Question: Which of these characterizations of Russian president Vladimir Putin best captures the prevailing sentiment today in China?

1. Vladimir Putin is an evil imperialist villain engaged in military adventurism in Eastern Europe who must be contained.
2. Vladimir Putin is a great national hero who is rightfully using Russia's military might to reclaim lost territory stolen from it by an imperialist and treacherous West.

Certainly, it is the “evil villain” of answer no. 1 that most accurately captures the prevailing view in much of the Western media as a United States–led coalition has struggled to contain Putin's expansionist and revisionist activities in Georgia and the Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. However, within China, the “hero” characterization in answer no. 2 would likely win hands down as Russia's strongman is often referred to as “Putin the Great.” Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal has noted, books about the former KGB chief have been known to “fly off the bookshelves” and frequently occupy China's bestseller lists.1

In fact, the hero worship of Vladimir Putin is fully consistent with a Chinese narrative in which the West, led by an imperialist United States, has systematically carved up the world at the expense of victim nations like Russia and China. In this narrative, Russia lost much of the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union only after Mikhail Gorbachev was “tricked” by Ronald Reagan. Now, it is only right and just that Putin the Great use Russia's growing military might to reclaim its lost territories.

Fig. 29.1. Is this the new axis of authoritarian evil? Here, China's president Xi Jinping and Russia's new “czar” Vladimir Putin strengthen ties. (Photograph by Kommersant Photo. Used with permission from Getty Images.)

Of course, the beauty of this Putin narrative is that it gives China permission to engage in precisely the same kind of coercive expansionism as Russia. The clear analogy: Because China was carved up during its own century of humiliation (including—and ironically—by Czarist Russia), it is also just that, as China grows its military might, it now exercise its historical right to recover the lands that were unfairly taken from it.

Within the context of our “will there be war” question, this is an obviously disturbing set of parallel narratives as they clearly sanction aggression in the name of justice. However, embedded in these narratives, is this even more disturbing possibility, namely: China and Russia might find common cause in their past history of victimhood and current status as the two most powerful authoritarian states in the world—and through such common cause, they may link together in a strategic military alliance arrayed against the United States and its democratic allies.

In thinking about the far-ranging implications of any such renewed Chinese-Russian military axis, it is well worth remembering this: While Mother Russia has been stripped of former Socialist Republics in the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Western Republics and no longer holds sway over client states like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, Russia nonetheless remains by far the largest country on the planet. In fact, the Russia landmass is almost double that of either China or the United States.

Within its ample borders, Russia is also blessed with the world's largest oil reserves, the second-largest coal reserves, 40 percent of the world's natural gas, one fifth of its timber, and an abundance of other minerals and metals such as aluminum, copper, lead, platinum, and tin.2 On this basis alone, it would seem to make sense for the “energy superpower” Russia to throw its lot in with the world's undisputed factory floor of China. Such a convenient marriage of resources and manufacturing capacity is, however, hardly the only reason for a possible China-Russia alliance.

Fig. 29.2. Chinese and Russian warships on joint maneuvers in the East China Sea practicing antisubmarine warfare. (Photograph used with permission from Reuters.)

On the political front, Russia shares with China a common communist past as well as a current authoritarian form of government—Russia is a democracy in name only. On the military front, Russia is also China's leading supplier of highly advanced weapons systems; and any long-term marriage between Russian military technology and China's vast military forces offers the prospect of a pair of foes that, in an alliance, may have both “quantity” and “quality” on their side.

While all these economic, political, and military ties would seem to make China and Russia natural allies, it must also be noted that there are equally compelling reasons why Russia over the longer term might instead choose to throw its lot in with the United States and its allies in a “balancing coalition” that would seek to contain China's rise. Perhaps the biggest reason for this possibility brings us back to one of the key motivators in Professor John Mearsheimer's theory of great-power politics, namely, fear.

Russia's fear of China begins with the fact that it shares the longest contiguous border of any in the world with a China that has a population almost ten times larger. Moreover, before the fall of the Soviet Union, China's Gross Domestic Product was only about one-third the size of Russia's. Today, however, China's heavily muscled economic engine is over four times larger.

Faced with these stark demographic and economic realities, many Russians now fear that Chinese immigration into Russia's Far East territories—both legal and illegal—will steadily erode Russia's hold on its own country.3 A companion concern is that China's voracious appetite for Russian natural resources will eventually turn Russia into a Chinese “colony” in much the same way China has come to dominate most of Africa, parts of Latin America, and portions of Australia and Canada. Indeed, some in Russia even fear that an increasingly powerful China will eventually seek to take the riches of Siberia by coercion or force⁴ under the flag of past Czarist territorial grabs from China—or even attempt to reclaim the port of Vladivostok under the banner of the unequal Treaty of Aigun that China was forced to sign in 1858 when it originally surrendered this key port.

From this perspective, the far better long-term strategy of Russia would be to join the United States balancing coalition. In fact, such an outcome would likely offer the world a far more stable and peaceful equilibrium than a Chinese-Russian axis that marries Russian technology and natural resources with the world's largest industrial base, military forces, and population.

The logic of such a US-led balancing coalition notwithstanding, a post-Crimea and adventurist Russia now appears to be moving in exactly the opposite direction—and right back into China's welcoming arms. This is certainly not a happy prospect for a world yearning for peace based on democracy and freedom, the rule of law, status-quo borders, and the nonviolent resolution of any territorial or maritime disputes through the institutions and mechanisms of international law.