The Intelligence Review | volume 3 | issue 6 |

Background
After decades of hostility during the Cold War, tensions between Moscow
and Beijing began to thaw during the Gorbachev-Xiaoping era. In the
second half of the 1980s, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and
Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping chose to focus less on their
countries’ respective ideological differences and instead look at the
bilateral relationship with more pragmatism (Yeung and Bjelakovic
2010:246). Due in part to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union
and the West’s pressure on China over Tiananmen Square, the two
countries normalized relations between 1989 and 1991 (Yeung and
Bjelakovic 2010:246).
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia and China gradually
increased their bilateral cooperation in various fields; this would
eventually lead to their landmark Treaty of Good Neighborliness and
Friendly Cooperation in 2001 (Chase and Medeiros 2018:3). Four
years later, the two countries surprised the international community
by holding their first joint military exercise (Finn 2005). Since then,
Russia and China have signed multiple bilateral agreements and have
participated in several joint military exercises. These developments
demonstrate that the Sino-Russian relationship has undergone a
gradual, positive rise that has evolved into a strategic partnership in
the 21 st century (Yujun et al. 2018).
Vostok 2018
Sino-Russian military relations appeared to reach a new level of
cooperation this past September. On September 11, 2018, Chinese
troops participated alongside the Russian armed forces in the threeweek-long
Vostok military exercise —thought to be Russia’s largest
war games since the Soviet era (BBC 2018). According to Real Clear
Defense, the exercise consisted of roughly “297,000 Russian service
members, about 36,000 pieces of equipment, and more than 1,000
aircraft, complemented by 3,200 Chinese soldiers and an unknown
number of Mongolians” (Myers 2018). Although some speculate that
the Russians may have exaggerated their troop numbers (Galeotti
2018), even reduced figures would make this joint Sino-Russian
exercise the largest to date (Zhou 2018).
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