RUSSIAN-CHINESE COOPERATION IN EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF EURASIAN ECONOMIC UNION AND SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION

The article researches the activity of two large international economic and political structures, the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, created in the post-Soviet space and includes a huge list of cooperation spheres, not the least - cooperation in education. Politically, Russian-Chinese relations are an important component of the modern system of international relations. The course of political and economic processes, at least within Eurasia, will largely depend on how relations between China and Russia develop. In recent years, bilateral relations between the two countries have been on the rise, which is expressed in the high growth rates of commodity circulation, expansion of investment cooperation, intensification of inter-regional and cross-border ties, and a marked increase in political dialogue and humanitarian interaction. Cooperation with China is crucial for the modernization of the Russian economy, giving it an innovative character and integration into the Asia-Pacific economic space. For Russia, relations with China are a priority in comparison with other Asian countries. In this regard, further development of partnership relations and strategic interaction with China is one of the main and, of course, priority and long-term policies of our country. Cooperation in the field of education is an integral element of strategic cooperation with Russia and China, which determines the relevance of the topic of our research. Preparing the article the authors pursued two main goals: to reveal particular qualities of the Russian-Chinese cooperation in the sphere of education and to analyze some characteristic features of the development in educational sphere in the frameworks of Eurasian Economic Union and Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Despite some correlative aspects of these two integrative structures, attitude towards the questions of education has a definite difference. The same thing can be said concerning Russian and Chinese systems of education regardless of the high level of cooperation between our countries. The authors used the following scientific methodology: the method of keys, the historic analytical method and the method of political analysis. The first mentioned method helped the authors to research the historical backgrounds of the Russian-Chinese cooperation on the whole and the development of their national educational systems - in particular. The method of keys provided a deep and precise analysis of the Russian and Chinese national educational systems. Finally, the method of political analysis made it possible to analyze the educational agenda in the frameworks of Eurasian Economic Union and Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In the final part of the research the authors came to the following conclusions: national system of Chinese education is successive to the Soviet one. At the same time, it is quiet paradoxical, but the Russian system is totally borrowed from the Western Europe. The second conclusion refers to the educational issue in the context of cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The authors revealed a number of aspects which complicate the full-scale cooperation between these two institutes due to the crucial difference of the educational systems mentioned above.