SUBTRACTION BY ADDITION:

"For China, geopolitics is crucial when it comes to its relations with Russia," explained Maximilian Mayer, a junior professor of international relations at the University of Bonn in western Germany.

In fact, that is what is at the heart of the two countries' partnership, Mayer told DW. It is "a form of strategic cooperation that seeks to push against what Moscow and Beijing see as American hegemony, and to push for the formation of another, oppositional pole in a multi-polar world order," Mayer said.

Tweet   @brothersjudd