Hcss report

Cross-Country Comparison
Over the last ten years, both China and Russia have increasingly emphasized the 
importance of a global focus, where they feel their voice can and should be heard and 
which they want to use as part of their identity as global powers. It may very well be 
that the important finding here is not so much assertiveness 
per se
, but the area in 
which it is expressed. And this area has expanded. Russia focuses particularly on 
the 
UN
as an important instrument. China shows its interest for the rest of the world by 
emphasizing concepts of 
cooperation in a broad range of domains
(from cultural to 
diplomatic and economic). Russia appears to show fewer global ambitions than China 
which also considers different channels to increase or maintain its influence. 
Concretely, while China looks at 
other major countries, 
regions (Europe) or continents 
(Africa), Russia has greater expectations of 
international organizations.

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30
STRATEGIC MONITOR 2014
The economic domain
(and to a lesser extent, the legal domain) seems to be a 
predominant arena in which both powers express their concerns and ambitions (even 
if these are ambitions for cooperation) and where they stress their interests. Yet each 
country also has a particular topic of interest on which they do not hesitate to assert 
their views or condemn the attitudes of others. For Russia, this would be matters of 
hard security
, such as terrorism and nuclear security. As for China, this ‘hard’ security 
aspect is far less dominant; rather, there is a particularly strong rhetoric about the 
defense of sovereignty – that is, its own 
territorial sovereignty
vis-à-vis
the ongoing 
disputes with Japan, and the situation with Taiwan.
Both countries’ rhetoric is not negative. This reflects official foreign policy discourses, 
which naturally tend to express views in a diplomatic way, and communicate national 
priorities for cooperation over conflict. But Russia’s foreign policy seems more 
assertive by nature than that of China, due to the difference in the tone employed. 
China uses a