The Deal Behind the Summit: China’s Strategic Gains from Russian Dependence
Last week, we covered what Putin failed to extract from his May summit with Xi: the deal on Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, on terms Moscow considered fair.
This piece covers what Beijing extracted from Putin, which was less visible, less commented upon, and considerably more consequential over the time horizon that matters.
Among the 40 agreements was a cluster of educational, scientific, and cultural cooperation documents that drew almost no Western coverage.
The two governments launched a joint “Years of Education” initiative for 2026 and 2027.
They extended the visa-free travel regime through the end of 2027.
They signed university partnership agreements linking Tsinghua, Peking University, and the Harbin Institute of Technology with Saint Petersburg State University and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
More than 80,000 Chinese and Russian students are currently studying in each other’s countries, with the number set to grow under the new framework.
Dozens of daily flights now connect major Chinese and Russian cities.
These agreements are the least dramatic items on the summit ledger and the most strategically significant over a 10-to-15-year horizon.
They are the soft-power infrastructure of a deepening Russian dependency on China, constructed precisely as Europe completes its deliberate severance of people-to-people ties with Russia.
Beijing is moving into a vacuum.
The question this piece examines is what China can extract once the dependency matures over the medium to long-term.
The Soft-Power Foundation
For three centuries, the educated Russian elite looked west.
The aspirational destinations were Berlin, Paris, London, and later Boston and California.
The cultural reference points were European.
The children of the Russian elite studied at Western universities and absorbed Western professional norms.
This orientation survived the Soviet period and reasserted itself fully after 1991.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed it.
The European Union deliberately restricted Russian student access, froze scientific collaborations, suspended cultural exchanges, and made travel difficult.
The severance was a policy choice intended to impose costs on the Russian elite.
Although it has in fact succeeded in its immediate aim, it has also created a vacuum.
China is filling it.
The “Years of Education” initiative, the visa-free regime, the university partnerships, and the scholarship programs are designed to redirect the aspirational orientation of the next generation of educated Russians from West to East.
The example most frequently cited in Russian commentary is the daughter of Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who has studied Chinese and represents the prototype of the new elite: fluent in Mandarin, oriented toward Beijing rather than Berlin, building a career in the Chinese-Russian interface.
Beijing’s bet is that a generation of equivalents will internalize China as the symbol of progress, the way previous Russian generations internalized Europe.
The bet is unlikely to fully succeed in cultural terms.
Russian civilizational self-conception is deeply European, and no amount of scholarship funding will reorient a thousand years of identity within a single generation.
But it does not need to fully succeed.
It needs only to produce a critical mass of Russian elites who are professionally invested in the Chinese relationship, who speak the language, who have Chinese professional networks, and who therefore have personal incentives aligned with deepening the dependency.
A generation groomed in hostility toward the West and fluency toward the East is a generation that will not push back against the structural subordination this piece describes.
And that is sufficient for Beijing’s purposes.
The soft-power foundation matters because it makes the hard-power extraction sustainable.
A Russia whose elite is professionally and culturally invested in the Chinese relationship is more likely to accept terms a more Western-oriented elite would reflexively resist.
The Military Technology Prize
The most valuable extraction available to Beijing over the coming decade is Russian military technology.
At a first look, this is counterintuitive given the state of the Russian military in Ukraine.
The army has performed poorly, absorbed catastrophic casualties, and revealed deficiencies in command and logistics.
The conventional Western read is that the war has reduced Russia’s value as a technology partner.
But this view is only partially correct and substantially incomplete.
Russia retains genuine advantages in several categories China wants and does not fully possess: The Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile for example, developed and tested through the war, represents a heavy ICBM capability with multiple independently targetable warheads and the throw-weight to penetrate missile defense.
The Zircon hypersonic cruise missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle represent maneuvering reentry capabilities that complicate any adversary’s missile defense calculus.
Russian nuclear submarine quieting and propulsion technology retains Cold War advantages.
Russian air defense systems, the S-400 and developmental S-500, are being tested in real time against the most intense drone and missile environment in modern history.
Russian anti-satellite capabilities continue to advance.
China wants all of this for a specific reason: Beijing’s nuclear deterrent has historically been smaller and less survivable than the American or Russian arsenals.
China has been expanding rapidly, building new silo fields and sea-based delivery systems to ensure its second-strike capability survives an American first strike.
Russian heavy ICBM technology, hypersonic glide vehicle technology, and nuclear submarine quieting technology all directly serve the Chinese goal of a survivable long-range deterrent.
The technology Russia retains is precisely the technology China needs to complete its strategic modernization.
The transfer is already happening, partly through theft.
Multiple Russian scientists have been charged with treason in recent years for sharing hypersonic and other advanced military technology with China.
The cases indicate Chinese intelligence has been actively acquiring Russian technology through espionage, and that Russian counterintelligence has been trying, with mixed success, to prevent it.
The current trajectory however, is that the espionage track will gradually transform into a sanctioned transfer track.
As Russian dependency deepens across energy, trade, finance, and the soft-power dimensions above, Beijing’s leverage to demand formal technology sharing increases.
Soon, there will be little need for outright theft and espionage.
The endgame is a scenario in which Russia, financially constrained and strategically dependent, agrees to transfer the advanced military technology it has historically guarded, in exchange for sums that reflect Russia’s weak negotiating position rather than the technology’s strategic value.
A Russia that needs Chinese capital, markets, technology imports, and diplomatic cover is a Russia that can be pressured into selling its crown jewels cheaply.
This is bad news for Europe and the United States, because it accelerates Chinese strategic modernization using capabilities that took Russia decades and enormous resources to develop.
The categories extend beyond missiles: nuclear submarine technology, advanced air defense refined in real time over Ukraine, anti-satellite warfare capability, and jamming-resistant drone technology battle-tested in the Ukrainian electronic warfare environment.
The war paradoxically increases the value of some Russian technology even as it degrades the military’s overall performance, because technology that survives the most intense EW and drone environment in history has been validated under the most demanding conditions.
China would pay substantially for jamming-resistant drone designs proven in Ukraine. Russia is developing exactly those designs.
The Arctic, Rare Earths, and Resource Extraction
