Since Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin announced their “friendship without limits” in February 2022 on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has become commonplace among many Western analysts, and much of the media to refer to an “alliance of autocracies” or an “axis of authoritarianism”.
In my new book, Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy, I describe this thinking as the “Chussia Anxiety”, Chussia, of course, being a compression of China and Russia.
Much does in fact draw these Eurasian great powers together, and nothing more powerfully than their shared sour attitude towards the US-led liberal western world which both leaders view, correctly as it happens, as an existential threat to their authoritarian rule.
Putin and Xi appear to have also built a genuine affection for each other. They have met on over 42 occasions since 2012, although many of these meetings occurred in the context of regional or multilateral meetings.
Both leaders have made it abundantly clear that they seek a new multipolar world order which is accommodating of authoritarian states. Both seek to present themselves as friends of the Global South, as providing alternative development models, especially in China’s case.
Cooperation in all fields between Russia and China has expanded greatly since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fell under increasingly punitive economic coercion from the West. Although mutual military and security support through joint exercises and training dates to the early 2000s following the formal establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, it has been ramped up significantly since 2014 and continues to occur following the invasion of Ukraine. It has also become more global, extending to the Baltic and the Sea of Japan.
China is steadily increasing its weight in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia.
A valiant effort on both sides has been made to sweep outstanding historical issues under the carpet, with censorship and propaganda departments on heighten vigilance against any expressions of historical grievances.
Elevated sanctions following Putin’s Ukraine invasion has substantially deepened economic integration between Russia and China. China, for example, has just about replaced the European Union as the major exporter of automobiles and machinery to Russia. China is now the second largest market for Russian crude oil exports, after India.
All of this points to a significant geopolitical realignment. The question is, however, how stable and hence enduring is the relatively recent closeness in relations between China and Russia?
I argue that we are witnessing the second great power shift of our generation. The first occurred in the first two decades of this century across the Pacific, from the United States to China, and, now, in the third decade, especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second is occurring across Eurasia at an accelerating pace.
China is emerging as the dominant unchallenged power in Eurasia which, as its power grows relative to Russia, will increasingly undermine Russia’s sense of its security.
Russia’s and China’s approach to their security are fundamentally at odds, as Kissinger argued many years ago in World Order. Russia gets its security from colonising neighbouring terrorises to act as buffer states. This imperative is as old as the liberation of Muscovy from the Mongols in the late 15th century. For China, its security is achieved through maintaining client states that recognise China’s geopolitical primacy.
For almost 200 years after the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, their common borders were stable, despite Russia’s relentless eastward colonial expansion. For much of this period, the Qing Dynasty was more powerful. When, in the 19th century, following the Opium Wars, the balance of power shifted decisively towards Russia, China had to accept two unequal treaties that ceded vast areas to Russia: north of the Amur under the 1858 Treaty of Aijun and Manchuria under the 1860 Convention of Peking.
Today, Russia is the only former imperial power not to have returned territories it gained from China under unequal treaties in the 19th century. The loss of these lands still rankles among Chinese nationalists. In April 2023, Beijing decreed that eight major cities in Russia in these lands should be referred to by their earlier Chinese names on official maps. Before being shut down, internet bloggers in China have called for the return of these lands as part of Xi’s “national rejuvenation”.
It is not necessary even to invoke the Sino-Soviet split (1961-1989), Moscow’s support for Delhi in the 1962 Sino-Indian War, numerous military clashes along Xinjiang’s border or fighting on the Ussuri which nearly led to nuclear conflict, bitter memories along the Amur River of the Blagoveshchensk Massacre of thousands of Chinese by Russians (1900), or current fears of Chinese encroachment into to Russia’s Far East, to appreciate that with the massive shift in the balance of power towards China, the relationship will become increasingly fraught.
Meanwhile, China is steadily increasing its weight in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia. Just last year, for example, it initiated the C+C5 arrangement with the five Central Asian states and established a permanent secretariat in Xi’an. This gave institutional form to the deep economic and infrastructure integration that has been occurring for many years.
With their divergent approaches to security, outstanding historical and territorial issues, is there again a possibility of doing what is sometimes referred to as a “reverse Kissinger”: the United States and Russia aligning against an ever more powerful China? This is most unlikely as Russia’s interests are difficult to reconcile with those of the United States, and, for both, China is not an existential threat. But Russia will not long tolerate its increasingly vasal-like status to China.
One possibility, which will be driven by the search for order in the international system, is that Europe may come to see that it needs to “re-Europeanise” Russia post Putin. For without that, China will be the dominant power of Eurasia with no one to balance it. Neither can do so without the other, and it will become greatly in each one’s interest to do so.
Meanwhile, just like the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century when it consolidated its frontiers and established hegemony over the Western hemisphere, China will be free to project power globally.
