Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia

  • Date: 12 December 2023, 15:15–17:00
  • Location: IRES Library, Gamla torget 3, 3rd floor
  • Type: Seminar
  • Organiser: Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES)
  • Contact person: Mattias Vesterlund


Perfect Imbalance seeks to answer one of the most important outstanding questions in twenty-first century politics: how close are Putin's Russia and Xi's China? Written by a scholar fluent in both Chinese and Russian, this book examines the current China–Russia partnership from several perspectives. First, what Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and their respective foreign policy establishments publicly say about the relationship between the countries. Second, how the two establishments frame their tangible cooperation on matters such as security, the Arctic, space, and international relations with other Eurasian countries. Finally, the book examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon Sino–Russian relations. Putin and Xi's stories, where possible, are cross-checked with what is really happening. Perfect Imbalance argues that although Russia has not pivoted towards China, and although there is no official Sino–Russian alliance is in sight, the relationship will continue to grow and expand in search for a perfect imbalance.

Bio: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is Head of the China Studies Centre and director of the PhD programme in Political Science at Riga Stradins University, Head of the Asia Programme at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a member of CHOICE and European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC). She has held fellowships at Fudan University and Stanford University, and is affiliated with King's College London and MERICS. In 2024, Una will be a visiting academic at the University of Oxford China Centre. She is the author of Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia (World Scientific, 2022), and the editor of Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China (Routledge, 2023).

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