Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping was likely pondering the benefits of his intimate relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Then his Russian counterpart's focus was on reining in American power, straining American allies in Europe and straining a young democracy next door in Kyiv, things that often cost China nothing.

Perhaps Putin would have paved the way for the Chinese president to achieve his ultimate foreign-policy goal: to claim Taiwan.

However, the dangers of China's partnership with Russia have become apparent since the war broke out, and a network of US alliances collectively imposed devastating sanctions on Russia.

What Beijing has tried to do is what it has always done, namely playing on all sides and pretending to be neutral, but it has found itself alienated from the world's great powers.

But China's contradictions should not be surprising. Even since the old days of the Communist Party a century ago, Beijing's relationship with Moscow was both promising and endangered, just as it is today.

The improvement in Sino-Russian relations has been worrying security experts in Washington that the United States will need to compete with a sinful alliance of two of the world's most powerful authoritarian states bent on reshaping the global order in their favour.

Perhaps their league together represents a major strategic challenge;

Confronting one adversary after another is tough enough, but as Putin's invasion of Ukraine tragically shows, a more or less coordinated double assault on American global power may be more complex.

Beijing and Moscow may help each other evade US sanctions, thus stripping Washington of its influence. The anti-American possibilities here are endless.

But the alliance of the Chinese and the Russians was never a rule of thumb. China and Russia missed their chance to unite together against the United States in the Cold War, as ideological struggles and personal rivalry led them to self-destruction.

Today, too, Russian and Chinese interests do not align, in fact, it is very likely that the two are on their way to a different future.

What is worse is that China's relations with Russia have become a test case for what role Beijing's leaders want to play in the world. tacitly - in his defunct and anachronistic quest to re-create the Soviet empire, he is making the Chinese president look like just another dictator in the making.

The issue today is how Beijing manages its relationship with Moscow, something that will in turn help it define its great power status.

China between Washington and Moscow

China's place in the world in recent decades has been largely determined by its relationship with the United States of America, but Russia is, in many respects, decisive for its role in the course of modern China, both for good and for bad.

Relations between the two communist regimes were ominous since their inception, specifically since Mao Zedong in December 1949 - that is, just two months after he established the People's Republic that followed the Chinese Civil War - boarded an armored train car to meet Joseph Stalin in Russia.

Mao arrived, begging for help, impoverished by the incomparable benefactor of the communist world. The Chinese leader was the scion of a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged country with a deep lack of money, technology, and international support. The Russian state was pivotal to the survival of his regime.

Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong

When the two leaders met, Mao put his questions to Stalin about just about everything, from concluding an alliance treaty, to requesting material and military assistance, to helping to edit his writings.

Encouraged, but inconspicuous, Stalin lodged Mao in a country house outside Moscow, where the harsh bargaining continued for weeks.

Mao eventually obtained a pact of friendship signed in February 1950, but he obtained it on humiliating terms that recalled - among other things - the memory of the "unfair treaties" imposed by the imperialist powers on China in the nineteenth century.

However, the Russians provided a huge amount of aid, "more aid than any similar program undertaken by any country anywhere else, including the American Marshall Plan for Europe," in the words of historian "Odd Arne Westad" in his book "The Cold War" A global history.

Soviet advisors trained Chinese military officers and helped plan Chinese cities.

Moscow's fervor increased after Stalin's death. Nikita Khrushchev, the heir to the Russian dictator, believed that China was the key to the absolute victory of communism over the West.

However, relations between the two powers began to disintegrate in the late 1950s, and Mao became dissatisfied with his position as a follower in the communist hierarchy, and separated from Moscow on the level of economic and foreign policies.

For Mao, the Soviets suffered from "right-wing thinking".

The border skirmishes between the two countries in 1969 came close to reaching an all-out war between them.

The Russians then threatened to use nuclear weapons, and Mao feared that they would indeed do so.

Tensions were resolved through negotiations, but the intense conflict between Moscow and Beijing prompted Mao to make a decision that changed the course of history: his meeting with US President Richard Nixon in 1972 and his reconciliation with China's supposed imperial executioner.

Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon

But in recent years, history has been turned upside down again, as the bonds of Sino-Russian relations have strengthened in conjunction with the increase in tensions between Beijing and Washington.

President Xi has referred to Putin as his "best friend," and the two men stressed after their last meeting in February ahead of the Beijing Olympics that the friendship between the two countries "has no end."

There are already a lot of factors that bring the two countries together, for example, the two countries complement each other economically, Russia is a supplier of raw materials of great importance to China, while Russia needs investment from China and technically high-quality products.

Their trade grew 36% last year alone, reaching $146 billion, and they have combined projects such as developing a commercial aircraft to rival Boeing and Airbus.

However, "anti-Americanism" remains the secret ingredient in this new friendship, as Alexander Gabov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Center in Moscow told me, with Putin and Xi sharing a common goal of pushing American influence away from their borders and unraveling the bonds of American alliances that lie next to them. .

Putin worries that, step by step, NATO is creeping closer to Russia, and Xi also insists that he is trapped in a network of American partners across Asia.

Thus, in this effort towards reshaping the global geo-strategic map, the joint effort to increase pressure on the United States of America in Europe and Asia may curb Washington's efforts and raise doubts about American global commitments.

The more the two countries can trade and invest with each other, the less they will be exposed to economic sanctions imposed by the United States.

And if they used their national currencies in that business, they might get rid of the mighty dollar.

However, there is only a handful of reasons to suspect that any of this might happen.

Dissonances between Russia and China

Worse and most importantly, the two countries are going in opposite directions.

As Putin sits on the throne of a corroding authority that lacks the economic vitality needed to maintain its political influence, he can therefore take upon himself the task of throwing a missile at the world order led by the United States of America.

By contrast, China sees itself as a rising power, and its rise is contingent (at least for now) on the world order itself.

Xi, like Putin, wants to overturn the system, but he can't stand the turmoil too much, and the Chinese economy is so intertwined with the rest of the world that any turmoil by President Xi could bounce back in his face, exploding in it.

“The Chinese want to get as much advantage as they can from participating in the global economy and supply chains,” Gboev said, adding that “characterizing what a superpower actually means (for China) is very pragmatic, far from emotional, and more dreamy over Putin's long-term obsession with dominating Ukraine."

The fact is that with the growing power of China, the gap in the interests of the two countries may widen, as “Xi wants to actually dominate the Russian economy through technology, and by integrating Russia into the [Pax Sinica] world] as a smaller partner, and despite his eagerness to show With official respect for its sovereignty, it wants to bring Moscow's economy and foreign policy more in line with China's foreign policy goals," says Gyaboev.

And while China up to this point “is not in a position to force Russia to do that, 10 or 15 years from now, that would be very possible, and that’s where the danger is for Russia.”

In this sense, the friendship between Putin and Xi may be a dangerous friendship for each other, as it is dangerous for Washington, and this may have become clear to them with the development of events in Ukraine.

Their partnership paid off in some respects, with Putin enjoying valuable diplomatic support from Xi.

From Beijing's perspective, Russia is doing its best to block democracy.

But Beijing drew a line between Putin's security concerns, which it described as "legitimate", and his war, which it did not condemn, but at the same time did not clearly support it. China abstained from a vote in the United Nations Security Council on a measure denying the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The reason for this is partly ideology. China advocates that international relations be based on the principle of "non-interference" in other countries' affairs, and while there is no greater form of predatory interference in other countries' affairs, Putin's aggression puts Xi in a clumsy position. diplomatically.

In their comments on Ukraine, Chinese officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of respecting state sovereignty.

Most importantly, China's national interests will determine how much support Xi can provide Russia.

For example, although Beijing has opposed sanctions against Russia, and may find ways to help Putin avoid them, China is too integrated into the global economy to risk being sanctioned itself.

Following the announcement of the sanctions, Chinese state banks began to limit purchases of credit for Russian goods, while the Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank suspended its Russia-related activities.

“Most likely, China will support Russia financially and through trade as much as any Western sanction would allow,” chief Asian economist Mark Williams wrote at the Center for Capital Economics in a February report.

"Neither big business nor the government will risk further disruption in relations with the West."

China first

Here lies the girth.

China's priority, in the end, is always China.

Beijing has thus far stressed that its friendship with Moscow is "very solid", and that it will help Putin (or anyone else, for that matter) as long as this does not harm its agenda.

This means that the marriage between Xi and Putin may remain a form of marriage that suits both parties only.

It should be noted that both can still annoy the United States and its friends, but they will struggle to build a true US-Japan or Britain-style alliance, as the parties in those partnerships are willing to coordinate action and policies.

Putin has done Xi a great service, revealing what might happen if China starts its own war. Putin's invasion made clear that, contrary to what Beijing's leaders seem to believe, the pattern of American alliances is still alive.

The Chinese Communist Party, obsessed with domestic stability, may look with alarm at sanctions against Russia and calculate the cost of incurring similar ones.

Many commentators have predicted that the Ukraine crisis would presage a similar Chinese military attack on Taiwan, but so far the opposite has happened.

So, the question now is how will President Xi respond to all these shifts?

The Ukrainian government has directly appealed to China to use its influence with Putin to stop these hostilities.

As far as we know, Beijing has remained loose from its commitment to this.

Therefore, Xi faces a heavy choice, where he can seize this opportunity to be the global good man and intervene on Ukraine's behalf in that crisis, which would mitigate China's confrontation with the United States on this issue, and thus position his government as a constructive player in the affairs Or he could also remain in his current support for Putin, pursuing his long-term goal of untangling American power.

Perhaps the most lasting consequence of Putin's war in Ukraine will be to determine the nature of China's role in the world.

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This article was translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily represent the Meydan website.

Translation: Karim Mohamed.