Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of China and Russia, at a reception in Moscow in March last year. PAVEL BYRKIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are moving closer together in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
They harbor the same old grudges against the power of the West and want to expand their global power.
They have followed strangely parallel paths, abolishing term limits to have unlimited power.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
Vladimir Putin gave his victory speech this week following elections in Russia that have been widely condemned as fraudulent. He particularly praised China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. Putin praised relations between Russia and China. He added that the bond would become even stronger in his fifth term. This is underpinned by Putin’s “good personal relations” with Xi. As “Reuters” reports, Putin will visit his ally on his first foreign trip of his new term in office.
It is a friendship between two heads of state whose careers show remarkable parallels. Both came to power in countries where absolute power was supposed to be protected by limiting the term of office of heads of state to two years. Over the past decade, Putin and Xi have crushed what little domestic opposition remained on their path to absolute power. As part of this process, both men reshaped the political system to maintain themselves in power. Both men are effectively presidents for life.
Graeme Thompson, an analyst at Eurasia Group, told Business Insider that the two leaders now share a common global goal. This goal is to curtail US power. “Both strive to restore to their respective countries the place they believe they deserve among the world’s great powers,” he said. The aim is to replace the USA as the global power center. “And both use the politics of nationalism and resentment toward the West, pointing to past periods of weakness and instability – China’s so-called ‘Century of Humiliation’ in the 19th century and Russia’s post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s – to support their domestic repression and to justify foreign policy goals.”
The path to totalitarianism
When Putin began his political career, he presented himself as a reformer. Who advocated for the liberalization of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To cement his image, he even dated Hollywood celebrities. But two decades later, the situation couldn’t be more different. The Russian leader is no longer trying to disguise his authoritarianism. Putin has destroyed what remains of the Russian opposition. Relations with the West have sunk to their lowest level in decades. In many ways, Putin’s unchallenged domestic power increasingly resembles Xi’s in the east of the country. They were born a year apart: Putin in 1952 and Xi in 1953. They rose from bureaucratic obscurity to govern and later dominate their countries.
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Putin on stage in Moscow on Monday. Contributor via Getty Images
Robert Dover, a professor of international security at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom, said Xi and Putin shared an ability to build loyal networks of power. “Both Putin’s and Xi’s careers were forged as highly effective backroom actors who built relationships of dependence and patronage,” he said. He pointed to Putin’s early career as a KGB agent and local politician. He also highlighted Xi’s experience as a Communist Party official who has proven himself in his country’s challenging political landscape. Xi has gone even further than Putin in his quest for total power. In the early years of the 21st century, he put an end to any hopes that China could move toward openness and liberalization.
He worked to destroy the opposition in the country. He achieved this by imprisoning the Uyghur Muslim minority in prison camps and cracking down on independence movements in Hong Kong. In 2018, he introduced legislation declaring him president for life. He recently eliminated one of the last remaining opportunities for the Chinese government to exercise even minimal control. This came as he concluded Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s annual press conference. During his time in office, he introduced a dystopian surveillance system in China. This system comprehensively monitors citizens’ lives for signs of dissent. In Russia, Putin was president for two terms. He then moved on to serve as prime minister for four years, allowing him to circumvent the ban on serving more than two consecutive terms.
In 2021, Putin went one step further. He signed a law that tightened term limits for Russian presidents to a maximum of two terms in a lifetime. However, the law contained an exception: it reset the counting of terms. That meant he could run twice more. This arrangement would allow him to remain in office until 2036, even if he would be 84 by then. Both leaders have placed combating foreign threats at the center of their ideology. Be it in the form of “decadent” cultural influences (such as Xi’s hatred of Korean K-pop bands) or plans by the US and its allies to “encircle” their countries.
Live video of Xi during the opening session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 5. GREG BAKER via Getty Images
Dover said it would be a mistake to view Putin and Xi simply as dictators who act as they see fit. Both had built effective networks of loyalists. These are able to react to crises. And put their ambitious strategies to gain more global power into action. They have the “long-term planning scope to realize very ambitious military and technological future plans by mid-century,” he said.
Xi and Putin share a hatred of Western power
The synergy between the two leaders is of growing importance on the global stage and is increasingly worrying Western leaders. Xi and Putin share an imperialist vision of their nations’ fate and a determination to end Western domination. Both leaders, Dover said, have developed a keen sense of how far they can go to undermine the West without provoking war.
Putin inspects a military guard of honor with Xi during a welcoming ceremony in front of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2018. GREG BAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
“Russia and China have sought to influence Western society and politics through aggressive influence operations, influencing elite opinion leaders, and sophisticated manipulation of broadcast and social media platforms,” he said. “Both Putin and Xi have developed a shrewd sense of what kinds of highly aggressive actions will not provoke a unified Western response: this is particularly dangerous for the West.”
Their global strategy is revealed not only by covertly undermining the West through propaganda and espionage. But also through the invasion of Ukraine. China has provided Russia with decisive diplomatic and economic support. Xi most likely believes that a defeat in Ukraine would be a massive blow to US prestige and a win for China. Experts say Xi is watching the war very closely. A Ukrainian defeat could weaken the US’s resolve to defend its allies, thereby facilitating its goal of regaining control of Taiwan.
But there are problems
However, the supposedly “limitless” partnership between Putin and Xi appears to have clear limits. This could jeopardize relations in the coming years. “It is almost a truism that authoritarian states cannot trust each other. And both Putin and Xi will at least do what is best for themselves and their regimes,” Thompson said. Putin appears to be afraid of Xi’s newfound economic power over Russia. Xi has sought to harness this power by seeking influence in the Central Asian republics. These areas have long been considered part of the Russian sphere of influence.
According to Thompson, a potential future trouble spot could be Russia’s Far Eastern provinces. These have long been viewed by Chinese nationalists as part of China. He even imagined a distant future in which Russia could once again seek closer ties with the West. Perhaps a post-Putin Russia, fearful of growing Chinese power in East Asia, will even turn back to the West to counterbalance Beijing, although that is still a long way off,” he said.
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