BEIJING, September 7. /TASS/. Beijing does not seek to hurt Russia’s interests in any way and will not benefit from Russia’s economic decline, Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov told journalists on Wednesday.

"We and China are in different weight categories economically and not only economically," he pointed out. For example, he noted that China’s population is 1.4 bln people while Russia has 140 mln people. "So we have one-tenth of the population that China has. However, [our] territory is almost twice as large, in addition to the natural resources," he added.

The envoy also noted that "from the standpoint of economic potential, China’s GDP is probably about seven times higher than ours." According to him, "this is a huge difference," however, "there are spheres where we are ahead of China," for example, "certain space technologies or nuclear energy, or the entire energy industry as a whole."

"So, I have always thought and said that the significance of Russian-Chinese trade for both sides is within the framework of pure figures - $147 bln of trade turnover last year and almost $200 bln this year, as we expect. For us, this is a lot and for China - not much, simply because of the incomparable volumes of foreign trade, and the incomparable dependency of the economy on foreign trade turnover," the diplomat explained. "Yet I wouldn’t rush to draw conclusions that this leads to some infringement of our interests, for example," he stressed.

According to Denisov, "anything can happen as global experience shows but this depends not only on China, but on us as well, on how we are going to act, and on how we are going to restructure our economy." "We have all the opportunities to build balanced relations with China. And China does not aspire at all to infringe on our interests in any way," he noted.

"We can also talk about politics, China is not interested at all in our economic decline because this would entail various political complications that China does not need. So in one way or another, existence determines consciousness, that’s true. But it’s also true that consciousness determines how existence will develop," he concluded.