Health, Road, and Russia: Perspectives on Russian Involvement with China’s Health Silk Road

Abstract

This chapter explores the degree of Russian involvement in the China-proposed offshoot of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): The Health Silk Road (HSR) since in 2015 until the most recent developments in 2021. Thus, the chapter focuses on a previously understudied faucet of Sino-Russian cooperation in general and its outlooks towards BRI in particular, namely, health. The topicality is exacerbated by the pandemic realities faced by both nations. Research questions include: how has the format developed vis-à-vis Russia so far? What is the degree of Russian engagement and what are its perspectives in the future? And ultimately: How does HSR measure against Russia’s BRI outlooks overall? This chapter presents the logic behind the HSR and the Chinese expectations, looks at the Russian response, outlines the perspectives of the engagement, and addresses the ambiguity of the Russian participation, ultimately concluding that the lack of Russian commitment towards the HSR falls into the trend of the Russian approach towards the BRI in general. Adopting a constructivist conceptual lens, the chapter sets political discourse analysis as the theoretical research framework, and employs qualitative methodology.