"I don't feel any threat of this kind. China is our strategic partner," Ivanov said on the Novoborzinsky testing ground in Chitaregion, bordering northwest China.

"We can clearly see Russia is under no threat of large-scale war," Ivanov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

Ivanov also said that Russia and a growing number of other countries are far more seriously concerned about local wars and conflicts.

"We got confronted with this problem in Chechnya a long time ago and have been trying to solve it with the use of armed forces," the minister said.

Last year, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a Sino-Russian Treaty on Good-neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation, which functions as a legal document guiding the steady growth of bilateral ties in the new century.

(People's Daily August 26, 2002)