Brief

All human beings understand friendship, and in today’s digital world, this concept spans cultures through virtual “friends” on social media platforms like Facebook and WeChat. The United Nations Charter speaks of developing “friendly relations among nations”, based on “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”. The UN’s International Day of Friendship promotes peace between peoples, countries, cultures, and individuals.

Within Chinese Communist Party discourse, however, “friendship” has since the 1940s been narrowly defined to focus on the Party-state and its interests. Drawing from Soviet concepts, this understanding carries explicit political expectations of alignment with China’s positions. The Party-state fosters “friendship” abroad through institutional proxies – including associations and think tanks — that cloak state involvement while lending the appearance of grassroots consensus to state-directed exchanges. Friendship is highly ritualised, as with the “Friendship Medal” first awarded to Vladimir Putin in 2018, and emotively proclaimed through state propaganda. Yet beneath the veneer of mutual feeling, relationships remain conditioned on accommodating China’s core interests, making friendship more about managing perceptions than bridging differences.

Analysis

One of the five human relationships (五伦) identified by Confucius in the sixth century BCE, friendship has endured for centuries in literature and thought of China. The country’s current political adaptation of friendship, however, stems directly from the CCP’s engagement with the Soviet Union from the 1930s onward. In the Soviet context, Stalin’s “Friendship of the Peoples” (druzhba narodov) was introduced in 1935 as a metaphor for unified polity of diverse ethnic groups under Soviet Communist Party rule and was applied more broadly to deny dissent and difference. Externally, friendship described Stalin’s pursuit of transnational engagement, particularly with the developing world. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union actively cultivated “good friends” globally, generally pro-Soviet elites, to expand the USSR’s sphere of influence. For Soviet partners, often trained at its institutions, friendship meant “accepting and supporting the Soviet state and its foreign policy”. Those who did not offer support were regarded as enemies.

Before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Soviet notion of friendship shaped the CCP’s international engagement. The PRC’s first bilateral friendship treaty, signed with the USSR in February 1950, was anticipated months earlier by the formation in Beijing of the China-Russia Friendship Association, joined by CCP elites who had studied in the Soviet Union. Mimicking a quintessentially Soviet practice seen throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the CCP established many such friendship associations from the 1950s. As in the Soviet case, friendship implied acceptance and support of China’s foreign policy line, which after 1954 focused on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. From then on, friendship became closely intertwined with non-interference in China’s internal affairs, which today remains a foreign policy keystone. In China’s official notion of friendship, the point is to project union and sympathy that supports China’s core interests and agendas — but beyond this concord, friends must mind their own business.

China’s present-day application of friendship is a continuation and elaboration of the older Soviet concept, and the CCP continues to use friendship associations and other exchange to advance international sympathy and accord with China’s goals, often to disguise state involvement. The country’s numerous sister-city relationships leverage cultural exchanges and local partnerships to advance broader diplomatic goals, with China Daily noting that they “hold the key to sound state-to-state relations”. On the diplomatic level, affirmations of friendship often signal China’s careful calibration of its relationships, not necessarily alliances, as it tries to maintain strategic ambiguity while advancing its interests. This is evidenced by the declaration of “friendship without limits” between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — a relationship that, in practice, has clear boundaries, such as China’s careful refusal to accept Russia’s territorial claims in Ukraine.