From rails to classrooms
The architecture of Sino-Russian educational partnership is adopting more hybrid forms as cooperation deepens
Russia and China are bound by decades of relations in which political and economic interactions have traditionally occupied the leading place. In recent years, however, another dimension of the bilateral dialogue has come into sharper relief — the humanitarian one. This is evidenced by growing Russian interest in Chinese popular culture, literature, music, theater and cinema, as shown by the success of Chinese television series on Russian streaming platforms, translations of contemporary Chinese prose and poetry, and touring performances by Chinese musical and theatrical ensembles. The humanitarian dimension is no longer merely supplementing the traditionally dominant economic and political relationship — it is becoming an independent and significant channel through which the two countries come to know each other.
As national cultures interpenetrate ever more closely, what defines the present moment is the consolidation of hybrid forms of cultural interaction. Productive partnership gives rise to fundamentally new formats that cannot be reduced to either of the originating traditions. Such hybrids are emerging in the sphere of Russian-Chinese cultural contacts as well: one need only think of Russian feature films and literary works set in China, or tourist itineraries that bring together the cultural heritage of both countries.
Hybrids of this kind are taking shape in education too — against the backdrop of intensifying Russian-Chinese humanitarian ties and an accelerating exchange of visits. In 2025, around 21,000 Russians studied at Chinese universities, while Russian universities hosted approximately 66,000 Chinese students. Throughout the 2020s, Russia has been gradually becoming one of China’s most important partners in higher education, alongside the traditional leaders from the Western world. This is demonstrated by the growing number of joint educational programs established through the efforts of Russian and Chinese universities. The momentum of Russian engagement is striking. Whereas around 120 new Russian-Chinese programs were launched during the 2010s, today the number of active partnerships has reached 150, involving around 90 Russian and 150 Chinese universities. The geography is expanding too: universities of the Urals, the Volga region, St Petersburg and Moscow are joining the traditionally active institutions of the Russian Far East and Siberia.
Joint educational programs are precisely the kind of cultural hybrids described above. They have absorbed the best of the educational traditions of both countries while remaining oriented toward the future — toward creating the conditions for a sustainable partnership. At the foundation of this partnership lie both a shared humanitarian dimension and a complementarity of skills and competencies. This is reflected in the diversity of Russian-Chinese educational cooperation.
While technical disciplines dominate in most Chinese-foreign joint projects, the Russian-Chinese partnership is distinguished by the way that a technological agenda is organically combined with a humanitarian one. Engineering disciplines occupy a significant place — mechatronics, electrical engineering, and automation — as do programs related to transport infrastructure, above all railways, including railway power supply, transport management and signaling systems. This cooperation carries strategic importance for the development of regional and global connectivity infrastructure. At the same time, the humanities remain an integral part of Russian-Chinese educational projects — Russian language study, musical performance and arts education. It is precisely these programs that transform the educational dialogue into a fully-fledged cultural exchange, extending well beyond applied technological cooperation.
Notably, the hybrid character of the educational partnership is expressed not only in program content but in its physical, spatial embodiment. Russia has become one of the countries — alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, among others — to have established a joint university on Chinese soil: MSU-BIT in Shenzhen, a non-profit Chinese-foreign cooperative university jointly founded in 2016 by the Shenzhen municipal people’s government, Lomonosov Moscow State University and Beijing Institute of Technology. Another unique and remarkable establishment is the international campus of St Petersburg State University and Harbin Institute of Technology (SPbU-HIT) in Harbin. This project reflects the deep historical and cultural ties between the two countries. The educational function here acquires an additional dimension — the preservation and reinterpretation of a shared heritage.
This kind of reading becomes possible through the “city as text” approach, which is gaining ground in urban research today. By treating planning documents, social media posts, real estate advertisements, news archives and topographic inscriptions as a single body of evidence open to computational analysis, the approach allows researchers to trace how the meaning of a place evolves across actors and across time. Applied to Harbin, it makes visible how official, academic, and everyday voices have repositioned shared heritage from a contested footprint to a shared resource, providing the empirical foundation that such a project deserves.
What the Harbin campus demonstrates in concentrated form is true of the partnership more broadly. The China-Russia Years of Education, spanning 2026 to 2027, open genuine opportunities for a qualitative renewal of the partnership. The two sides have a historic chance to build a sustainable model of long-term educational cooperation in which technical and humanitarian directions develop in balance. It is precisely this breadth — from railway technologies to the Russian language, from musical performance to arts education — that makes the Russian-Chinese educational dialogue both unique and full of promise.
Polina Rysakova is a researcher at the Center for Eurasian Studies at European University, St Petersburg. Igor Khodachek is the director of the Center for Eurasian Studies at European University.
The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.
