Standing under a pagoda roof at the entrance to a sprawling Chinese-themed park in Moscow, Alyona Iyevskaya was doing homework for her university. Against a backdrop of ornate pavilions, arched bridges, a pond and a statue of Confucius, a friend filmed her on a camera phone gushing about the park — in Mandarin.
Ms. Iyevskaya, 19, said she chose to study the language at Moscow City University, where she is a first-year student, because she believes China is on the rise and her prospects will be better if she speaks the language. Many Moscow universities now offer similar courses.
“Many young people want to go to China to study,” Ms. Iyevskaya said. “There are so many prospects in China,” she added. “It is so cool, and it is developing so fast.”
In a country that until recently worshiped everything Western, something surprising has happened: China has become desirable and trendy for Russians.
Chinese cars have become a common sight on Moscow streets. Members of the Russian elite are hiring Chinese nannies to encourage their children to learn Mandarin early. The capital’s museums and performance centers are clamoring to put on Chinese exhibitions and shows.
“The last three years let the Russians see the East in a totally new light, not as an exotic alternative to Europe but as a mainstream direction for business, tourism and studies,” Kirill V. Babaev, the head of the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in an email.
“The Russian people are following this trend with so much interest, as if they had just discovered another planet,” he added.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China has become the Kremlin’s best friend in public, even as some Russian officials retain a deep suspicion of Beijing’s intentions. It has provided diplomatic support and bought Russian oil and gas. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has met with President Vladimir V. Putin in the Kremlin, both smiling warmly for the cameras. China has also helped replace Western consumer goods that Russians cannot buy because of sanctions.
All that has fed into a growing mania for Chinese goods and culture across Russia.
In Moscow, the few public schools that offer Chinese are oversubscribed, and Mandarin is a staple not only at linguistic universities, but also at technical schools. Employment vacancies requiring Chinese have soared in recent years, according to a popular job website.
Theater directors from China stage plays based on contemporary Chinese novels in Russian theaters that once welcomed leading Western artists. In April, a major museum in Moscow hosted an exhibition of porcelain, ceramics and other artifacts from the National Museum of China in Beijing. Books about Chinese culture are featured prominently in bookstores.
In late January, Moscow City Hall decorated the city center to celebrate Lunar New Year, covering pedestrian streets with red lanterns and installing a giant panda hugging a Christmas tree next to Red Square.
Moscow’s subway laid on a red Chinese-themed train and translated its map into Chinese. The city’s billboards and state television featured Mr. Xi’s “favorite catchphrases,” (“delicious soup is made by combining different ingredients” is one), and Chinese restaurants have been sprouting in cities across Russia.
Valentin Gogol, the founder of a company that supplies nannies for members of the Russian elite, said he had been scrambling to meet ever-growing demand for Chinese speakers. Salaries now run to $5,000 per month, he said, generally high by Russian standards, and still, “The process of recruiting has been quite hard.”
English-speaking nannies are still the most popular, he said, but Chinese-speaking ones have replaced French speakers in second place.
“People now see it as an additional second language to complement English,” said Mr. Gogol, whose company is still called English Nanny.
Chinese cars are one increasingly visible sign of the Russian embrace of China. Cars made in China have flooded the Russian market, with more than 900,000 sold last year alone, according to Autostat, an auto market consultancy. That compared with about 115,000 in 2021.
Sergei Stillavin, a Russian radio host and founder of a car blog on YouTube, used to travel around Europe to review European cars. Now almost all cars featured in his blog are Chinese.
“BMW is still more prestigious,” he said, speaking about deeply entrenched preferences in Russia. “But I know people who switched from Porsche to Li Xiang,” a Chinese car brand now ubiquitous on Moscow’s streets.
While there is undoubtedly much more enthusiasm for Chinese goods, there is still a lingering longing for Western products that have become increasingly difficult to obtain in recent years.
Taxi drivers in Chinese cars in Moscow say they would still rather buy a German car if it were the same price. And videos have circulated on social media poking fun at Chinese cars. In one, a Russian man presents a Chinese car as a gift to his girlfriend. As soon as she sees the stylish car, her face falls.
“I hope you are joking,” she says. “I won’t drive a Chinese one, this is not a Porsche, or a Mercedes.”
Western branding also remains common across the Russian capital. A new elite building complex in Moscow bears aspirational London-themed names like Knightsbridge Private Park complex and Belgravia, rather than ones evoking Shanghai or Beijing. And even a Chinese business cluster near Moscow is called GreenWood.
“Red Silk,” a joint Russian-Chinese movie with Chinese and Russian spies battling Japanese enemies, Chinese nationalists and their British backers on a trans-Siberian train in 1927, was a box-office disaster despite state-sponsored advertising. And only one Chinese fashion brand, Ellassay, has replaced the Western luxury boutiques that used to dominate the storefront of GUM, Red Square’s department store.
Aleksandr Grek, a Russian magazine editor and a China enthusiast with five children, said there were generational differences in how China was viewed by the young.
His children over 14 are still more Western-oriented, but the younger ones know little about Western culture and are infatuated with Asia, he said.
“They don’t see anything that is made in the United States,” said Mr. Grek, 59, sipping green tea in a Moscow cafe and talking of his younger children. “Everything that surrounds them is made in China.”
Mr. Grek’s children all studied Chinese. His 14-year-old daughter speaks it fluently and will spend the next summer in China living with a local family “just like children used to go to England” to improve their English. For Mr. Grek and his family, the reasoning is simple.
“China is our only friend now,” he said, listing technological fields where he sees China as the world’s leader, like solar power and artificial intelligence. “And it is becoming top country in the world.”
Other Russians are more skeptical, saying that the increased interest in China was likely a temporary marriage of convenience.
Yulia Kuznetsova, a Chinese language and culture specialist, said she remembered when learning Mandarin was considered exotic and Sinologists were a fringe group. She said she thought that the China craze would end once relations with the West improved.
“Deep down nothing has changed,” she said. For Russians, Ms. Kuznetsova said, China “is a foreign culture.”
“Even the Arab world is much closer to us,” she said, citing Dubai as one place where Russians were flocking. “We can only be close with Europe because we are united by a culture that is similar or even the same.”
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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