Why Xi secretly hates and fears Russia – and may be about to betray Putin

Both men want the democracies to fall into chaos and disarray. They see the international order led by the West as presumptuous, weak and ripe for overthrow. But behind the mutual professions of esteem lie deep fissures of history, race and power, writes China expert Michael Sheridan

‘The two autocrats have boasted of their alliance for more than two years now’ (Getty Images)

The bear and the dragon can never be friends. That is a lesson Xi Jinping heard at a young age. And it explains why the Chinese leader’s “no limits” partnership with Vladimir Putin may turn into a limitless liability – for the Kremlin.

While researching a new biography of Xi, I came across a startling declassified US document. It reveals that the man who was Xi’s mentor in his first job, at the heart of China’s military, was fiercely anti-Russian. Never trust Moscow, he told his staff.

Today, it all looks fine. The two autocrats have boasted of their alliance for more than two years now. It’s clear that Putin gave his “friend” a tip that he was about to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, Xi has stood alongside him, talking up peace but sending Russia weapons technology in exchange for oil and gas.

For sure, both men want the democracies to fall into chaos and disarray. They see the international order led by the West as presumptuous, weak and ripe for overthrow.

But behind the mutual professions of esteem lie deep fissures of history, race and power. We know about Putin’s formative years in the Soviet KGB. But few people know that Xi Jinping grew up learning to hate and fear the Soviet Union.

The document is a White House cable detailing how Xi’s mentor, the Chinese defence chief Geng Biao, gave the Americans “the fullest account we have received to date … of the Sino-Soviet split”.

Xi was a junior private secretary – or mishu – to him at the time. It was his first job after graduation. He got it thanks to family networking (his father was an old comrade). It was a privileged role, handling secret papers, bag-carrying and acting as his master’s eyes and ears.

Xi earned a tiny salary but won trusted access to power. He saw and heard everything during a radical shift in Chinese strategy towards the West. It opened the door for China’s incredible economic growth, which made it a great world power. But that is just what the Russians didn’t want.

The US cable tells how Xi’s boss went to the White House on 28 May 1980, met president Jimmy Carter and then sat down to lunch with the secretary of state, Edmund Muskie.

Geng explained to him that China’s only friend in the Kremlin had been Stalin. But after his death, the Soviets demanded influence over most of northern China. They wanted to station troops on Chinese soil, to command a joint fleet and install long-range communications.

Worst of all, said Geng, the Russians wanted to keep China as a poor and backward granary for the socialist bloc. They said there was no need for industries because the Soviet Union would give them any machinery they needed. His country, “would always have been an agricultural society and would have remained forever a Soviet satellite.”

We know the account is accurate because Muskie wrote it up himself.

It is no exaggeration to say that the history of the world would have been different if the Chinese had accepted this fraternal advice. But they did not – and Xi is the inheritor of its gigantic economic and military power today.

As the young Xi sat in on meetings, he heard his superiors air old grievances. Maps on the walls showed the lands torn away from China by a 19th-century treaty which handed the regions beyond the Black Dragon River to the Czar. Today, they are Russia’s Pacific provinces with the vital port of Vladivostok.

The British returned Hong Kong to China but there is not the slightest chance of Putin or any other Russian leader reversing what the Chinese still call an “unequal treaty”.

And Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is so blatant a crime against international law that it strikes at China’s core principle of sovereignty. After all, Beijing formally recognises Ukraine as a nation and the Zelensky government as its legitimate ruler. Putin doesn’t.

The glaring contradiction can’t last for long. It seems that China helped to deter Putin from using tactical nuclear weapons early in the war. Its “no-limits” aid is strictly limited by sanctions. Ironically, Russia is becoming an economic satellite of China.

Then there is that legacy of suspicion. Xi’s handpicked foreign minister, Qin Gang, was purged in a sex-and-spying scandal after a tip-off from Moscow that he had been compromised by the CIA. Everybody is spying on everybody else.

Is Xi Jinping, who came of age hearing that Russia was a barbarous bully, about to throw away decades of peaceful prosperity by gambling all on Putin’s war? I don’t think so.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of The Red Emperor published by Headline Press at £25