The disintegration of the USSR and the formation of the Russian Federation (RF) as an independent state have been the starting point of shaping and developing the present-day Russian-Chinese relations. This process has been going on for fifteen years according to its own logic and is largely determined by the modern national-state interests of Russia and China, as well as their place in the international division of labour and their geopolitical position. At the same time,many important specific features of the modern Russian-Chinese relations can adequately be understood and interpreted only in the context of the preceding intensive interaction of the two countries, whose history goes back about four hundred years.