Putin at the court of the Celestial Emperor

Relations between the Russian and the Chinese empires have, from their outset, been fraught with misunderstanding. As the Mongol and Tatar empires crumbled towards the end of the 16th century, Russian Cossacks – bands of free peasant soldiers analogous to Spanish Conquistadors – began to push eastwards towards the northern borders of Manchuria. In 1618 the Muscovite Tsar Mikhail Romanov put out tentative approaches towards its great southern neighbour, despatching the Cossack Ivashko Petlin of Tobolsk to the court of Peking as Russia’s first emissary. Ming officials assumed that Petlin was a tribute-bringer from a hitherto unknown pale-skinned northern tribe. The following year Petlin reported to the Kremlin of the unimaginable size of the Chinese Emperor’s palace and the length of the Great Wall. He was not believed.

In 1670 the Manchus were forced to take notice of their upstart neighbours when Cossacks established an ostrog, or fort, at Albazin on the Amur River, the Chinese empire’s only natural northern boundary. The Cossacks’ leader, somewhat underestimating his opponent’s strength, tactlessly wrote to the Chinese emperor suggesting he accept the suzerainty of the Tsar. This message, in Latin, was judged by puzzled Manchu court translators to be a grammatical error.

It took some years for the deep mind of Peking’s bureaucracy to come up with a response, but in 1683 a punitive Manchu force of 3,000 was eventually sent north to demolish the upstart ostrog. It was barely a skirmishing party by Chinese standards – the Ming had maintained a permanent garrison of one million men guarding the Great Wall. Nevertheless after three years and two sieges the Cossacks were finally forced out of the Amur River basin, Siberia’s natural link to the Pacific. The Russians were not to return to the Amur until the middle of the 19^th century.

Asia’s two great land empires needed to define a commonly-agreed border. Peter the Great sent his childhood friend Fyodor Golovin to negotiate a lasting peace. A treaty was drawn up with the help of two Jesuits fluent in Chinese and was signed in the frontier town of Nerchinsk in 1689. Monumental stones carved in Latin, Manchu, Chinese and Russian would mark the mutually agreed key border points. Crucially for the Russians, the Chinese had agreed to trade – although only at a single spot, the tiny settlement of Kiakhta on the steppes of northern Mongolia.

‘The mutual trade at Kiakhta does not benefit China,’ read the Manchu preamble, which the Jesuits diplomatically left out of their translation. ‘But because the Great Emperor loves all human beings he sympathises with your little people who are poor and miserable, and because your Senate has appealed to His Celestial Majesty He has agreed to approve of the petition.’ But for all the Manchus’ high-handed bluster it was the first treaty ever to be signed by China which treated a foreign power as an equal rather than as a vassal.

From these rocky beginnings was born a relationship that has never been defined by genuine friendship or ideological unity, but by recurring patterns of dominance, asymmetric dependency, and rivalry, latterly dressed up in the language of brotherhood. Throughout the 19th century – the Century of Humiliation, in Chinese historiography – Imperial Russia eagerly took bites out of Manchuria and made the Amur a Russian river. The great new port of Vladivostok, connected to Europe by a railway from 1903, was built on the site of an ancient Chinese settlement known as Yongmingcheng, or ‘City of Eternal Light.’ The new Russian name – ‘Lord of the East’ – was blunter.

The last Chinese Emperor was deposed in 1911 by Sun Yat-sen, a young revolutionary firebrand. In 1923 the newly-hatched Bolshevik government, via the Communist International, entered the chaotic world of warlord kingdoms by backing Sun’s Kuomintang. Sun declared that Lenin was a ‘great man’ and indicated that he wished to follow the same path, sending young officers and party cadres to study the Red Army. But it was only in 1949 that Mao Zedong turned China red, with distinctly halfhearted support from the USSR. Stalin had a long history of underestimating or actively working against Mao. In the 1920s he backed Chiang Kai-shek over the Chinese Communists, with catastrophic results for the CCP in 1927. Throughout the civil war he remained deeply sceptical of Mao’s peasant-based revolution, which didn’t fit orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory of urban proletarian revolt. As late as 1945, Stalin signed a friendship treaty with the Nationalist government and advised the CCP to enter a coalition with Chiang rather than push for outright victory. In short, Stalin’s support for Mao in 1949 was ambivalent, shaped by ideological suspicion, geopolitical calculation, and personal mistrust.

For a while, communist ideologues in Moscow and Beijing constructed a fiction of unity. Yet the Soviet Union exploited its asymmetric power relations with China to its own advantage until ideological rivalries made a breakdown in relations inevitable, leading to the Sino-Soviet split in 1963 and even a brief border war. Through most of the Cold War the communist world was divided, with the People’s Republic of China and the USSR pursuing separate strategies for exporting their influence, often violently, through the Third World.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment when China became wealthier, more technologically sophisticated and geopolitically more powerful than its one-time Russian big brother. But since the beginning of this century the leaders of China and Russia have been united by a common rival, and now, in some senses, a common enemy, in the form of the liberal world order. In 2022, just before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signed a ‘Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development’ – known informally as the ‘no-limits partnership.’ Limits, however, quickly appeared as Beijing refused to send military aid to Moscow and many major Chinese banks and companies pulled out of Russia to comply with US sanctions.

‘Today China and Russia present a performative anti-Western unity, although Moscow is now the subordinate partner,’ write Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner in their forthcoming book Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations. ‘Florid proclamations of friendship are undoubtedly a façade behind which historic rivalries persist.’ As trade relations with the West collapse, Russia has doubled its trade with China – but China still does six times more business with the US and EU. China is happy to import cheap Russian oil and gas, but is in no hurry to sign a deal to build Power of Siberia-2, a 2600 kilometre pipeline linking Yamal gas fields to China that Putin needs to replace lost Western markets.

‘Neither China nor Russia has such a fateful relationship to any other land on earth,’ write Urbansky and Wagner. But increasingly it is the Russians who are once again reverting to historical type as humble petitioners at the court of a Celestial Emperor.