"So what does China think of Russia?" As I stand in the smog on the curb outside Beijing's most powerful think-tank, a combination of pollution, humidity and heat give the air the qualities of a solid. The main highways of China's capital resemble triumphal motorways, a grid around the Forbidden City, lined by the glassy trophies of our times: five-star hotels, oil majors, banks. I am talking to the editor of a Chinese foreign policy journal: "We learnt a lot from Moscow's mistakes." 

Since 1991, China and Russia have been mutual utopias and dystopias. In the early 1980s the two powers chose different exits from the dead-end of bureaucratic Communism. For Russia, China's choices came to look like a utopian success of authoritarianism, capitalism and sovereignty, a triumph over the West that Moscow should have followed. For China, Russia came to look like a dystopian blend of lawlessness, corruption and shrunken power: a litany of every mistake a ruling party can make. During the 1990s Chinese academies studied the collapse of the USSR to derive policies to feed into strengthening their own Communist Party (CCP). Since 2006 a restricted eight-volume DVD set, Consider Danger in Times of Peace, on the Soviet collapse has been mandatory viewing for all central, provincial and municipal party organs. 

"But what does China want from Russia?" China can be whatever it wants to be. As the 2012 CCP leadership reshuffle looms and new skyscrapers throw off their scaffolding, Beijing is abuzz with foreign policy debates. China today has an intensive, but constrained, internal debate on what kind of superpower to become. The rapidity of its rise has taken Chinese intellectuals by surprise, creating several conflicted and criss-crossing intellectual tendencies, which are arguing over how China should assert itself. 

Inside the think-tank there is a small room with a very low ceiling where staff meet the Europeans. There is no table. You are encouraged to recline throughout, Chinese-style, on squidgy sofas at the opposite end of the room from your interlocutors. There are small red-capped bottles of Nongfu spring water if you are thirsty. On the wall, paintings of Big Ben and a white-washed Greek village in a fake gold frame. They hope you are feeling at home.