia have steadily increased their strategic cooperation. However, crises and tensions in each other’s areas of strategic interest continue to complicate each country’s relations with the other and the rest of the international community. In this chapter, we explore China’s reaction toward the major crisis in the post-Soviet space (the Ukraine crisis of 2014) and Russia’s responses to the intensifying South China Sea dispute and show that they share many similarities and, at the same time, display a tendency toward the two countries’ growing support of each other. To explain the reaction patterns and better understand the nature of contemporary China–Russia relations, we apply a neoclassical realist framework that helps assess the impact of both system-level and unit-level factors on great powers’ behavior. The assessment demonstrates that the observed behavior pattern is an outcome of causal forces of different levels simultaneously pushing in different directions and the amount of support depends on how these system and unit-level variables relate to each other.
