After Brexit, Britain has vowed to build a “Global Britain”. Guided by this strategy, the Great Britain’s policy towards People’s Republic of China is undergoing a more dramatic adjustment, which has brought the relations between China and the United Kingdom from a “golden era” to a more turbulent and unpredictable period of today. Overall, Britain’s current policy toward China is based on a range of policy tools, such as investment screening, Indo-Pacific Policy, as well as bilateral mechanisms, to catch the Chinese market for economic gain, while politically following the United States and provoking China on ideological and sovereignty matters in order to maintain its alliance with the West. Given in general the increase of negative perceptions of British public opinion of China, as well as the dramatic changes in the international situation (including the occurrence of major geopolitical events such as the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict), adjustments in the UK’s policy toward China will continue for some time, which will impact the stability of Sino-British relations. In the future, based on pragmatism, Britain’s China policy will maintain a flexible balance between maintaining selective cooperation with China in economy and global governance and deepening confrontation with China in the political sphere.

The China-Russia relations are facing a changing external environment, including the Indo- Pacific. This article focuses on the EU Indo-Pacific Strategy, which is a new and little-researched theme. It aims to address a central question: what the implications of the EU Indo-Pacific Strategy on the China-Russia relations are. It focuses on the discourse of the EU’s supranational authorities. The qualitative content analysis of that discourse unveils that the nature of this strategy is to enhance the legitimacy and uniqueness of the EU as a global player. It argues that this strategy has important implications for both China and Russia in direct or indirect ways. One main assumption is that the EU’s impact will be more concentrated in low politics than high politics. This article develops two hypotheses. One is that the EU Indo-Pacific Strategy will enhance the West as external pressure to China and Russia in the region, especially on low political issues. The other is that increasing external pressure from the EU and the West in this region highlights the necessity of cooperation between China and Russia. It concludes that while the implications for China and Russia are different respectively, the EU’s ambition as an exogenous factor will compel China and Russia to uplift their bilateral ties.

The main challenge for Russia in the post-Cold War era is that the geographical space available for strategic autonomy has been greatly compressed. Due to the checks and balances of Western powers, the security panic of neighboring countries, and the decline of its own strength after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to maintain the Strategic control model. Russia is torn between imperial historical traditions and nation-state strategic narratives. Will Russia return to the imperial age? The investigation of the geopolitical mechanism of Russian strategic culture is helpful to study and judge its regular behavior pattern. Continental identity, flanking position, and terrestrial claim tradition are three variables which have shaped Russia’s strategic culture. At the same time, the pursuit of sea power, the yearning for modernization in the heartland, and the wise shrinking of tough external forces have verified the logic that Russia’s strategic culture will be adjust dynamically with the change of relative power status and strategic environment. Russian strategic culture shapes strategic motivation dominated by fear and exerts indirect and nonlinear influence on strategic behavior including strategic intention. Risk aversion/risk-taking, the two decision-making preferences for dealing with geopolitical risks, are caused by differences in the degree of fear of power status and the external environment. Through the historical practice of Russian strategic culture investigation, the author believes that: if the current and future development trends show a negative expected trend, then Russia will make necessary revisions to the existing historical experience to suit the current strategic situation. The process-tracking study of Russian imperial history since Peter the Great also verifies the theoretical inferences of this study from case studies. The study of Russian strategic culture will help to promote the deepening and expansion of cooperation between China and Russia. Although the cooperation between the two countries started from the geopolitical pressure of the global strategic offensive of the United States, the beneficial dialogue and communication at the strategic and cultural level can transcend the historical normalcy of the cooperation between the two countries forced by the external geopolitical threats and shape the strategic stability of China and Russia.

The majority of existing research on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) focuses primarily on its operation in past years. However, efforts to deepen an understanding of the BRI itself remain at an early stage. Some fundamental questions on its nature, scope, process and implications still remain and require clearer answers or even more debates. Scholars who fail to consider these larger questions risk developing their arguments on premature assumptions on the BRI and consequently overlooking very important elements of it. From the discipline of international relations (IR), this article aims to identify some key questions to the BRI and recommend a new research agenda. It argues that IR scholars face challenges to examine the BRI due to the BRI itself, as a puzzle, and limits of current dominant IR trends. This article suggests that a better understanding of the BRI involves a more open-minded conceptualization of it. The new research agenda on the BRI proposes to focus on five themes and related key questions and hypotheses. In order to tackle the complexity of the BRI, this agenda calls for more creative efforts, including a combination of various theoretical perspectives, and incorporation of more elements of non-western wisdom into analytical frameworks, including China and other countries. Being aware of the debates of incommensurability between paradigms and perspectives, this article suggests a pragmatic approach in acquiring knowledge on the BRI.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched as a leitmotif of China’s economic diplomacy in 2013 after Xi Jinping assumed power. Inevitably, China’s behaviors in international oil and gas cooperation have been influenced by the BRI in terms of policy purpose, cooperation model, business organization, and even energy security strategy. Under the BRI, China’s originally primary purpose of natural resource access in oil and gas cooperation has shifted to a business-based strategy. Meanwhile, China has constructed oil and gas pipelines as common interest-based interconnections of infrastructures, instead of getting involved in geopolitical games. In the process, China and large national companies play as partners and coordinators more often even as their traditional roles are operators and majority shareholders. Coupled with the transition of purpose, the cooperation model also changes to an industrial chain-based model. China’s overseas oil and gas cooperation transitioned from an “upstreamdownstream integration” model to a “module plug-in” model, which flexibly includes natural resources, trade, transportation, refining and engineering services to prompt the “going-out” of China’s technology, equipment, and industrial capacity. In the organization of international oil and gas cooperation, coordination among the majors of Chinese national oil companies, and between national oil companies and other actors has become independent. The Yamal project provides an empirical case that displays China’s transition in international oil and gas cooperation under the BRI in this article.

This paper is part of the findings from the research project on Arctic governance paradigm and marginal path of governance by Chinese scientist groups, funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China, 15CGJ032.