Authors

Frank Wong¹;  ¹ MGIMO University, Russian Federation

Discussion

Russia and China have established and upgraded their strategic partnership since the end of the Cold War. However, the bilateral relationship has allegedly become increasingly asymmetrical, in which Moscow has turned into a junior partner if not a vassal state of Beijing. By redefining the concept of power asymmetry in international relations as the disparity of capability, disproportion of dependence, and imbalance of influence in the military, economic, soft, financial, and technological dimensions, this paper proposes a new framework to assess the evolution of asymmetrical relations in terms of different levels of depth and breadth. It finds out that power asymmetry between Russia and China has been exaggerated because only disparities of capabilities existed in the bilateral relationship throughout the post-Cold War era until the current Ukraine conflict, after which Moscow unprecedentedly fell into overdependence on Beijing but merely in the technological dimension. As a result, China can exercise potential rather than actual influence over Russia due to insufficient leverage. Based on the development of asymmetrical Russia-China relations over the past three decades, the paper also shows that defensive rather than offensive realism has better explanatory power because Moscow decided to bandwagon rather than balance against Beijing and focused more on the global power imbalance with the United States. Although power asymmetry did not cause a split between Russia and China, it prevented the formation of their alliance since Moscow remained concerned about the loss of autonomy in case of an asymmetrical alliance with China.