Xi Jinping’s Russian Lessons

On February 4, 2022, just before invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing, where he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping signed a document that hailed a “no limits” partnership. In the two-plus years since, China has refused to condemn the invasion and helped Russia acquire materiel, from machine tools to engines to drones, crucial for the war effort. The flourishing partnership between Xi and Putin has raised serious questions in Western capitals. Is the alliance that linked Moscow and Beijing in the early Cold War back? The Russians and the Chinese have repeatedly dismissed such talk, but they have also asserted that their current partnership is more resilient than the days when they led the communist world together.

Xi would know. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a high-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official whose own career was a microcosm of relations between Beijing and Moscow during the twentieth century, from the early days of the revolution in the 1920s and 1930s to the on-and-off help during the 1940s and the wholesale copying of the Soviet model in the 1950s, and from the open split of the 1960s and 1970s to the rapprochement in the late 1980s. The elder Xi’s dealings with Moscow showed the dangers of intimacy and enmity, how growing too close created unmanageable tensions that produced a costly feud. Understanding that history, the younger Xi by all appearances believes that the current relationship between Moscow and Beijing is indeed stronger than it was in the 1950s, and that he can avoid the strains that led to the earlier split.

During the Cold War, communist ideology ultimately pushed the two countries apart, while now they are united by a more general set of conservative, anti-Western, and statist attitudes. In the old days, poor relations between individual leaders damaged the relationship, while today, Xi and Putin have made their personal connection a feature of the strategic partnership. Then, the exigencies of the Cold War alliance, which required each side to sacrifice its own interests for the other’s, contained the seeds of its own demise, whereas the current axis of convenience allows more flexibility. China and Russia will never again march in lockstep as they did in the first years after the Chinese Revolution, but they won’t walk away from each other any time soon.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS

Xi Jinping was born in 1953, at the height of China’s feverish copying of the Soviet Union. The most popular slogan in China that year: “The Soviet Union of today is the China of tomorrow.” Xi Zhongxun had just moved to Beijing from China’s northwest, where he had spent most of the first four decades of his life fighting in a revolution inspired by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Like so many of his generation, Xi was devoted to the cause despite numerous setbacks and personal sacrifices—a devotion that survived his persecution and incarceration by fellow members of the CCP in 1935 for not adhering closely enough to communist orthodoxy.

The Bolshevik victory influenced early Chinese radicals, and Moscow led and bankrolled the CCP in its early years. But the growing independence of the Chinese Communists went hand in hand with the rise of Mao Zedong—and tied Xi Zhongxun’s fate to Mao’s. In Mao’s narrative, Soviet-trained radicals had almost buried the revolution in China because they had failed to understand the country’s special conditions. These dogmatists, Mao claimed, had persecuted Xi in 1935 just as they had mistreated Mao himself earlier that decade, when Mao was sidelined by Soviet-aligned leaders in the CCP.

Xi and Putin have made their personal connection a feature of the strategic partnership.

Nonetheless, Mao was not advocating a break from Moscow. Xi Zhongxun met very few foreigners for most of his early life, but that changed in the late 1940s, as the Communists swept across China during the country’s civil war. He started having sustained interactions with Soviets as the head of the enormous Northwest Bureau, the party organization that oversaw the Xinjiang region. The Soviet Union helped the CCP project military power there, and in December 1949, after the Communists had won the war and consolidated control over mainland China, Xi successfully proposed to the party’s leaders that Xinjiang and the Soviet Union cooperate to develop resources in the province. A year later, Xi became head of the Northwest Chinese-Soviet Friendship Association.

Right around the time of Xi Jinping’s birth, the CCP undertook its first great purge—an incident closely linked to both the Soviet Union and the Xi family. Gao Gang, a high-level official who was seen as a potential successor to Mao, went too far in his criticisms of other leaders during private conversations. Mao turned on his protégé, and Gao eventually committed suicide. Gao had close ties to Moscow, and although they were not the reason for his purge at the time, Mao came to worry about such connections and concluded that they amounted to treachery. The danger of close relations with a foreign power, even an ally, could not have been lost on Xi Zhongxun, who had served alongside Gao in the northwest and had been persecuted along with him in 1935. Xi nearly fell along with him.

Although Xi Zhongxun’s career was hurt by Gao’s misfortune, he was later put in charge of managing the tens of thousands of Soviet experts sent to help China rebuild after years of war. That was no easy task. As Xi recounted in a 1956 speech, these experts had a hard time acclimating to China, and some of them had “died, been poisoned, been injured, gotten sick, and robbed”—even suicide was a problem. When Mao decided that same year that the Chinese political structure was too “Soviet” and concentrated too much authority in Beijing, Xi was also tasked by the leadership to devise a government-restructuring plan.

SPLITTING UP

In August and September 1959, Xi, then a powerful vice premier, led a delegation to the Soviet Union. The timing was inopportune. In June, the Soviets had reneged on a promise to support China’s nuclear weapons program. Xi was supposed to visit the Soviet Union earlier in the summer of that year, but a CCP plenum in Lushan—where Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai was purged—shattered those plans. Peng had written a letter to Mao criticizing the Great Leap Forward, and Mao not only interpreted Peng’s act as a personal affront but also suspected, incorrectly, that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had put him up to it. Peng and Xi were linked by career ties forged on the battlefield for northwest China. The CCP’s second great purge, just like the first, was both proximate to the Xi family and tied to Mao’s suspicions of Soviet intentions. And once again, Xi only narrowly survived.

Since 1956, Sino-Soviet tensions had been growing gradually behind the scenes, but they broke out publicly during Xi’s trip. On August 25, the same day the Soviet embassy in Beijing invited Xi on his visit, Chinese soldiers killed one Indian soldier and wounded another on the Chinese-Indian border. Although the Chinese concluded that the deaths were accidental, the Soviets were incensed, because they believed that the violence would push the Indians away from the communist bloc and frustrate Khrushchev’s attempts to achieve détente with the West during an upcoming trip to Washington.

Arriving in Moscow two days after the violence on the border, Xi did his best to affirm the alliance. In a private meeting with a Soviet vice premier, he tried to put a positive spin on Mao’s Great Leap Forward, then one year in. He visited the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, a showcase for Soviet technological triumphs, and placed a wreath at the mausoleum of the Soviet Union’s first two leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. After spending a few days in Soviet Ukraine and Czechoslovakia, Xi returned to Moscow, where his delegation toured Lenin’s old office and apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace. He apparently told his son about the moment: in 2010, when Xi Jinping visited Moscow as vice president, he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to take him to the same room. According to a well-connected Russia expert, Xi lingered there, telling Medvedev that this was the cradle of Bolshevism. His father, Xi claimed, had said that Russia and China should always be friends.

Yet in 1959, Xi Zhongxun was in the middle of a crisis in the relationship. On September 9, back in Beijing, Soviet diplomats informed the Chinese about plans to publish a statement in TASS, the state-owned news agency, that took a neutral position on the Chinese-Indian border skirmish. The Chinese were furious and asked the Soviets to change or delay the bulletin. The Soviets not only refused their request but published the statement that evening. Xi left for Beijing the very next day—even though he was supposed to continue leading the delegation until September 18. When Mao and Khrushchev met the following month, Mao complained about the incident, saying, “The TASS announcement made all imperialists happy.”

The dispute was merely the first public crack in the alliance. In the summer of 1960, Khrushchev removed all Soviet experts from China, and Xi was placed in charge of managing their departure. The lesson his son drew from the episode was that the Chinese needed to rely on themselves. At a November 2022 meeting in Bali, according to a former senior U.S. diplomat, Xi Jinping told U.S. President Joe Biden that American technological restrictions would fail, pointing out that the Soviets’ cessation of technological cooperation had not prevented China from developing its own nuclear weapons.

HOT AND COLD

In 1962, Xi Zhongxun’s luck ran out, and he was expelled from power in the CCP’s third great purge. Just like Gao and Peng, he was accused of spying for the Soviet Union, although that was not the primary reason for his punishment. Mao had decided that China, like the Soviet Union before it, was losing its fixation on class struggle, and Xi was caught up in destruction that Mao wrought in reaction. In 1965, while Mao was planning a costly reorganization of Chinese society to fight a possible war against the Soviet Union or the United States, Xi was exiled from Beijing to a mining machinery factory hundreds of miles away in the city of Luoyang. Ironically, that factory had been completed with the help of Soviet experts and had even been described in a local newspaper as a “crystallization” of the “glorious Sino-Soviet friendship.”

All told, Xi Zhongxun spent 16 years in the political wilderness. He had to wait until 1978, two years after Mao’s death, to be rehabilitated. As party boss of the province of Guangdong, Xi warned Americans that they needed to be strong to ward off Soviet aggression. On a trip to the United States in 1980, he impressed his U.S. counterparts with his anti-Soviet views and even made a trip to the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, in Colorado, where he took copious notes. As the Politburo member charged with managing relations with foreign parties that were revolutionary, leftist, or communist in nature, Xi helped lead Beijing’s competition for influence with Moscow throughout the world. He also managed Tibetan affairs, and in the first half of the 1980s, he worried about Soviet influence over the Dalai Lama. But by 1986, as ties thawed, Xi was praising the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and expressing hope for improved relations.

What did Xi Jinping make of this history? In 2013, on his first overseas trip after becoming top leader, he went to Russia, where he spoke warmly to a group of Sinologists about his father’s 1959 visit. The pictures from that journey had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, he said, but his mother kept the gifts from it. Xi explained that although many observers believed that his generation was oriented toward the West, he was raised reading two literatures, Chinese and Russian. After Xi was exiled to the countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the Cultural Revolution, he spent his days reading Russian revolutionary novels, with a favorite being What Is to Be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Xi later claimed to like the character Rakhmetov, the revolutionary fanatic who slept on nails to forge his will. Claiming inspiration, Xi said he wandered through rainstorms and blizzards during his time in the countryside.

But in his 2013 talk with the Russian Sinologists, he did not mention the dismal state of Sino-Soviet relations at the time of his Russian reading. In 1969, the year he was sent to the countryside, China and the Soviet Union were fighting an undeclared border war, and there were even fears of a Soviet nuclear attack. Nor did he tell them about his first job after graduating university, working as a secretary to Geng Biao, secretary-general of the Central Military Commission. Geng viewed Moscow warily. In 1980, at a meeting in Beijing, U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown told Geng that when it came to the two sides’ views on the Soviet Union, “it seems to me, our respective staffs must have written our talking papers together.”

THE IDEOLOGICAL IRRITANT

Given the state of relations among Russia, China, and the United States today, it is hard to imagine that Xi Jinping spent part of his teenage years digging an air-raid shelter in preparation for a possible Soviet attack—or for that matter, that his father had been invited to see NORAD. The fluidity of the Washington-Beijing-Moscow triangle over the last 75 years has led some to hope that Xi might somehow be convinced to rein in his support for Russia. But those wishing for a redux of the Sino-Soviet split are likely to be disappointed.

For one thing, the irritant of ideology is now mostly absent from the relationship. It is true that a common communist ideology served as an extraordinary glue for China and Russia in the years immediately after 1949. But as time went on, ideology actually made it harder for the two countries to manage their differences. Mao had a habit of interpreting tactical differences as deeper ideological disputes. The Soviets, Mao increasingly came to believe, did not support China’s combative position toward the West because they had gone “revisionist.” And among communists, charges of theoretical heresy were explosive. When Mao and Khrushchev fought over the TASS announcement in October 1959, it was Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi’s claim that the Soviets were “time-servers” that especially enraged Khrushchev, as it questioned his communist credentials by painting him as a traitor to the revolutionary enterprise. There is a lot of truth, then, to the historian Lorenz Luthi’s claim that “without the vital role of ideology, neither would the alliance have been established nor would it have collapsed.”

Chinese and Russian elites consider democracy promotion an existential threat.

Moreover, once ideological differences entered the equation, it became hard to talk about anything else, in part because debates over ideology could imply calls for regime change. In 1971, after a relatively productive conversation with two Soviet diplomats, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai exploded when one of them raised the issue of a People’s Daily article that they believed called for the Soviet people to start a revolution. Zhou noted that the Soviet Union was hosting Wang Ming, an early CCP leader who had clashed with Mao and been effectively exiled. “You think that we fear him,” Zhou said. “He is worse than shit!” When one Soviet diplomat asked a Chinese participant to stop yelling, saying “a shout is not an argument,” the Chinese diplomat fired back: “If not for shouting, you will not listen.”

Today’s Russia, however, is distant from the ideals of communism, to put it mildly. Although Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “geopolitical catastrophe,” he has often revealed rather negative views of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In his speech on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he blamed Lenin for creating modern Ukraine and spoke of Stalin’s “dictatorship” and “totalitarian regime.” Xi Jinping, on the other hand, continues to take communism’s legacy seriously. According to an Australian diplomat, Russian diplomats found it odd when, on one occasion, Xi quoted to them the Russian revolutionary novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Although not a dogmatist, Xi cares deeply about ideology and has even blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union in part on Moscow’s failure to ensure that people took Marxism-Leninism seriously.

Despite these important differences, Chinese and Russian elites do share a conservative, statist worldview. They both see attacks on their history as Western plots to delegitimize their regimes and consider democracy promotion an existential threat. They both appreciate traditional values as a bulwark against instability and think the West is tearing itself apart with cultural debates. They both have concluded that authoritarian regimes are better at dealing with modern challenges. They both want their countries to regain a lost status and lost territory. Putin and Xi even spin the same legitimation narrative, claiming their predecessors allowed an intolerable (and Western-influenced) degradation of authority that only their strongman rule could arrest.

MAN TO MAN

Another factor binding Moscow and Beijing today are the warm relations between Putin and Xi. Chinese and Russian media tout a strong personal relationship between the two leaders, although it is hard to say how genuine the supposed friendship is. Putin was trained as a KGB agent, an experience that taught him how to manage people, and Xi would have learned similar tricks from his father, a master of the party’s “united front” efforts to win over skeptics. Putin and Xi are very different people. Putin once broke his arm fighting toughs on the Leningrad subway. Xi has consistently demonstrated extraordinary self-control, as evidenced by his ability to rise to power without anyone knowing what he really thought. Putin enjoys high living, while Xi’s personal style seems to border on ascetic. But at the very least, a functional relationship between Russian and Chinese leaders is something of a historical anomaly.

For Mao, Stalin’s ideological credentials and contributions to Soviet history made him a titan of the communist world. Yet Stalin’s cautious attitude toward the Chinese Revolution in the second half of the 1940s rankled him. So did Stalin’s high-handedness during the negotiations for the alliance treaty between the two countries in 1949 and 1950. After Stalin’s death, Mao felt his own stature far outweighed Khrushchev’s, and the chairman famously treated his Soviet counterpart with disdain.

Mao was impressed by the toughness his protégé Deng Xiaoping displayed during interminable debates over ideology in Moscow in the 1960s, when Deng was Beijing’s most prominent attack dog on the world stage. After Mao’s death, Deng noted that countries close to the Soviet Union had dysfunctional economies, while U.S. allies thrived. By the time Deng became China’s paramount leader, many of his associates hoped for a better relationship with Moscow, but Deng ignored those voices. He and Gorbachev met only once—during the Tiananmen Square protests—and Deng concluded that the Soviet leader was “an idiot.” After the Soviet Union collapsed and Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia, the Chinese were at first skeptical of him, given his role in helping bring about the demise of communism, but relations among top leaders gradually improved. Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, had studied in the Soviet Union and could sing old Sino-Soviet friendship songs.

Warm interpersonal relations are not the main reason Russia and China are so close today, but the past certainly shows how much individual leaders can matter when they have disdain for their counterparts and the countries they lead. And despite their differences, it is not hard to guess why Putin and Xi might get along on a personal level. They are almost the same age, and they are both sons of men who sacrificed for their countries. And perhaps most important, they both had formative experiences about the dangers of political instability. During the Cultural Revolution, Xi and his family were kidnapped and beaten by Mao’s Red Guards, and in 1989, Putin, then a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, watched as East Germany collapsed around him while he could not get guidance from Moscow. The two have much to talk about when they make blini and dumplings together for the television cameras.

TEAMING UP

Greater flexibility in the partnership between Beijing and Moscow today also makes it hardier than it was in the past. Since 1949, the central strategic challenge has been how the two powers, which together make up Eurasia’s authoritarian heartland, can cooperate effectively against the threat of the U.S.-led democratic periphery. Despite the extraordinary strength of Washington’s position in their neighborhoods, Beijing and Moscow have struggled to get this coordination right. Time and time again, they have proved unwilling to sacrifice their interests for each other, driven in part by a suspicion that the other is selling them out and seeking improved relations with the West.

Before the Sino-Soviet split, the alliance between Moscow and Beijing created real problems for the United States and real benefits for the two powers. A calm border between the two countries allowed them to focus on confronting the West and to share military technology. In 1958, when China attacked Taiwan in an attempt to take control of the island, Khrushchev came to Beijing’s aid by publicly warning that he would intervene to protect China if the United States entered the conflict—even though he resented that Beijing had failed to tell him about its plans ahead of time.

Yet the heartland’s relationship with the periphery has always been a mix of coexistence and competition, and Moscow and Beijing have rarely given equal weight to those dueling objectives. During the 1950s and 1960s, China was essentially shut out of the international system while the Soviet Union was largely a status quo power. Mao’s cavalier language threatening nuclear war, along with his use of force on the Chinese-Indian border and against the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait, raised fears in the Kremlin that China would drag the Soviet Union into war. Moscow supported the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, declined to help China during various crises, and hoped for détente with the West—moves that led leaders in Beijing to conclude that Moscow cared more about the West than it did about the communist bloc.

Now, China and Russia have switched positions. Beijing hopes to benefit economically and technologically from continued ties with the United States and Europe, while Moscow sees itself in a purely competitive relationship. The Russians undoubtedly wish that Beijing would provide lethal aid in Ukraine and agree to the Power of Siberia 2, a proposed pipeline that would send natural gas to northeastern China. Unlike during the heyday of the Sino-Soviet alliance, however, Beijing is not technically beholden to sacrifice its economic or reputational interests for Moscow because the two are not formal allies. The Russians have less reason to feel betrayed—and the Chinese have less reason to fear entrapment.

HISTORY LESSONS

As the son of a man so involved in his country’s relationship with Moscow, Xi Jinping knows his history. The past has shown the dangers of both incautious embrace and full-blown enmity. Now, Xi wants to have his cake and eat it, too—move close enough to Russia to create problems for the West, but not so close that China has to decouple entirely. It is not an easy cake to bake, and it may become harder. Washington is trying to make it as difficult as possible by painting Russia and China with the same brush, portraying China (correctly) as facilitating Russia’s war in Ukraine. The conflict has created real economic and reputational costs for Beijing, even as it shies away from some of Moscow’s requests.

Problems exist in any relationship, especially between great powers. What is different from the Cold War is that thorny ideological and personal issues no longer make such challenges so hard to manage. Absent high-impact but low-probability events—such as the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the collapse of the Russian state, or a war over Taiwan—China will probably maneuver within the broad parameters it has already set out for the relationship. Sometimes Beijing will suggest a close relationship with Moscow, and sometimes it will imply a more distant one, modulating its message as the situation demands. The United States, for its part, may be able to shape some of China’s calculus and limit what kinds of help Russia receives. For the foreseeable future, however, Xi’s model for Chinese-Russian relations will likely prove sturdier than in the past because, perhaps counterintuitively, it avoids the danger of intimacy.