For Beijing, last weekend’s mutiny against Vladimir Putin was a cautionary tale.
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
JUNE 30, 2023, 9:54 AM
Throughout most of the ongoing war in Ukraine, a truism has held across most of the American political spectrum, from left to right, about the second-order effects of the conflict’s outcome. A Ukrainian victory would strengthen the position of the United States vis-à-vis China globally, while a Russian victory would achieve the opposite.
It is easy to see how takes like this gain such a strong foothold. Analysts are quick to apply sweeping, abstract constructs to their assessments of major world events. This time, that has meant a supposed worldwide faceoff between authoritarianism and democracy. Beyond such considerations, many have tried to imagine the Ukraine conflict’s effects on Chinese thinking about Taiwan. Here again, it is supposed that a Ukrainian victory against a vastly larger invading adversary would be deflating for China, lowering the risk of any near-term attempt to take control of Taiwan by force. And a Russian victory, which now seems quite unlikely, would produce the opposite effect.
But while we are busy imagining, there is a more interesting puzzle that has so far received surprisingly little attention involving China, Russia, and Ukraine, and that involves the way Beijing views the recent attempt by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin to drive his private army all the way from the Russian southwestern borderlands to Moscow, to either overthrow President Vladimir Putin, kidnap his top defense officials, or lodge a dramatic patriotic protest, depending on whose interpretation one takes of last weekend’s shocking news from the country. Here, “puzzle” is the only appropriate word, not because we don’t know what really motivated Prigozhin or who, if any, his co-conspirators within the Putin system may have been, but because high-level Chinese thinking on global events of the first rank are utterly shrouded in a black box.
What is publicly known is that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made an unusually strong statement of sympathy toward Russia and Putin early last year, when he spoke of their friendship as having “no limits.” China has been at pains since then to say that this does not mean the two countries have entered into an alliance, and Beijing ever since has been caught in a delicate and even costly balancing act, trying to show support for Moscow in various ways, through public statements and high-level diplomatic exchanges. To avoid incurring high costs in its already troubled relationship with Washington, this has required Beijing to avoid the least appearance of providing lethal weapons to Putin’s flagging army. And to avoid serious damage to relations with Europe, China has had to maintain the pose that it is not so much interested in a Russian victory as it is in some sort of scarcely defined just and peaceful outcome. But European countries that feel threatened by Putin’s recklessness and exasperated by the cost of the conflict seem less and less inclined to believe in China’s good offices.
What, though, do the Chinese themselves think of the latest events out of Russia? If Beijing ever placed any stock in the idea that Russia and China were together defending the virtues of authoritarianism against an unending onslaught of what is fancied as Western liberalism and democracy, any such illusions by now must be cold and six feet under. There is no longer any possible way to understand or interpret Putinism that could make China comfortable with a close ideological pairing or even comparison.
Much has been made of China’s growing authoritarianism under Xi, but it is hard to imagine that Xi looks upon the degraded spectacle of Russia with anything less than quiet contempt. Xi has famously required members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to study and derive lessons from the demise of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. His own synoptic assessment of how that erstwhile superpower collapsed is that it lost its nerve, meaning it didn’t have the guts to fight to defend and sustain its own system. Putin clearly has the will to keep fighting for power, but in the view of Xi, can Putin be said to have a system worth fighting for? China’s own history from the mid-20th century until now says otherwise.
One of the foundational principles of Mao Zedong, whose victory against Nationalists in a long civil war led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, was that the country’s military must at all times remain under the clear and unambiguous control and at the service of the CCP. Every leader since Mao has clung to this line, and none more so than Xi, who has doubled down.
But China’s history holds even older reasons to feel repelled by Russia’s unrelenting decay under Putin. For decades prior to the CCP victory in 1949, the country was constantly riven by warlordism. Here is where the spectacle of today’s Russia comes most sharply into critical focus. As if pursuing history in reverse, Putin has increasingly relied on warlords and militias to shore up his power and pursue strategic goals.
A murderous earlier round of this involved Chechnya at the turn of the century, when Putin relied on forces loyal to Akhmad Kadyrov to put down a separatist rebellion there. Last year in Ukraine, Putin went even beyond doubling down on that strategy, leaning heavily on Prigozhin’s paramilitary Wagner Group in order to conquer and reabsorb into Russia not just any component of the former Soviet Union, but the largest country in Europe by territory.
He might have heeded Machiavelli, who wrote: “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline.” That’s reaching back to the 16th century, though, which China, with its own deep traditions of statecraft, would probably view as unnecessary, especially because its own history of the last century is so rich in cautionary examples.
This helps explain why Beijing was silent for so long after Prigozhin’s short-lived insurrection, or whatever it was, began. It was embarrassing, and for the duration, no one there could have wanted to be associated too closely with Russia. When Beijing finally began to comment, it was to merely express the bland wish that its neighbor could somehow preserve its national stability.
None of this should suggest that China is going to wash its hands of Russia or of Putin. How could it? They are nuclear-armed neighbors linked by many things, from Russia’s growing dependence on China as a buyer of its hydrocarbons, to the flow of Chinese economic migrants into the lightly populated borderlands of the Russian far east.
There is no doubting that China once strongly modeled itself after the Soviet Union. Even Mao’s personalized rule and many attempts by Russia to define and police political orthodoxy have not changed that. What is gone, though, at least as long as Putin remains in power, is any thought that the two countries still share any substantive ideology. Even from Beijing, the criminalized authoritarianism of Putin must look cringeworthy. Distrust the smiles. Far from an ally, Russia increasingly stands out as a problem.
Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Twitter: @hofrench
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