As Russia and China are pursuing a seemingly ever-closer alignment, the increasing disparities in their economic capabilities, China’s growing military capabilities and Russia’s military performance during its war of aggression against Ukraine raise important questions about status anxiety in the Russia-China relationship. While Russia’s official rhetoric has consistently downplayed any signs or expectations of Russia’s diminishing status compared to China’s, Russia’s historical narratives – articulated by Russia’s leadership, various ‘groups’ of intellectual and political ‘elites’ and oppositional voices – have engaged with questions of Russia’s international status in a variety of ways. This paper will employ narrative analysis to explore the multiple ways in which Russia’s state-sponsored and competing memories of Russia’s past engagement with China and the ‘East’ more broadly have been strategically employed by a variety of actors in Russian society to downplay, manage, or exacerbate status anxiety in Russia’s current and future relationship with China. It will then consider the ways in which such memory politics has fed into Moscow’s approach to its ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
