Abstract Sino-Russian technology cooperation has been regarded as systemically productive given Russia and China’s enduring resilience and challenge to the Western-sponsored world order. This paper tests such a viewpoint. Employing the concept of allyship from the social justice literature, it argues that Sino-Russian interactions in key high-tech fields embody the logic of social activism rather than alliance or strategic partnership. Construed as an allyship, this cooperation, which seeks to dismantle Western “hegemony,” augments the two states materially and reputationally and erodes Western digital dominance. In doing so, however, it recreates within itself a hegemonic order by elevating China at the cost of such cooperation’s systemic principle, namely—state sovereignty in the digital and technological domain, specifically on Russia’s side who conceives of it as a precondition for its own security, strategic resilience, and status as a world power. The findings suggest that the system-level outcomes of Sino-Russian high-tech alignment are in fact doubled-edged—partly successful and partly self-defeating. As the Kremlin has privately confirmed its China-related concerns, the sovereignty factor may potentially contribute to Russo-Chinese decoupling in the future.
Roman Kolodii (Wed,) studied this question.