The Russia-China 'no limits' partnership — Bobo Lo on what is actually limited

Bobo Lo, an independent scholar formerly of Chatham House, the Lowy Institute, and Sciences Po, has produced the longest continuous analytical record on the Russia-China relationship of any Western analyst. His 2008 book *Axis of Convenience* set out the framework he has refined since: the Russia-China relationship is structurally asymmetric, transactional rather than ideological, and bounded by Chinese interests rather than Russian ambitions.

The February 2022 joint statement in Beijing — issued days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine — described the partnership as having 'no limits.' Lo's reading, articulated across multiple 2022-2024 papers, is that the phrase was Chinese diplomatic theatre at a politically opportune moment, and that the actual content of the relationship has been demonstrably limited.

What China has done: massively expanded oil and gas purchases from Russia at discounted prices; provided non-sanctionable civilian goods, components, and machinery that have allowed Russian industrial production to maintain levels despite Western sanctions; offered diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council; expanded yuan-ruble settlement to reduce Russian exposure to dollar-clearing risk. By 2024 China accounted for 31% of Russian exports and roughly 36% of Russian imports, up from 14% and 24% in 2021.

What China has not done: provided weapons or weapons-system-specific dual-use components in quantities that would expose Chinese firms to US secondary sanctions; offered formal alliance commitments; supported Russian positions on Ukraine in any binding multilateral framework. Lo emphasises that Chinese banks have substantially constrained their Russian exposure since 2022 to manage sanctions risk — the major Chinese banks process trade transactions cautiously, often through smaller regional banks that absorb the regulatory risk.

Lo's framework also tracks the underlying strategic asymmetry. Chinese GDP is roughly ten times Russian GDP. Chinese technology dependence on Russia is essentially zero. Russian technology dependence on China — for telecommunications, consumer electronics, automotive, increasingly aviation — is growing. The relationship is one in which one party can essentially set the terms and the other party has limited leverage to renegotiate them. The 'no limits' framing obscures this. Lo's work restores it.

­Bobo Lo, an associate fellow with Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme and previously a Russian-affairs diplomat, has authored *Axis of Convenience* (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and *A Wary Embrace: What the China-Russia Relationship Means for the World* (Lowy Institute / Penguin, 2017), plus a steady output of Lowy Institute papers and Chatham House analyses on the bilateral relationship across two decades. His reading is that the 4 February 2022 joint statement — issued during Xi Jinping's Beijing meeting with Vladimir Putin twenty days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine — described a partnership with 'no limits' that, in operational practice, has substantial and identifiable limits across multiple dimensions.

The economic dimension is the clearest operational layer. Russian trade with China rose from approximately $147 billion in 2021 to $240 billion in 2023, then continued to rise modestly through 2024. The bulk of the increase came from Chinese imports of Russian crude oil, natural gas, and coal — China became Russia's largest energy customer following the European demand contraction. The pricing terms, by all credible reporting, have been substantially below international-benchmark levels for Russian product, reflecting China's monopsony bargaining position. The trade growth represents Russian dependence increasing on Chinese buyers rather than a symmetrical deepening.

The technology-transfer dimension is more constrained than the trade-flow expansion implies. China has not provided Russia with the most advanced military technology that would meaningfully change the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war: advanced air-defense systems on the scale of the S-400-equivalent or beyond, modern combat aircraft, advanced satellite imagery and reconnaissance support, or the precision-guided munitions that have been the binding shortage in Russian operational planning. What China has provided is dual-use industrial inputs — machine tools, microelectronics components, chemical precursors for explosives — that support the Russian defense industrial base's remilitarisation without crossing the lines that would trigger Western secondary-sanctions enforcement against Chinese firms.

The financial-infrastructure dimension is where the asymmetry is starkest. Russia has substantially shifted its central bank reserve composition away from US-dollar and euro assets (largely under duress, given the February 2022 freezing of approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves held in Western jurisdictions). The renminbi has become a meaningful but secondary reserve currency in Russian official holdings, and renminbi-denominated trade settlement covers a growing share of bilateral commerce. The Chinese major banks, however, have remained cautious in their direct engagement with sanctioned Russian counterparties, with secondary-sanctions risk operating as the binding constraint.

The Central Asian dimension is the geographic region where the two partnerships' competing interests are most visible. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation's institutional centrality to Central Asia gives both states a coordination forum, but the substantive economic engagement — infrastructure investment, trade volumes, political alignment — has tilted clearly toward China across the Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan triangle. Russia's historical security-and-political primacy in the region, anchored by the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and by the Russian military presence in specific countries (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia), has held formally but softened operationally, particularly following the 2022 Kazakh constitutional reform that removed Russian-favouring linguistic provisions.

The strategic-doctrinal question — whether the partnership constitutes a coordinated bloc opposed to the US-led order or a coalition of convenience aligned by what each capital opposes — is what Bobo Lo's framework most clearly answers. The bilateral relationship is durable as long as both states perceive that the alternative posture (deeper accommodation with the West) is foreclosed. As long as the Western position on Russia hardens around sanctions and isolation, and the Western position on China hardens around technology containment, the partnership's structural rationale remains intact. The partnership is not a unified strategy; it is a parallel adaptation to a shared external environment, and the limits on it become visible the moment the external environment changes.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.