China and Russia are not only two major influential power in the world, but also the two largest economic transition countries. As a neighboring country, the cooperation of economic and trade between two sides not only has obvious geographical advantages, but highly complementary. With the in-depth cooperation in trade and economic of two countries,more and more direct cooperation between cities has taken place. In the past years, due to geographical advantages, the cooperation mostly took place in border cities, such as Heihe City and Blagovichensk City. With the new cooperation trend between China and Russia, more and more developed city of two countries begin to make cooperation, it's a new cooperation phenomenon that different from previous cooperation between border cities. In the process of cooperation, there are advantages and mutual interests, as well as difficulties and conflicts. Therefore the management of the cooperation of these cities also need innovation method. Therefore, it is urgent to analyze the problems and make research in this field. The previous researcher mainly focus on the analysis of the cooperation and management strategy between border cities of two countries which has been fully studied. However, there is less even almost no research analysis the current new cooperation situation between the economic center cities of two countries, including the problems exiting, further cooperation analysis, and future development trend as well as innovation management method to well promote the cooperation of them. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).