Putin is Xi’s puppet – he just doesn’t realise it yet

For now, it suits the CCP’s hand to play Putin against Europe. But it won’t last

On Monday, en route to Mongolia in open contempt of its International Criminal Court obligation to arrest him as a war criminal, Vladimir Putin told a class of Siberian children that some youngsters in his family have learnt to speak Chinese fluently. He said that growing economic, political, and social contacts between Moscow and Beijing make Chinese a popular foreign language for Russians to learn.
This unusual personal revelation by the Russian dictator tells us about how his regime views its interactions with Chinese authoritarian power. He sees them as involved in an ever-closer partnership, tied to a political and intelligence nexus, with shared ambitions to collectively overthrow the global geopolitical status quo.
He is right in one sense and wrong in another. Yes, they are in partnership – but only for now. Before long the Chinese dragon seems destined to turn on its current ally. In fact, there is already some evidence it is doing so.
From an economic perspective, the relationship between Russia and China is fundamentally transactional, unequal, and ultimately weakening to Russian regional authority. In Siberia alone, Chinese influence in Eastern Siberia is growing organically, with an influx of business interests, workers and organised criminal activity which Putin does not contest.
Putin’s Russia is a willing victim of the ‘resource curse’ syndrome, where massive oil and gas exports to China bring in billions to be squandered on a pointless war in Ukraine, but – crucially – do not result in revival of the wider Russian domestic finances.
There is a growing recognition of this even within Russia itself. Putin’s chief propagandist Vladimir Solovyov – perhaps in an effort to maintain an impression of balanced objectivity – highlighted the risk that Russia might become too dependent on imported Chinese “cars and drone parts”. (He had just visited Russian troops in Ukraine, where Chinese “drone parts” are well-known to be put to military use). But even so Russia cannot produce enough of its own to keep up with the losses inflicted by Ukraine. China is therefore crucial to keeping Putin’s deluded dream of triumph in Ukraine alive.
This ‘partnership’, if that is the appropriate term, will survive for a while, but one has to wonder when Beijing will seek to exploit its power over Moscow yet further. As the Taiwanese President cheekily said this week: if the Chinese Communist party truly believes it has a territorial claim to Taiwan, then it should – logically – also be trying to take back land from Russia. In a sense, it already is. Reabsorption of Eastern Siberian territories briefly subjected to the Manchu Qing Dynasty is already under way, and the more Beijing can increase and exploit Russian dependency now, the sooner this will become a reality. The Siberian school where Putin voiced his statesmanlike picture of Sino-Russian cooperation stands on lands which once were ruled by China. Putin likes to be photographed bare-chested on horseback during his Tuvan holiday fishing trips – if Xi has his way, the Russian autocrat’s new clothes may soon be even more transparent.
But that is the long-term direction of travel. For now, we must deal with the relationship as it stands. Despite wishful Western thinking that China remains a ‘status quo power’ – a power which relies too heavily on the current international order to risk outright conflict with the West – Chinese support for Putin, and Beijing’s own accelerating proliferation of nuclear warheads, surely shows that the supposed ‘status quo’ no longer exists. With its developing-world and other clients and quasi-allies, China bandies talk of a benign new era based on multipolar co-operation, but the subtext is always that the PRC will have hegemony in place of the US.
At the moment, it suits the CCP’s hand to play Putin against Europe while it contests Western influence in the Indo-Pacific. It seems that Russia and China are co-operating, rather than competing, in efforts to bring sub-Saharan Africa under their influence. We neglect these realities at our peril.
There are undoubted differences between China, Russia, North Korean and other states aligned against the West. But we would be wrong to assume that this reduces the danger they pose, individually and as an increasingly interconnected political-military nexus. It has recently emerged that last March President Biden ordered the US military to prepare for ‘possible co-ordinated nuclear confrontation with Russia, China and North Korea.’
The lesson is immediate and clear. Whatever their differences, the shared Russia-China agenda now poses a combined existential threat to world peace and security; Western, and particularly UK, engagement with both that is not properly aligned to this reality will fail.