Why Russia’s biggest threat is China – Richard Mills

2025.01.04

A few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in the spring of 2022, Russian leader Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping of China declared theirs was a partnership that contained no limits.  

Since the Russian army crossed the border into Ukraine, the Chinese have not once criticized Russia’s actions, and have abstained on every critical vote at the United Nations including one condemning Russia’s annexations of four Ukrainian oblasts, or territories.

Beijing meanwhile has supported Moscow’s security concerns around NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe, and shared blaming the United States and NATO for supplying Ukraine with weapons.

As Russia has lost its ability to sell oil and gas to Europe, China has stepped in to fill the void. According to one source, a year into the war the Chinese were buying 60% of their energy resources from Russia. In 2023 China imported 23% of its crude oil from Russia, making it the top country supplier, despite sanctions and a price cap on Russian oil.

Beijing also purchased nearly half (46%) of Russia’s coal exports from December 2022 to October 2024, 22% of Russia’s LNG exports, and 29% of Russia’s pipeline gas (U.S. Energy Information Administration), providing Moscow with much-needed income to continue its war with Ukraine.

In May 2022, in a clear provocation against the United States, the two countries flew joint patrols adjacent to the Japanese and South Korean air defence zones while President Biden was visiting US allies in Asia.

According to the Wilson Center, since 2017 China and Russia have conducted more than 100 joint military exercises, many of them in distant locations such as the Mediterranean, the Arctic Circle, and off the South African coast.

While a Sino-Russian alliance makes geopolitical sense in 2024, it is arguably a temporary state of being that will not stand the test of time. That’s because Russian and China are both authoritarian great powers who each wish to disrupt the status quo in Eurasia to their benefit. Moreover, China and Russia have always had a complicated relationship. While both nations oppose Western influence in the region, beneath the façade of cooperation lies fierce competition.

At a 2023 Global MIT event for foreign policy scholars, a senior lecturer in international peace and security from King’s College London’s Department of War Studies remarked, “I don’t think it’s an alliance; otherwise, China might have come to Russia’s assistance. I don’t think it will ever be an alliance. The military cooperation isn’t at a level that could truly be called an alliance relationship.” A senior researcher on China and Indo-Pacific Security at the Center for Naval Analyses described the relationship as one-sided, explaining, “For China, Russia is a consequential, though problematic, partner.” A China expert from the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote an essay in 2019 on “why the China-Russia alliance won’t last,” arguing that “the more they try to cooperate, the more their disparate interests will strain the relationship.” — Wilson Center, ‘China and Russia: Quietly Going Steady?’ Oct. 29, 2024

The Eurasian Steppe

For centuries, Russia’s most important geopolitical strategy has been to control as much of the Eurasian Steppe as possible, a vast region that stretches through Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Manchuria. Since the Paleolithic age, the Steppe has been the main overland route between Europe, Western, Central, East and South Asia — predating the Silk Road.

In the West this huge flat plain begins in northern Germany and gradually widens as it opens to the east, eventually reaching Russia where it spans thousands of kilometers across. Throughout the Cold War, Russia achieved its greatest territorial control over the Eurasian Steppe, all the way from where it begins in Germany, through their proxy countries in the Warsaw Pact. Through this grouping of countries, Russia was protected by the Baltic Sea to the north and the Carpathian Mountains and Black Sea to the south. If a Western European army wanted to invade Russia it would have to squeeze their tanks through the narrowest part of the plain in Germany, where the Russian could concentrate troops to plug the gap.

However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has watched as its complete domination of the Eurasian Steppe has eroded. Along with the reunification of Germany, every former Warsaw Pact country joined NATO and even three former Soviet Baltic republics signed onto the alliance. Only Belarus remained loyal to Moscow, meaning the red lines for Russia became the Ukraine and Georgia.

If Ukraine were to join NATO it would cement NATO and the US’s military’s presence across nearly the entirety of the European part of the Eurasian Steppe, theoretically enabling NATO forces to land unopposed in Crimea and line up tanks across thousands of kilometers of open, flat terrain.

To regain a strategic foothold, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, including Abkhazia, thus plugging the western coastal entrance to the Eurasian Steppe. In 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine to occupy Crimea and prevent a Western European army from entering the Steppe from the Black Sea. This was followed by the 2022 invasion, in an attempt to push Russia’s geographic defenses against NATO back to the gap between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, opposite Romania and Poland.

According to YouTuber RealLifeLore, whose video has received over 10 million views, Russia is attempting to push back against what they perceive as US and NATO encirclement in Eastern Europe at precisely the same time that China is attempting to push back against what they also perceive as US encirclement of them in the Indo Pacific.

The nine-dash line

On Eurasia’s eastern flank, China’s foremost geopolitical objective is finishing the Chinese civil war by wresting control over Taiwan either through diplomacy or warfare. Just as Russia feels hemmed in in their European theater, China feels that the United States is the major obstacle standing in the way of re-uniting Taiwan with China.

Indeed China perceives itself as increasingly encircled by regimes friendly to Washington, with its naval power confined to its coastlines on the East and South China seas.

Beijing’s greatest fear is that, should war become the only way to win back control of Taiwan, its imports of energy resources will become blockaded by the US Navy. Currently more than 70% of China’s oil and liquefied natural gas come through a single narrow choke point, from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca. If this were to happen, China’s economy, which is highly dependent on energy and mineral imports, would come to a crashing halt and Taiwan would remain under the control of the Republic of China (ROC), the official name for Taiwan.

To mitigate this risk, China maintains a large territorial claim to nearly the entire South China Sea almost to the entrance to the Strait of Malacca, an area known as the nine-dash line. This line is rooted in China’s supposed historical claims to the region, which are disputed by Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

China maintains another series of territorial disputes with India across the Himalayas — lands that India currently administers but that China claims as natural extensions of its provinces in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Unequal treaties

Russia has a long history of conflicts with powers in East Asia dating back to the Mongol conquest of Russia in the 13^th century. In the 20^th century Russia fought wars against Japan in 1905 and again in 1945.

China, meanwhile, has conflicted with Russia and European powers, most notably during the 110-year period between 1839 and 1949 — what the Chinese call their “century of humiliation”. It was during this period that China ceded control of Hong Kong to the British and the Japanese conquered Taiwan and Manchuria, the area east of Mongolia and north of North Korea.

According to official Chinese doctrine, the century of humiliation ended in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the RealLifeLore video,

The Chinese Communist Party label these treaties that forced China into surrendering land to foreign powers during its century of humiliation as unequal treaties and it is intensely ironic that one of the most unequal of all the treaties that was forced upon China during the century of humiliation came from their current closest partner the Russians.

This goes back to 1858, when the Qing dynasty was both waging a civil war that would claim the lives of tens of millions of people, and fighting the Second Opium War against the British and the French.

Sensing China’s weakness, the Russian empire seized the opportunity by lining up tens of thousands of troops on the border with Manchuria, then demanded that the Qing cede Outer Manchuria to Russia.

As RealLifeLore explains, not wanting to open up a third war with the Russians in the north, the Qing reluctantly relented and agreed under duress in a treaty in 1860 to surrender over this huge amount of land equivalent to the size of Ukraine without anyone firing a shot. What used to be known as Outer Manchuria would eventually become incredibly important to the Russians. It’s where they founded big cities like Khabarovsk, the largest city today in the entire Russian Far East and Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean and the contemporary home base of the Russian Pacific fleet including their nuclear-armed submarines. Without Vladivostok, the Russian Navy and submarine nuclear deterrent would be largely incapable of operating anywhere in the Pacific, granting it an enormous strategic importance to Moscow. But at the same time, the 1860 treaty that surrendered all of this land to Russia under duress locked the Chinese out from being able to directly access the Sea of Japan, limiting them instead to just the East and South China seas.

Mao and Russia

Chinese nationalists never forgot what happened in Manchuria, including the founder of the People’s Republic himself, Mao Zedong.

In 1964, Mao commented to a delegation from the Japanese Socialist Party that the Russians had unilaterally absorbed Outer Manchuria and that the issue had never been resolved, sparking outrage in Moscow.

Four years later, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and at the same time published the Brezhnev Doctrine insisting that the USSR reserved the right to topple any other communist government that was straying too far from the global communist movement as Moscow defined it.

To Mao, the Brezhnev Doctrine was an ideological justification for the Soviets to invade China and overthrow him. He thus decided to manufacture a crisis along the Sino-Soviet border, on lands previously known as Outer Manchuria. Russia insisted that the border was the banks of the Amur and Ussuri rivers on the Chinese side, effectively making all of the islands within the rivers Russian. Mao disagreed with this interpretation, saying that the boundary instead ran through the midpoint of the rivers.

The matter came to a head in March 1969, over an island the Chinese claimed on their side of the river as Zhenbao, and which the Soviets claimed within their river as Damansky. For weeks, hundreds of Chinese and Soviet troops battled for control of the island. According to RealLifeLore, dozens were killed and hundreds more wounded, with the two largest communist countries firing over 10,000 rounds of artillery and coming to the brink of a full-scale nuclear war.

The biggest fear in Moscow was that Mao was preparing to retake all of Outer Manchuria. Eventually the crisis was diffused, but the border remained in dispute until it was formally demarcated in 1991.

(The Chinese reportedly had well over 1.5 million soldiers deployed compared to only 350,000 on the Soviet side.)

While Russia also agreed to the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine, through treaties in 1994 and 1997, two decades later Moscow reneged on those treaties based on historical rather than legal claims, particularly the Crimea and Donbas regions. As noted by RealLifeLore,

Russia invaded and conquered large swaths of Ukrainian territory based on their supposed historical claims to those territories, opening up the Pandora’s box of China hypothetically doing the very same thing with their historical claims to Outer Manchuria at some point in the distant future.

The Englesberg Ideas blog colorfully documents the relationship between Mao Zedong and the former Soviet Union, starting with the end of the border skirmish with Outer Manchuria in 1969.

Speaking to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was trying to mediate between Beijing and Moscow, Mao reportedly told him, “You [the Soviet Union] piss on my head and I should respect you? No matter who tries to persuade us [to mend fences], we won’t move,” he said. “The more they talk the worse relations will become.”

In fact tensions between Mao and the Soviets dated to the Second World War when Stalin was in control. “Before I met with Stalin,” Mao recalled some years after the Soviet dictator’s death in 1953, “I did not have much good feeling about him… He was very different from Lenin: Lenin shared his heart with others as equals whereas Stalin liked to stand above everyone else and order others around.”

For his part, Stalin disliked self-made communists like Mao and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, who Stalin secretly planned to have poisoned. According to the blog, while Mao knew that Stalin regarded him as a Chinese Tito, he was willing to subordinate himself to Stalin, declaring in a 1949 newspaper editorial that China would “lean to one side” — the Soviet side.

The next year the two countries signed the Sino-Soviet Alliance. According to the blog, while Mao believed that allying with the Soviets would help in his goal of transforming China — he needed Stalin’s help in the form of advice, weapons and technologies — later Mao would grumble ceaselessly about his relationship with Stalin being like that between ‘a cat and mouse’ or between ‘a father and son’.

As for Nikita Khrushchev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, Mao considered him an upstart and believed himself better placed to pass judgments on profound matters such as war and peace and the future of revolution.

While the fully named Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance lasted until 1979, relations started to sour in the mid-1950s. According to Wikipedia,

In early 1956, Sino-Soviet relations began deteriorating, following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the USSR, which he initiated with the speech On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences that criticized Stalin and Stalinism – especially the Great Purge of Soviet society, of the rank-and-file of the Soviet Armed Forces, and of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In light of de-Stalinization, the CPSU’s changed ideological orientation – from Stalin’s confrontation of the West to Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence with it — posed problems of ideological credibility and political authority for Mao, who had emulated Stalin’s style of leadership and practical application of Marxism–Leninism in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the PRC as a country.

China’s growing influence in Central Asia

The historical strains over Outer Manchuria are far from the only point of divergence between Moscow and Beijing. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, five independent countries emerged in Central Asia after decades of being dominated by Moscow. Since then, many have moved closer to China.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to emulate the “Silk Road”, which refers to the ancient network of trading routes between China and Europe, which served as both a conduit for the movement of goods, and an exchange of ideas for centuries.

The silk routes connected China, India, Tibet, the Persian Empire, the Mediterranean countries and parts of North and East Africa. The 7,000-mile Silk Road began at the Chinese city of X’an. When it reached Dunhuang the Silk Road split into three routes – the Southern Route, Central Route and Northern Route. These trade routes spread throughout the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and extended as far as Pakistan, India and even Rome.

The Silk Road routes were established during the Han Dynasty, which opened trade to the West in 130 BC, and they lasted until 1453 AD, when the Ottoman Empire boycotted trade with China and closed them. The Han extended the Great Wall of China to protect the movement of Chinese goods along the Silk Road.

The Maritime Silk Road was a network of shipping lines from the Red Sea to East Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia. The network consisted of ship routes in two general directions: the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

The East China Sea routes connected the Chinese mainland to the northeast Asian regions of the Liaodong peninsula, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands. The South China Sea route headed down, then up, through the Malacca Straits into the Bay of Bengal, opening up China to the coasts of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the African continent.

These shipping lanes are still in use.

Global trades routes are shifting Part 1 — Richard Mills

Central Asia and China are a natural fit. The area is rich in natural resources especially oil and gas that China needs to keep its economy running at full tilt. Remember that China is resource-hungry but resource-poor.

With China’s backing, oil and gas pipelines have been built from hydrocarbon-rich countries like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that all now flow east towards China. From these three countries, China now imports around 15% of its natural gas demand, greatly helping Beijing in overcoming its heavy reliance on more vulnerable liquefied natural gas imports coming by sea through the Malacca Strait, RealLifeLore points out.

With its massive and still-growing capital and industrial base, China has also overtaken Russia in terms of trade volumes with all of the Central Asian states since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is why Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan never joined Russia’s Eurasian economic union, Moscow’s version of the European Union consisting of former Soviet states. Instead all three more heavily participate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Geographic control over Central Asia has been an imperative foreign policy goal of Moscow’s for centuries because it contains yet another of the most major historical invasion routes into the flat Eurasian Steppe.

China’s objectives in Central Asia span far beyond simply acquiring the regions’s rich hydrocarbons. China also wanted to stabilize its turbulent Xinjiang province, a region racked by internal violence and instability fueled by ethnic and religious differences from the majority Han Chinese government. By the early 2010s the instability in Xinjiang had reached a boiling point and the Chinese Communist party decided to respond with harsh repression. In 2012 the Chinese People’s Armed Police established a permanent presence across the border in Tajikistan. Their objective was to stop the spread of Islamist militants and arms flowing into in Xinjiang from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But Tajikstan was also a member of the CSTO military alliance led by Moscow and it never asked the Russians for permission. The fact that a supposed CSTO member and former Soviet republic had secretly granted another foreign power access to deploy military bases on its territory was a severe affront for the Russians. RealLifeLore explains:

In a sign of their growing displacement in Central Asia at the hands of the Chinese, for now Russia has little other choice but to accept the new reality in the region and Beijing’s emerging supremacy.

Moscow’s more important focus is on their perceived fight against the West across the European plain and losing influence and ground in Central Asia to China appears a price they are willing to pay in order to maintain that focus.

Getting back to the BRI, Eurasiaview mentions how Belt and Road is central to Beijing’s strategy in central Asia. It includes ambitious projects such as the China-Central Asia-West Asia Corridor, which links China’s western regions to Central Asia and further into the Middle East; the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor connecting Central to South Asia via Pakistan; and the Khorgos Gateway, a port on the Kazakhstan-China border that facilitates trade across Eurasia.

These projects are not merely economic but also strategic. They provide China with access to vital resources, secure energy supplies, and expand its influence across a region historically under Russian hegemony. — Eurasiaview

Meanwhile, several factors have eroded Russia’s position. They include the war in Ukraine, which has drained resources and diverted attention away from Central Asia; and economic challenges, with Western sanctions weakening Russia’s economy, reducing its capacity to invest in Central Asia. In contrast, China’s economic strength allows it to offer loans, build infrastructure, and secure energy deals, outpacing Russia’s efforts.

Recently AsiaTimes reported that Russia has made two major compromises with China by giving Beijing the green light to build a railway in nearby Central Asia and accepting China’s suggestion of re-routing the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline to pass through Kazakhstan instead of Mongolia.

Eurasiaview outlines seven key reasons for China’s increasing footprint in Central Asia:

• Strategic importance: Central Asia serves as a buffer zone between China and key global powers such as Russia and the United States.

• Economic interests: China’s Belt and Road aims to enhance connectivity across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, with Central Asia playing a pivotal role.

• Declining Russian influence: Shifting power dynamics as Russia faces economic challenges and geopolitical isolation due to its involvement in Ukraine, its influence in Central Asia has waned creating a vacuum that China is eager to fill. 

• Multilateral engagement: China leverages platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to bolster security cooperation and deepen its ties in Central Asian countries.

• Local opportunities: China’s construction prowess and the infrastructure in Central Asia creates a mutually beneficial arrangement for China and Central Asia in filling infrastructure gaps. Central Asia depends upon Chin to a massive extent in the field of Foreign Direct Investment and foreign credits.

• Countering Western influence: The Chinese system is often considered as the model of a viable modern authoritarian regime. Central Asia is encircled by an arc of autocratic regimes namely Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Türkiye. Thereby democracy is perceived as anarchy and a threat that might lead to de-stabilization and conflict. 

• Control over trade routes: Central Asia’s position at the crossroads of Asia and Europe makes it vital for securing trade routes and reducing dependence on maritime pathways vulnerable to disruptions. 

China overtook Russia as Central Asia’s biggest trading partner in 2022 with bilateral trade peaking at $70 billion, encompassing investments in energy, infrastructure and logistics.

As far as the countries themselves, in Kazakhstan China has invested in the Atyrau oil refinery and Zhanatus wind farm. Bilateral trade volumes have skyrocketed from $400 million at the time of establishing diplomatic ties to more than $41 billion in 2023, a 100-fold increase.

The $1.4 billion China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway project is a major infrastructure milestone.

Turkmenistan supplies over 40 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to China through the Central Asia-China gas pipeline.    

China considers Uzbekistan a country with a huge consumer market. However, as of July 1, 2023 China was Uzbekistan’s largest creditor. Beijing is owed $3.8 billion by Tashkent. China has invested heavily in Uzbekistan’s natural gas sector, particularly through agreements with companies like Uzbekneftegaz. Projects such as the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor connect Uzbekistan more closely to China’s trade network.

The PRC is the largest investor in the economy of Tajikistan. Around $4.85 billion of foreign direct investment was attracted to Tajikistan during 2007-21 including $2.1 billion from China. Like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan is heavily indebted to China, which Beijing uses as leverage for securing mineral rights and infrastructure deals.

China and Turkmenistan established diplomatic relations in 1992. Since then they have developed close bilateral relationships. Turkmenistan is highly dependent on China as its largest buyer of natural gas, transported via the Central Asia-China Gas Pipeline.

Water

One of the greatest macro problems China faces this century is a shortage of available fresh water. While the country is home to around 20% of the global population (1.4 billion people), China only controls about 7% of the world’s fresh surface water.

The biggest issue is that most of China’s water is not located in the most densely populated North China Plain. Rather, around 80% of its water supplies are found in Southern China and Tibet.

The North Plain, states RealLifeLore, only has enough water to match the consumption rate of Saudi Arabia, a desert country home to less than one-tenth of China’s population. The remaining supply must be diverted from other parts of China via pipelines and aqueducts, or from abroad.

The problem became acute in 2022, when China suffered a record drought; the Yangtze River Valley for example saw the lowest levels of rainfall since record-keeping began in 1971.

It’s not only that China’s rivers could fall so low as to impede navigation. The bigger problem is that the nearest fresh-water supplies are in the South, in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal and Bhutan, all of which China has adversarial relationships with.

RealLifeLore points out that India also faces water shortages, but would never “sit idly by” if China tried to take over its limited fresh-water resources. “And so the fight here in this directions will be ferocious.”

Russia should also be looking over its shoulder at China with respect to water scarcity. In the Russian Far East sits Lake Baikal, said to be the largest lake on the planet with more fresh water in it than all the North American Great Lakes combined.

According to RealLifeLore, it alone contains nearly one-quarter of Earth’s entire surface freshwater and could sustain the global population with drinking water for 50 years. China is well aware of the lake’s potential and in 2010 a state-owned enterprise called Aquasib began buying up land around the lake. In 2017, China announced plans to construct a pipeline but the proposal drew an angry response from the local population, prompting the Russian government to step in and shut down the idea. Since then, no water pipelines from the lake have been built.

A marriage of convenience

Despite their differences, over unequal treaties, their interpretations of Communism, Central Asia, and water, Beijing and Moscow, it should be said, complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well.

China has an enormous population base and a capital-rich economy that rivals even the United States in purchasing power. Yet in terms of natural resources, China is poor. It has little natural gas, oil or minerals it needs to continue fueling its expanding industrial base. This is why so much of China’s oil and gas is exported from the Persian Gulf through the Malacca Strait — a strategic vulnerability.

Russia is the exact opposite of China. Its economy is tiny in comparison and capital-poor. As of 2023, the entire Russian economy was smaller than that of New York City or the Chinese province of Guangdong. What Russia does have is a practically endless supply of the minerals that China needs. It has by far the largest natural gas reserves on the planet and one of the largest reserves of coal, which China still uses in abundance for power. It also has some of the most important minerals that China lacks, including copper, lead, nickel and diamonds. Moreover, these resources are mainly in the Asian part of Russia, relatively close to China’s huge industrial base.

As RealLifeLore succinctly puts it,

China can provide the Russians with the capital they need to continue pushing back against American hegemony in Eastern Europe and expanding their strategic depth control across the Eurasian Steppe through states like Ukraine and Moldova. And then equipped with vast Russian resources coming in over land through pipelines and railways, China can gradually reduce its overdependence on importing resources through the dangerous Strait of Malacca and therefore push back more effectively against American hegemony in the Indo Pacific, granting them greater strategic flexibility when dealing with finishing the Chinese civil war and securing Taiwan.

A 2022 report by the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) names six motives for cooperating with Russia:

• to maintain a stable and peaceful neighborly relationship
• to gain political support and legitimacy for its own regime
• to improve military cooperation to counterbalance the US
• to maintain stability in Central Asia
• to deepen cooperation in terms of economic and technological exchange
• global governance.

The report identifies four challenges for the relationship between the countries:

• history and mutual suspicion
• competing regional interests
• limitations in the economic exchange
• different approaches to the future global order.

Xi’s useful idiot

Authoritarian governments since the 1917 Russian Revolution have depended upon useful idiots in the West to disguise their true motives of dominating their neighbors and fellow citizens.

‘Useful idiots’ equally present on the left and right — Richard Mills

Useful idiots in the media were exemplified by the New York Times’ Walter Duranty, who according to Princeton Progressives, explained away Stalin’s mass murders by gun and starvation as “simply breaking eggs in order to make an omelet.”

Accomplished writers such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb, were in the 1920s and ‘30s all leading lights in Britain’s socialist movement. Despite the grim realities of Stalinism, a form of oppressive dictatorship that collectivized farms leading to mass starvation, and either shot or sent enemies of the state to gulags, where they were worked to death, across the West and especially in the UK, the Soviet Union was praised as a workers’ paradise.

The current Sino-Soviet dalliance including some pundits describing the relationship between Presidents Xi and Putin as a “bromance”, belies the fact that Putin serves a purpose as Xi’s useful idiot.

For now the West’s attention is on the Ukraine, a war going on three years old that Russia is clearly losing. A recent Project Syndicate article holds that the question is not whether Russia will lose the war (in strategic terms, it already has), but only how big the loss will be:

The war has cost Russia more than 700,000 casualties. It has forced Russia to reorient its lucrative European energy trade to less profitable markets. It has depressed productivity through sanctions. It has led to the impoundment of its foreign-exchange reserves, with the accruing interest diverted to Ukraine. It has triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of prime working-age citizens (often highly educated and in the crucial tech sector). It has precipitated the bombing of Russian factories, military bases, and infrastructure, as well as the first invasion of its territory (in the Kursk region) since World War II. And it has brought about the expansion and reinvigoration of NATO, with Sweden and Finland’s accession to membership in the alliance transforming the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.

In November it was reported that three Russian oil refineries were forced to halt or scale back production due to significant losses and face risk of closure. Ukraine has targeted Russian oil production with long-range drone strikes.  

And then there’s this. Putin calculated that the losses from a short-lived war in Ukraine, even with sanctions, would be outweighed by increased prosperity in Russia. What he didn’t count on was the war lasting now almost three years. Half of Russia’s $640-billion savings account has been frozen in foreign accounts — an amount equal to 15% of Russia’s GDP. When will Russia’s savings account run dry? As the savings account gets lower the Russian government will, like the United States, print more currency, resulting in higher inflation.

Skyrocketing food inflation is a growing concern for the Kremlin. Bloomberg reports a kilogram of potatoes is at least 73% more expensive than at the start of 2024, while the price of butter has increased by more than 30%. Milk, bread and fish are 12-15% higher than 2023 levels.

The official interest rate in the Russian economy has reached 21%. When the US was battling high inflation, the Fed hiked interest rates to slow the economy, including to prevent home prices from rising too much. Instead, higher rates dramatically increased borrowing costs, hitting the average American homeowner in the pocketbook. The same thing is likely happening to Russians, who are also dealing with high inflation. As of November, year over year inflation was running at 8.8%.

Ben Scott in ‘The Interpreter’ writes that a weakened Russia will be less of an obstacle to China’s expanding influence in Central Asia and more likely to acquiesce on bilateral issues, from energy and military technology transfers to longstanding territorial disputes.

China’s policy has been to provide Russia with as much moral and practical support as possible without incurring any material costs. As mentioned at the top, China has supported Russia economically, by purchasing Russian oil and gas previously exported to Europe.

More subtly, Russia has played an especially useful role for China in its competition with the United States. Putin has murdered dissidents abroad, meddled in US domestic politics, and engaged in military brinkmanship in third countries, such as Syria.

China says Scott has benefited in two ways:

First, Russian aggression has allowed China’s behaviour to more often pass under the radar. Although China’s global reputation has suffered in recent years, when compared to Russia it looks relatively benign, even to Americans…

Second, China is learning useful practical lessons from Russian behaviour, including from the invasion of Ukraine. These encompass everything from the utility of economic sanctions and nuclear brinkmanship through to numerous lessons about modern warfare. The People’s Liberation Army is mitigating its lack of combat experience – its main weakness – through stepped-up military exercises with experienced Russian forces.

Many claims are still made about Putin’s “useful idiots” in the West, but it’s increasingly clear that he is not the grand puppet master many once feared. Russia is paying a heavy price for his foolhardy adventures. The only beneficiary is China. The Xi–Putin partnership is no bromance. Putin is Xi’s useful idiot. The real question is what Xi does as Putin becomes less useful.

Conclusion

Russia and China are both friend and foe, depending on the circumstances and on what suits them best: cooperation or competition.

While the current arrangement leans toward cooperation, we at AOTH agree with those who say it’s more temporary than permanent.

Indeed historically speaking, the two countries are far more predisposed to be major rivals than friends; current cooperation is thus a historical aberration.

China is increasingly the stronger partner in the relationship. What it lacks in natural resources it makes up for in a much larger economy than Russia’s, which is basically a commodity supply state.

RealLifeLore states:

The more that Russia has to rely on China to provide capital and labor to develop its resources in the Far East that will mostly get exported to China, and the more Russia must turn away from Europe and towards a reliance on China’s cash to keep its government solvent, the more Russia will have to accept that it is becoming China’s junior partner on the world stage.

As long as the United States remains their common enemy, the more likely Russia’s and China’s interests will align.

At the moment, Russia is giving China everything it needs. Moscow is distracting the US away from the Indo-Pacific with a major war in Europe. It is giving China free economic rein in Central Asia and selling China enormously discounted oil and gas, even as more pipelines are being built to send Central Asian gas to China.

However, there is always the possibility of one side pressing its case and destabilizing the entire arrangement. China has made clear its territorial ambitions, i.e., regaining Outer Manchuria. If the Russians, say following the ousting or death of Putin, were to slow down deliveries of energy or water to China, Beijing could make demands on Russia that Moscow could not possibly refuse, including taking back Outer Manchuria and maybe even more of the mostly uninhabited Russian Far East.

RealLifeLore concludes, and we agree, that:

A formal alliance with China is a very dangerous one for this exact reason and it’s likely why the Kremlin will continue to sell resources to China and cooperate with them to an extent in the near term, but it’s also why long-term cooperation over the span of decades between them is highly unlikely.

Russia’s biggest threat is China

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com
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