“This is the message that a lot of countries in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Africa and the rest of Asia have taken from the last three years,” he says. Limits to ‘no limits’ relationship Xi and Putin have assiduously cultivated an image of peak China-Russia ties that stems from their close personal friendship. They have met more than 45 times in the past decade, including with public displays of tea drinking and dumpling making. Putin has gifted Xi ice cream for his birthday, and Xi has trumpeted Putin as his best friend. But it was after a meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022, when the pair declared their countries’ friendship was now one with “no limits”, that China-Russia ties came under fresh scrutiny. Less than three weeks later, Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. But for all the posturing and strengthened economic and military ties, analysts say there remain obvious limits to this “no limits” relationship. The two sides have not declared a formal military alliance, and China, unlike North Korea, has not sent troops or weapons systems to aid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Their relatively recent “brotherhood” sits against a backdrop of fractious relations, border skirmishes and mistrust for much of the 20th century, culminating in the bitter Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. Today, the two countries still compete in their spheres of influence in Central Asia and the Arctic. “China worries about entrapment, about getting drawn into Russia’s more disruptive actions, like the war in Ukraine, and the way they’ve been tainted by association. Russia is also reluctant to get drawn into China’s struggles in the Indo-Pacific,” says the Centre for Naval Analyses’ Wishnick. There have also been flashes of rare dissent among respected Chinese scholars over Beijing’s support for Moscow, running counter to Chinese state media’s parroting of Russian talking points about NATO expansionism being the root cause of the war. “China has paid too much both economically and politically without achieving the expected results of improving China’s international stance or easing the US pressure on China,” Chinese Professor Feng Yujun said in a translated lecture in 2023. Another prominent academic, Hu Wei, was forced into early retirement after his 2022 essay calling for China to “cut off as soon as possible” its ties with Putin went viral and was quickly scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s early “pivot to Putin” in the opening weeks of his return to the White House has added another dynamic to the relationship, seemingly born from his idea that “you never want Russia and China uniting. I’m going to have to un-unite them”, as he told US pundit Tucker Carlson in October. Dubbed the “reverse Nixon” by geopolitical analysts, after US president Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972 to draw closer to Beijing and undermine Kremlin influence, the strategy has mostly been pilloried as a fantasy based on misunderstood history. What you have now “is the reverse of the ‘reverse Nixon’” former senior US State Department official Evan Feigenbaum told The Wall Street Journal in February. In attempting to split two powers with an ideological affinity and shared strategic interests, “what it has done instead is to split the West, while Russia aligns with the US and with China simultaneously”. In a show of solidarity last month, Xi was Putin’s guest of honour in Moscow at a World War II Victory Day parade in Red Square, where Chinese troops goosestepped alongside Russia’s. Xi later declared their countries were “friends of steel” who must “decisively counter” US efforts to contain them, in a clear rebuke to Washington. On the China-Russia border, life grinds on For all the professions of “brotherhood” and “unbreakable” bonds by Putin and Xi, it’s difficult to gauge whether the two leaders have generated a genuine affinity between the peoples of their countries. In Manzhouli’s main street, called the China-Soviet Golden Street, a giant statue of a panda and polar bear holding hands has been erected as a tribute to the countries’ close ties. The street is lined with shops selling cheap leather jackets, electronics and souvenirs aimed at Russian tourists, while Russian restaurants and a nearby theme park built to resemble Moscow’s Red Square hope to entice Chinese tourists. For local Chinese traders, many of whom speak Russian, the Machiavellian power plays of the world’s strongmen are a secondary concern to the daily reality of trying to carve out a living in a border town straddling two sputtering economies, one ravaged by war and the other by the long drag of a property market collapse. Cross-border trade might be booming, but business isn’t. “Thanks to the war, business is getting worse and worse,” says Li Yanshan, 49, a shoe shop owner who caters to Russian tourists. Wang Shanshan, the owner of a healthcare shop, is also feeling the pinch. In the past, Russian tourists spent lavishly in the town, she says. “Not any more. Now they don’t buy anything that are not life necessities. It will only get better when the war comes to an end,” she says. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.