About Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — abbreviated IREECAS, and also rendered IEERCAS — is a constituent research institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in CASS's Academic Division of International Studies. It is China's CASS institute for the vast region stretching from Eastern Europe through Russia to the five states of Central Asia. A partner institution in Uzbekistan describes it concisely as a specialised research body of CASS focusing on political, economic and socio-humanitarian developments in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Its researchers work on those countries' politics, economics, history and international relations, on China's relations with them, and on the multilateral frameworks — above all the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Eurasian cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative — through which China engages the region.

The institute is distinct from the parent academy profiled separately as CASS itself, and from CASS's other area institutes: the Institute of European Studies covers Europe, the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies covers the Middle East and Africa, and the National Institute of International Strategy covers the Asia-Pacific and global strategy. IREECAS's territory is the former Soviet space and its Eastern European neighbours — the region where China's northern and western diplomacy is conducted.

Origins: from the 1965 Soviet research institute to CASS

Unlike most CASS institutes, IREECAS predates CASS itself. A retrospective on Asian studies at CASS published by the International Institute for Asian Studies records that in 1965 a Research Institute of Soviet Union was established; it later became part of the CPC Central Foreign Liaison Department, and was finally absorbed into CASS in the early 1980s. CASS's official history tells the same story from the academy's side: the Institute of Soviet Union and East European Studies was incorporated into CASS during the academy's first expansion period of 1977–1981, alongside the Institute of West Asian and African Studies and the Institute of Latin American Studies, and the history gives its later name as the Institute of East European, Russian and Central Asian Studies.

That lineage explains both the institute's depth and its name changes. A body founded in 1965 to study the Soviet Union — then China's estranged communist neighbour and rival — carried its expertise through the Sino-Soviet normalisation of the late 1980s and then had to reinvent its subject when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991: one country became fifteen, and a Soviet institute necessarily became an institute of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The current name, with Russia named first, reflects the post-1991 map and the weight of China-Russia relations within the institute's work. The retrospective on CASS Asian studies lists the institute among the main bodies of the Academic Division of International Studies once CASS restored its academic division system in 2006.

Research territory: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia

The institute's name is its research map. Russia receives the deepest attention, organised in part through named internal units visible in the public record: a Russian Economics Department — also rendered Russian Economic Research Department — headed by Professor Xu Poling, and a Russian Research Center of CASS directed by institute researcher Pang Dapeng. Eastern Europe is covered as the region's western tier, the post-communist states whose politics and economies were transformed after 1989 and whose relations with the European Union, Russia and China the institute analyses. Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — is the third pillar, and in recent decades the most dynamic: it is the region of the SCO's founding membership, of China's Belt and Road land routes, and of the China-Central Asia summit mechanism.

Across all three sub-regions the institute's approach is that of an area-studies think tank rather than a single-discipline department. Its scholars publish on domestic politics and economic policy, on history, and on international relations, and its named scholars hold roles that show the spread: Wang Xiaoquan, head of a research division at the institute, is secretary general of the All-China Association for the Study of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and deputy director of the Belt and Road Research Centre at CASS; Li Jianmin is a senior research fellow of the institute writing on economic questions; and Li Zhonghai, an institute researcher with experience in Chinese business organisations in Russia and at the Russian Embassy, has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Russia, East European and Central Asian Studies — the field's Chinese journal title, mirroring the institute's own name and remit.

China-Russia relations and strategic cooperation

China-Russia relations are the institute's heaviest single theme. Its director, Sun Zhuangzhi, serves as vice president and secretary-general of the High-level Joint Think-Tank for China-Russian Strategic Cooperation, a role that places the institute inside the official academic architecture of the bilateral relationship. Institute experts emphasise, in their public work, that strategic economic cooperation with Russia is one of the most important areas of China's policy — Xu Poling's formulation at a meeting with the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, with which the institute signed a memorandum of cooperation in August 2024 and discussed developing Russian-Chinese exchange trade in consumer goods.

The institute also contributes the regional assessment to CASS-wide products. When CASS released its Report on International Situation (2022) in Beijing on 24 February 2022, the release conference was organised by the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies together with the High-end Think Tank of China-Russia Strategic Cooperation, and Sun Zhuangzhi presented the situation in Russia and Eurasia in 2021 — days, as it happened, before that situation was transformed by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, on which institute scholars have since been among the Chinese analysts most often cited. Earlier, institute-associated scholars took part in forums on the China-Russia-Mongolia Economic Corridor, a component of the Belt and Road Initiative, discussing trilateral trade and economic partnership with experts from Russia, Mongolia and other countries.

Central Asia, the SCO and the Belt and Road

If Russia is the institute's largest subject, Central Asia is its signature one, largely through its director's specialisation. Sun Zhuangzhi is executive director of the Chinese Research Center of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, vice president of the China-Central Asia Friendship Association, and a member of the Chinese Committee for Neighbour-State Friendship and Cooperation of the SCO. Tsinghua University's biography of him lists his research fields as international politics, focusing on Belt and Road construction, international relations in Central Asia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and records dozens of books and articles, among them Foreign Relations of the Five Central Asian States (1999), Recent Changes and Its Impacts on Regional Security in Central Asia (2001), Afghanistan Problems and Regional Security in Central Asia (2003), Color Revolutions in CIS Countries (2011) and Cross-Border Cooperation between Central Asian States (2014), together with articles on the SCO's development, the strategic significance of the Silk Road Economic Belt and extending cooperation space under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Sun's SCO writing illustrates the institute's public voice: marking the SCO's twentieth anniversary in 2021, he argued that the organisation, with twenty years of security cooperation — resolving disputes through dialogue, cracking down on transnational crime, establishing the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure in Tashkent and holding joint anti-terrorism drills — could help safeguard Central Asia's security after the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan, and should lay foundations for security cooperation under the Belt and Road framework. These are the arguments of a think tank that does not merely observe regional institutions but participates in the Chinese academic effort to shape them.

Think tank forums and partner institutions

The institute's exchange work is visible in the China+Central Asia Think Tank Forum. The first forum was convened in Beijing, online and offline, on 19 November under the theme “Afghanistan's New Situation and Central Asian Security and Development”, as an important measure in promoting think tank exchanges under the framework of the China+Central Asia foreign ministers' meeting mechanism; SCO Secretary-General Vladimir Norov and the directors of Kyrgyz and Tajik strategic studies institutes took part, and Sun Zhuangzhi presented the transformation in Afghanistan as a possibility for establishing a new cooperative regional order. By its fifth edition, held in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 3 June 2025 under the theme “China and Central Asia: A New Starting Point for Regional Partnership”, the forum was opened with a video address by CASS President Gao Xiang and remarks by Kazakhstan's state counsellor, the director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies and Sun Zhuangzhi, who described the China-Central Asia Summit as a milestone setting out a long-term vision for the relationship.

Bilateral partnerships show the same pattern. In Uzbekistan, the Institute for Strategic and Regional Studies under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan hosted an IREECAS delegation led by Deputy Director Jin Zhe on 26 December 2025. The talks covered Uzbekistan-China cooperation — described by Jin Zhe as having reached the level of an all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership — and the two institutes' partnership within the Uzbekistan-China Expert Council, established in 2024, whose first meeting, on climate change and green economy development, was held in Beijing in March 2025. The sides agreed to hold the next Expert Council meeting in Tashkent in the second half of 2026, and stressed joint research on green development, digitalisation, transport and logistics connectivity and poverty reduction. CASS's Asian-studies output associated with this region includes the Central Asian Yellow Book, the annual development report format through which Chinese area institutes present a region's year.

Publications and regional reporting

The institute's output takes the forms typical of a CASS area institute: scholarly books and journal articles by its researchers, contributions to CASS-wide situation reports, and annual regional reporting. Sun Zhuangzhi's bibliography, listed in the Central Asia section above, spans monographs on the five Central Asian states' foreign relations, regional security, Afghanistan, colour revolutions in the Commonwealth of Independent States and cross-border cooperation — a publication record that tracks the region's own post-1991 history. The journal Russia, East European and Central Asian Studies, whose editor-in-chief has been institute researcher Li Zhonghai, carries the field's name in its title and provides the Chinese-language scholarly venue most closely identified with the institute's territory. CASS's Asian-studies retrospective records the academy's institutes producing comprehensive introductions to developments in Asian countries and hosting research reports including the Central Asian Yellow Book — the annual-report format associated with Central Asian studies at CASS. Together with the institute's role in organising the CASS Report on International Situation (2022) and presenting its Russia and Eurasia assessment, these publications show an institute whose written output is aimed simultaneously at scholars, at partner think tanks in the region and at Chinese policy readers who need an annual, structured account of a fast-changing Eurasia.

People: Sun Zhuangzhi and the institute's scholars

Sun Zhuangzhi, the institute's director, received the Special Governmental Grant from the State Council in 2010, according to his Tsinghua-hosted biography. His combination of roles — institute director, SCO research centre executive director, China-Central Asia Friendship Association vice president and secretary-general of the China-Russia strategic cooperation think tank — makes him the public face of the institute across both of its main theatres. Jin Zhe appears in the record as a deputy director, leading the institute's delegation to Uzbekistan. Other named scholars include Xu Poling, head of the Russian Economics Department, who has stressed the importance of strategic economic cooperation with Russia; Pang Dapeng, researcher and director of the CASS Russian Research Center; Wang Xiaoquan, research division head and secretary general of the national scholarly association for the field; senior research fellow Li Jianmin; and researchers of the Russian Economic Research Department such as Jiang Jing, Ding Chao and Zhou Caiquan, recorded taking part in the institute's BRICS-centre discussions.

The presence of a national scholarly association secretariat within the institute's staff — Wang Xiaoquan's role in the All-China Association for the Study of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia — mirrors the position of sister CASS institutes in their fields: the academy institute doubles as a hub for the nationwide community of specialists, not merely as one research team among many.

Why the institute matters

IREECAS matters because of where China now looks. The region it studies contains China's largest neighbour, its most important strategic partnership, the land corridor of the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Central Asian states with which China has built a summit-level mechanism in a few short years. Questions that were, in 1965, questions about a hostile Soviet Union are now questions about energy and trade with Russia, security and connectivity in Central Asia, and the design of Eurasian institutions such as the SCO — and the institute has carried Chinese expertise on the region continuously through that entire transformation, from a 1965 Soviet research institute, through incorporation into CASS in the early 1980s, to its present form.

For readers of this directory, the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies is recorded as a Beijing institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the Academic Division of International Studies, researching Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia across politics, economics, history and international relations, including Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Eurasian affairs, under director Sun Zhuangzhi.