Beijing-Moscow Alliance

Image by the author/Kandinsky 2.1. I asked AI to draw a picture: “Russia & China.” This is how AI saw it.

In December 1949, the leader of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, traveled to Moscow to meet with his Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong’s official visit to the USSR was unusually long for reasons beyond his control. The new Sino-Soviet Treaty was not signed until February 14, 1950. Symbolically, this happened on Valentine’s Day, although both leaders did not feel any love for each other at all. Moreover, they were atheists. Chairman Mao had to wait several weeks for a new audience with Stalin to resolve the accumulated political and ideological contradictions. Mao Zedong was furious. “I was so angry that I thumped the table once,” Mao later told the Soviet ambassador.

Instead of welcoming the Chinese leader as a victorious comrade-in-arms in the struggle against imperialism, Stalin gave Mao a lecture on Marxism. It was hard to imagine a greater humiliation for the leader of a young, ambitious communist country (given China’s millennial imperial political tradition).

Seven decades later, the balance of power has changed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s emergence as an economic superpower, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that has the upper hand in relations. Russian elites believe that the future of Russia depends on China. The voices of skeptics warning of the dangers of such an alliance are very rare. When Xi…