China Daily yesterday published an article reviewing the status of China-Russia relations on the occasion of the upcoming 20th anniversary on July 16 of the signing of the landmark China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, which the two countries recently extended.
The article reported: “The two governments have thoroughly resolved the border issue left over from history and secured constant peace at their shared boundaries of over 4,300 km.… Annual bilateral trade volume has increased nearly 14-fold in the past two decades, from $8 billion in 2000 to $107.77 billion in 2020. Recently, Russia’s Finance Ministry completed an asset structure adjustment to the National Wealth Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, and the share of the Chinese yuan was increased from 15% to 30.4%.”
“It shows Russia’s confidence in the prospects of China’s economic growth and China-Russia cooperation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
The article also quotes Xu Bu, president of the China Institute of International Studies, who said the two countries have achieved continuing progress in their ties as they “exercise mutual respect and mutual trust, pursue no alignment or confrontation, target no third countries and subscribe to win-win cooperation.” As a result, their strategic cooperation has become increasingly mature, and their ties have “become a role model between major powers in modern times,” Xu said at a recent seminar.
Chen Wenling, chief economist at the Beijing-based China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said the ties between the two countries is also “an anchor of global peace and balance.” “Without the cooperation of the two major countries, some people may be bolder and increasingly fearless when prioritizing their own national interests above the world’s interests, bullying and suppressing other countries in order to maintain their hegemony,” Chen wrote in a recent article published on a news website affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission. She further wrote that, as long as China and Russia jointly defend humanity’s common interests, a fair and just international order and the basic principles of international relations, more countries will follow their lead, and “the world will not be messed up too much and will be full of hope.”
China Daily concluded: “Since both China and Russia have announced that they will not form a strategic alliance to deal with other countries, this unique nonalignment policy `enables the development of the world’s diversity and lays a solid foundation for world peace,’ Hong Kong-based China Review News said in a commentary.”
