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The new “comprehensive strategic partnership” between Tbilisi and Beijing tells us more about Georgian Dream’s political anxieties than about any genuine deepening of bilateral ties.
On June 9, marking the 34th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Georgia and China, something notable happened, or rather, something notably quiet happened. There were no handshakes, no joint press conferences, no smiling leaders posed before flags. Instead, the Chinese embassy in Georgia published a set of letters exchanged between President Xi Jinping and Georgian Dream’s handpicked president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, announcing that the two countries had upgraded their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”
For Georgian Dream, this was presented as a diplomatic triumph. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze followed with a briefing in which he declared the previous strategic partnership agreement with the United States, halted by Washington in 2024 in response to Georgia’s democratic backsliding, had been “just an agreement on paper,” while the partnership with China represented something real and substantive. He went further, describing China as “the only peaceful superpower,” a barely veiled swipe at Washington.
