The emerging immersive and autonomous services have posed stringent requirements on both communications and localization. By considering the great potential of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), this paper focuses on the joint channel estimation and localization for RIS-aided wireless systems. As opposed to existing works that treat channel estimation and localization independently, this paper exploits the intrinsic coupling and nonlinear relationships between the channel parameters and user location for enhancement of both localization and channel reconstruction. By noticing the non-convex, nonlinear objective function and the sparse angle pattern, a variational Bayesian learning-based framework is developed to jointly estimate the channel parameters and user location through leveraging an effective approximation of the posterior distribution. The proposed framework is capable of unifying near-field and far-field scenarios owing to exploitation of sparsity of the angular domain. Since the joint channel and location estimation problem has a closed-form solution in each iteration, our proposed iterative algorithm performs better than the conventional particle swarm optimization (PSO) and maximum likelihood (ML) based ones in terms of computational complexity. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm almost reaches the Bayesian Cramer-Rao bound (BCRB) and achieves a superior estimation accuracy by comparing to the PSO and the ML algorithms.