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57 Russian Pol. & L. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/ruspl57 and id is 1 raw text is: RUSSIAN POLITICS & LAW Routledge 2020, VOL. 57, NOS. 1-2, 1-17 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611940.2020.1835069 Taylor&Francis Group Russia-China Cooperation: A View from the Region Ivan Zuenko Moscow and Beijing regularly declare that their relationship is the best it has ever been. And, in fact, on a majority of issues on the global agenda Russia and China take similar positions. The territorial problems between the two countries are officially resolved, and there is strong personal contact between the nations' leaders. Against this backdrop, it is logical to expect a boom in cooperation, espe- cially considering the countries' economic complementarity (Russia has natural resources, China has demand), their geographic proximity (a shared 4,209-km border), and the existence of an active program of joint development in the outlying regions of Russia and the PRC.' However, in practice, the current level of cooperation on the ground does not meet the expectations expressed over recent decades, especially after the Kremlin undertook its turn to the East. From the border region, this is plain to see, and yet most scholarly and expert materials that have appeared in the capital express an extremely optimistic view of the current status and future prospects for regional cooperation; the authors back them up with statistical displays and state- ments by bureaucrats at various levels.2 The differences in these assessments can be explained by the fact that in the capital cities, the emphasis is placed on achievements in foreign policy, diplo- macy, and military and strategic cooperation; in the outlying regions, those issues are seen as the prerogative of the Center, while they look to concrete projects for results: the quantity and quality of investments, the state of joint manufacturing and logistics infrastructure, revenue for local economies from bilateral trade, and projects concerning humanitarian ties. In all these areas, the results are modest, especially given the heightened expectations born of geo- graphical determinism: it has been presumed that the border regions would inevitably be at the epicenter of cooperation between the two countries. The goal of this article is to show what factors determine the content and dynamics of Russian-Chinese cooperation in the border regions, what determines our attitude toward that cooperation, and why we should English translation © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text © 2017 Kontrapunkt. Rossiisko-kitaiskoe sotrudnichestvo: vzgliad iz regiona, Kontrapunkt, 2017, no. 10, pp. 1-12. Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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