Russian Travelers’ Sight of China in the 18th century: Problems of Perception

This paper explores intercultural relations between China and Russia in the 18th century. In 18th century communication with other countries became quite important, especially with China, trading with it has always been profitable. Communication between two cultures has overcome different challenging stages because of various cultural and historical reasons, nonetheless, in the end, Russia managed to create a unique strategy to communicate with China. Purpose of this paper is to study milestones of Chinese-Russia communication and reasons for their appearance, to highlight the strategy of Russia in order to succeed. The first goal is to study culture and its classification, the second goal is to study intercultural communication between China and Russia in the 18th century, the third goal is to distinguish reasons which caused these problems and finally to recreate Russian strategy. Historical, analytical and systematic analyses were used. On the way to successful communication between China and Russia faced various difficulties. Moreover, cultural differences played an important role in establishing relationships. Russia managed to succeed because paid attention to cultural differences and made concessions.