Sino-Russian cooperation against liberal hegemony
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Sino‑Russian cooperation against liberal hegemony John M. Owen IV1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Sino-Russian security and economic cooperation has broadened and deepened in nonlinear but progressive fashion since the late 1990s. Contra realism, it is not simply American material power that drives this increasing cooperation; US power has at best remained constant. Instead, two conditions combine to deepen Sino-Russian cooperation. First, enduring liberal hegemony, or a combination of material power, prestige, and the ability to set and enforce rules, makes America threatening, under broad conditions, to any authoritarian regime’s domestic power and foreign influence. Hegemony is an interaction of material power and ideas; each augments the other. Second is the steady 20-year movement of Russia’s regime under Vladimir Putin away from liberal democracy. These two conditions make cooperation on either side of the liberal–nonliberal ideological divide increasingly easier than cooperation across it. Several types of qualitative evidence support these claims, including: (1) private and public statements from both Beijing and Moscow on the liberaldemocratic threat; (2) specific deepening of bilateral cooperation after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014; (3) efforts by Moscow and Beijing to counter liberal hegemony’s spread in their regions; (4) the tendency for anti-liberal elites in neighboring states to cooperate more with China or Russia. I address realist counter-arguments skeptical of any systematic causal role for ideology. Insofar as America tires of its role as liberal hegemon, or the “China Model” becomes so prestigious as to threaten the Putin regime, the impetus to Sino-Russian cooperation identified here will fade. Keywords Liberalism · Hegemony · Cooperation · Balancing · International order · China · Russia
* John M. Owen IV [email protected] 1
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
J. M. Owen IV
Introduction Why has Sino-Russian cooperation broadened and deepened, erratically but markedly, since the late 1990s? Why has cooperation evidently accelerated since Xi Jinping gained power in 2012? International cooperation is difficult to measure,1 but treaties are surely a mark of it. China and Russia signed partnership agreements in 1994 and 1996 (the latter a “strategic partnership”). In 2001, they entered a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, each pledging that “[w]hen a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that peace is being threatened and undermined or its security interests are involved or when it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.” The 2001 agreement gave China access to Russian military technology (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC, 2001). In 2012, the two states entered a “comprehensive strategic partnership of equality, mutual trust, mutual support, common prosperity, and long-lasting fr
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