Xi and Putin, Mao and Stalin

China and Russia are closer now than they have ever been, as this month’s cover article explored. The latest meeting of their two leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, was held on December 30, 2022. During that video call, Xi “expressed his pleasure in meeting President Putin virtually at the year-end, which he said has become a good tradition between them,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said. According to the ministry, Xi added, “In the first 11 months of this year, two-way trade volume reached a record high. Investment cooperation has been improved and integrated. Energy cooperation continues to serve as an anchor. And cooperation projects in key areas are moving forward steadily.”

In other words, during a year in which Moscow launched an unprovoked and devastating attack on Ukrainian cities and towns, making it responsible for thousands of civilians and military deaths, China’s president proudly touted a “record high” trade volume and growing investment and cooperation projects with Russia.

Even from within China, and at substantial risk to themselves, people have rejected Russia's war on Ukraine and directly urged China’s leadership to do the same. A few days after Russia attacked Ukraine, five respected Chinese historians published an open letter “denouncing Russia’s action on its neighbor and calling for peace,” the Guardian reported late last February.

One of those historians, Xu Guoqi, is quoted as saying, “Is it worth [it] for China to undermine its own credibility to defend the indefensible? I’m afraid they were fooled by Putin.”

So why is Xi Jinping risking his relationship with much of the global community – including China's biggest customer, the United States – in favor of nurturing a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin?

In reviewing today’s China-Russia relationship, it is instructional to take a deeper dive into the original relationship between the Soviet Union and the newly formed People’s Republic of China in the late 1940s and ‘50s. The relationship broke up in the 1960s and did not renew itself until the late 1980s. Are there lessons to be learned from China-Soviet ties for the present, and the future, of the China-Russia relationship?

In 1949, when Mao Zedong went to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin, it was not only a meeting of two committed communists; it was also a meeting of two recent allies in the war against Germany, Japan, and the Axis powers. But during that war, Stalin had led his nation.  Mao, on the other hand, had had to join forces with the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, against whom he had been fighting for years, in order to defeat Japan. When the two met, it was not a meeting of equals. Stalin had the distinct advantage. But he hadn't been born with it.

Stalin came from humble beginnings in the Soviet republic of Georgia. His father was a cobbler and an alcoholic; his mother a laundress. Yet by the end of his life, Stalin probably “exercised greater political power than any other figure in history,” as Britannica put it. That power was derived from a ruthlessness that killed tens of millions of Soviet citizens.

Mao, on the other hand, came from a wealthy, land-owning family in rural China. Ultimately pursuing revolution, Mao did indeed become battle-hardened over the course of continuing warfare against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. But he initially was born into privilege, and Chinese sources who knew him said he continued to “lord it over” those beneath him.

In conversation with Stalin, however, Mao was clearly the supplicant – a position that must have been difficult for him. In their meeting in Moscow on December 16, 1949, two-and-a-half months after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 of that year, Mao was questioned by Stalin on the progress and provisions that the nascent new regime had and required. In contrast, Mao asked Stalin what the Soviet leader could provide him, as the record of their translated conversation shows.

Mao’s requests of Stalin were exhaustive. He asked for a credit line of $300 million, to which Stalin replied, “This can be done.”

Mao went on to ask Stalin for help in creating air transportation routes, a naval force, and for help to conquer Taiwan (then often referred to as Formosa), where Chiang’s routed Nationalist forces had taken refuge. Stalin agreed to it all, with a caveat on the Taiwan question.

“Some of our generals have been voicing opinions that we should request assistance from the Soviet Union, which could send volunteer pilots or secret military detachments to speed up the conquest of Formosa,” Mao said.

Stalin replied, “Assistance has not been ruled out, though one ought to consider the form of such assistance. What is most important here is not to give Americans a pretext to intervene. With regard to headquarters staff and instructors we can give them to you anytime.”

In this exchange, Stalin showed his understanding of international issues to be far more sophisticated than that of Mao Zedong. After all, Stalin had been the face and force of the Soviet Union during World War II, while Mao had been sidelined in favor of Chiang as the representative of China during the war.

Stalin’s superior experience and talent for manipulation successfully brought him a partner in arms in China. His difficult but necessary relationship with the Allied powers during the war gave him an understanding of Western thought and ideas, and he used that to his advantage by co-opting China into his sphere, thus removing it from the grasp of Western powers for decades to come.

Efforts to maintain the relationship between the two nations past Stalin’s death ultimately failed. The Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s is generally attributed to the ideological and doctrinal differences that Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev increasingly faced following Stalin’s death in 1953, and Khrushchev’s subsequent rise to power. But Chinese sources who lived through the demise of the Chinese-Soviet relationship in the late 1950s and ‘60s often say that the relationship failed at the local level as much if not more than it fell apart in the political halls of power in Moscow and Beijing.

Chinese inevitably and invariably put the blame on the Soviets. According to the Chinese side, the thousands of engineers and technicians who went to China to help it modernize were overbearing, boorish, and arrogant. The Soviets implied that they were smarter than and superior to the technologically starved Chinese, these sources say, and treated the Chinese as backward and incompetent peasants.

Today, some say the situation is reversed: Putin is the supplicant, and Xi is the magnanimous partner who bothers to give Putin much more than just the time of day, despite the commonsense case against it.

Like Stalin before him, however, the case can be made that Putin used his much broader experience with the West to compromise Xi Jinping and to leverage both China’s buying power as well as its tacit support for the invasion of a sovereign nation, which goes against China’s longstanding foreign policy precepts. Putin knew that deep sanctions would follow his invasion of Ukraine, and he knew that Russian oil would be a primary target of those sanctions. China, right next door, might not be paying top dollar for that oil, but even at discount prices, it’s enough to keep Putin going.

Putin knew the Western sanctions would drive him to the thirsty Chinese market, and he needed a friend when he came knocking. As can be seen with Stalin and Mao, however, such an unequal friendship is not a solid foundation for building a lasting relationship.