China’s aim is to become the ‘sole superpower’

Hot on the heels of his summit with US President Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping hosted Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Beijing this week. Headlines spoke of trade deals, warnings against a return to the law of the jungle, and a joint declaration on building a multipolar world.

But underneath that it was also obvious that this is not a partnership of equals any more – and hasn’t been for some time. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has become increasingly dependent on China.

But the proclamation of a “no-limits friendship” between Moscow and Beijing has not turned into a strategic alliance between two poles of a new world order.

China is Russia’s most important export market for oil and gas and vital imports, such as dual-use goods critical to sustaining Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

Expensive partnership

Yet, bilateral trade between Moscow and Beijing is not growing that fast, despite being above US$200 billion annually.

Notably, Russia is one of the few nations with a China trade surplus, albeit a small one, fueled by Chinese energy imports. In this context, the lack of a final deal between Moscow and Beijing over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline is remarkable but not surprising.

The key disagreements appear to be on price, such as how much China pays, and how much it buys. This sheds an interesting light on Beijing’s strategic commitments to Moscow, indicating that China is reluctant to sign up to a long-term and expensive partnership with Russia.

Beijing wants Moscow’s gas, but not at any price. Beyond economic relations, China also provides essential political and diplomatic cover for Russia by helping it retain its reputation as a champion of the global south and critic of a United States-led world order.

This is unlikely to change. Xi has committed himself while Putin “continues to offer firm and mutual support on matters relating to our respective core interests and key concerns.”

The Russian President is the 12th leader to visit Xi this year. He has followed in the footsteps of, among others, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Keir Starmer and Germany’s Friedrich Merz. And, of course, his visit followed just a week after the Trump summit.

This makes Beijing an important pole in a multipolar order – and a more important one than Moscow. There is clearly significant ideological alignment between Russia and China, including in their sometimes more veiled and sometimes more explicit criticism of the US.

But their shared criticism of American hegemony and unilateralism disguises a crucial difference over what they envision as the end state of the current transition to a new order.

For Russia, a multipolar order in which Moscow is one of the poles, is probably the best that the Kremlin can hope for. Regarding Beijing, the real issue is whether a multipolar order is simply a transitional phase – and the desired endpoint is a new hegemonic order.

Dominant power

This would place China at the apex with all the other poles of the multipolar order, including Russia and the US, relegated to second-tier status.

The challenge for Beijing is how to avoid all-out confrontation with Washington – the so-called Thucydides Trap, which refers to the near inevitability of war between a rising power such as China that seeks to replace an existing dominant power in the United States.

For now, a conflict is not imminently on the cards. Instead, Russia and China can jointly exploit an opportunity grounded in their shared dislike of an American-dominated world. But not much of this actually translates into a coordinated and effective foreign policy agenda.

Two of their multilateral flagship projects, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, and BRICS, which is shorthand for the bloc of rising powers comprising, among others, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, are not coherent formats.

Booming BRICS since 2009

India and Pakistan are involved in the SCO and yet fought a war in 2025. Iran and the UAE are members of BRICS and now find themselves on opposite sides of the US-Iran conflict.

What brings Russia and China and their partners together is the dissatisfaction with the previous Washington-led liberal order, and the opportunities presented in the way in which Trump tries to destroy it.

For Russia, it’s an opening for disruption and chaos. For China, it is in all likelihood an opportunity to accelerate the transition to Chinese dominance.

The clear signal from the Xi-Trump and Xi-Putin summits is that China is not choosing between Russia and the US. This underscores Xi’s rhetorical commitment to a multipolar order and indicates China’s policies toward Russia and the US.

Multilateral order

Russia is a useful partner – not an ally, and not a vassal yet. The US, meanwhile, is still an essential political and economic partner.

This gives reassurance to Russia that, for now, China sees a multilateral order as beneficial, while signaling to the US that China is not seeking to replace the US as the sole superpower.

But neither Moscow nor Washington should be under any illusion that a tripolar order is China’s ultimate goal. This is a transitional strategy to a China-dominated international order through which Beijing hopes to avoid the Thucydides Trap.

Stefan Wolff is a Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.