Vladimir Putin’s close bond with Xi Jinping is built on shifting sands
It was the Chinese President’s 11th visit to Russia – by far the most he has visited any other country – and it cemented a relationship that has repeatedly been described as “unshakeable”.
Tell that to Mr Cui, a retired driver from Beijing, as he stood contemplating Russian militarism in the village of Aihui on the Chinese side of the two countries’ border.
He had just visited a museum dedicated to centuries of Russian expansion across the Far East, culminating in a notorious massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians on the banks of the nearby Amur river in 1900.
“It makes me angry,” Cui, 64, said. “This really taught me something new.”
He knew that Russia and China had once been enemies, before they became friends, but he said he had never known Russia had seized and occupied so much Chinese territory over the years.
“It’s just like Ukraine now,” he said. “What happened here 100 years ago is happening there now.”
Xi and the Russian President’s love-in is mutual, heartfelt and politically necessary. Back in 2019, Xi described Putin as “my closest foreign colleague and my best bosom friend”. He showed his feelings by refusing to criticise Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Putin paid Xi back with cheap oil and steadfast moral support in China’s careful construction of a new alliance of anti-American countries, even though it will almost certainly set in stone Russia’s own eclipse as the world’s second superpower.
But as the museum, the Aihui History Exhibition Hall, suggests, the friendship lies on shaky emotional foundations.
The museum’s rooms and waxwork tableaux show brave defenders trying to stave off Cossack hordes, and dignified Chinese officials being forced to sign away tracts of land to hard-faced barbarians with straw-coloured hair.
The climactic display is a panorama, along with life-size models, illustrating the great massacre of 1900 when, in the middle of China’s Boxer Rebellion, Russian troops launched a pogrom against Chinese living on the north side of the river. As men, women and children fled, they were bayoneted, forced into the river and shot or drowned.
The Russians then crossed the river, inflicting more atrocities as they burned Aihui town itself. The waxwork figures are portrayed holding their dead, and with sound effects of their screams. The Chinese general graphically kills himself in front of the invaders.
The museum is free, but before entering, visitors must show their passports. It is too graphic – or insulting – for Russians to be allowed to enter, even though many of the Chinese exhibit labels are translated into Russian.
Outside the museum, past where Mr Cui was talking, flows the river, known in Russia as the Amur and as the Heilongjiang or Black Dragon river in Chinese. It is now firmly settled as the frontier, but that settlement was not easy.
After the wars of the 19th century, there were overlapping civil wars in both countries. They both fought the Japanese, but then there was a strange and little-reported conflict between them during the Cultural Revolution, in 1969. Chairman Mao had fallen out with the “revisionist” Soviet Union version of communism, ending up with Chinese troops attacking Soviet border guards stationed on Zhenbao island in the river, killing scores of them.
But as both countries “opened and reformed”, China under Deng Xiaoping and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, they tried to resolve disputes over territory. It took almost 20 years for the final small islands and patches of mud to be assigned to one or the other.
Zhenbao became Chinese. But what are now Russia’s far eastern provinces remained in Moscow’s hands.
Outside the museum, another visitor, who described herself as a loyal member of the Communist Party, had a diametrically opposite view to Cui’s.
A woman who gave her name as Mrs Du, who had come from the far south on a history tour of the border areas, said that China’s wars with Russia were all a long time ago.
Comparisons with Ukraine today were a “difficult question” but one on which she felt she should not in any case give a view.
“President Xi Jinping says we are brothers now, because the Russians are so friendly to us Chinese,” she said. “Ordinary people like us should not comment.” What she did say was that the Chinese would never hate the Russians as much as the Japanese.
Yuexin Rachel Lin, a Singaporean historian of Russia at the University of Leeds, who has visited museums along both sides of the border, says both give their own distinctive versions of history – with contradictions on both sides.
In the same museum on the Chinese side, Russians can be portrayed in one room as imperialist aggressors and in the next as friends who during their enforced occupation introduced scientific advances and railways, with the colonialist aspects ignored.
However, the anti-Russian sentiment has not been fully replaced with revolutionary ideology. Tens of thousands of Chinese now live in Russia’s far east, leaving Russia fearing China wants to “take back” the region by stealth.
The economic relationship also swings ambiguously. Twenty years ago, the far eastern cities went into collapse with the decline of the Russian economy, while Chinese ones such as Heihe built gleaming tower blocks and free trade zones. Chinese often say that in the revolutionary years Russia was their “big brother”; now it is China’s turn. But the Chinese free trade zones largely lie empty, in China’s post-Covid slump, while trade with China has led to Russia’s border areas developing quickly, even as the rest of the country has faced a crisis caused by the Ukraine invasion.
“The number of Russian tourists never recovered after Covid,” said Yang Hong, a trader in the night market in Heihe, developed specifically for the Russian trade. “I think it must be the state of the economy, and the war.”
All this leaves the relationship in a constant state of flux. The final message of the museum, literally set in stone, is taken from “Xi Jinping thought” and focuses on China itself. Friendships are temporary, only the nation is permanent, it seems to say.
“The weak are bullied; those who lag behind are beaten,” it says. “Continuous efforts to promote the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics will surely realise the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
The Times
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