The heirs to two of the most violent revolutions in modern history shook hands and took stock of their “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”, at a recent meeting in Moscow.
Many in the west have puzzled over this relationship between Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Some have imagined, for example, that Xi would be a neutral party in Putin’s war in Ukraine, or that he could even be a peacemaker.
But rather than imagining a troubling new partnership has emerged unpredictably after decades of peacetime globalisation, we should look to a longer arc of history to understand Russia and China’s shared confrontation with the world.
