Vladimir Putin is doubling down on his support of and reliance on communist China.
On May 15, the Kremlin published an interview in which Mr. Putin spoke to China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency. During the discussion, Mr. Putin lauded Russia’s longstanding “friendship” with China and its international organizations. He placed blame for the Ukraine war on Ukraine’s “Western patrons” rather than his own invasion of Crimea and the Donbass in 2014 and his ongoing attempt since 2022 to sack Kyiv. And he blamed the “golden billion” for the world’s woes.
In the interview, Mr. Putin divided the world into wealthy and poor nations, and argued that poor countries, led by China, “see BRICS as a platform for their voices to be certainly heard.”
Mr. Putin’s view of geopolitics starkly contrasts President Joe Biden’s division of the world into democracies versus autocracies. Mr. Putin claims that “US‑led Western elites refuse to respect civilizational and cultural diversity and reject centuries-old traditional values.” Yet he does the same in Ukraine, and the Chinese regime does the same to its Uyghur, Tibetan, Falun Gong, and Christian groups.
Furthermore, the United States, in fact, supports diversity as long as the term is not twisted to mean dictators overrunning their borders, subordinating foreign populations to their unilateral rule, refusing to let people vote in real elections, and taking property from citizens and investors in an unreasonable manner.
Both Mr. Putin and Western leftists use the idea of “neocolonialism” by the “West” to tar wealthy democracies at the expense of relatively poorer (by GDP per capita) countries weighed down by authoritarian leaders, lack of education, and corruption.
Mr. Putin’s theory of neocolonialism is a warmed-over version of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and a self-justification for the spread of Russian and Chinese armies through violent invasions, revolution, and elite capture.
Mr. Putin appears to believe that the BRICS countries—led by China and composed of Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa—are leading the “Global South and East” against the golden billion, which refers among other countries to G7 members, with their combined population of 779 million. The grouping used to be the G8, including Russia, until Mr. Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine and he was kicked out.
What Mr. Putin does not mention in his interview is that the United States built up the economies of many of the G7 countries after World War II through the Marshall Plan. In turn, the G7 provided extensive international development aid to a diverse range of countries, including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which, in joining up against the G7, now do not seem at all appreciative of the free money.
Both China and Russia seek to de-dollarize their trade with each other and the world to sanction-proof their economies. Mr. Putin pointedly noted during his interview that “More than 90% of settlements between our [Russian and Chinese] companies are made in national currencies.” Most of that trade is in the yuan (renminbi) rather than the ruble, illustrating the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) growing dominance over the country that spawned it.
The former Soviet Union’s purpose in starting the CCP was to overthrow imperialism in China, which would, in turn, make it easier to overthrow capitalism in Europe. Lenin’s International of Communist Parties (Comintern), founded in 1919, “was supposed to foment anti-capitalist revolutions in Europe; in the colonial world, it aimed at provoking anti-imperialist insurgencies, designed to overthrow imperialism and thereby contribute to anti-capitalist revolutions in Europe,” according to historian Lorenz M. Lüthi. “For that purpose, the Comintern sponsored the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921.”
China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which developed from the Shanghai Five, also got a positive mention in Mr. Putin’s interview. The SCO includes China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. This matters, as there is a strong correlation between countries that threaten or commit violence to disrupt the U.S.-led international order, or are complicit in such threats, and countries that belong to these Beijing-led international organizations. Four countries have SCO observer status: Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia. Three of those and two of the full members are violently opposed to “U.S. hegemony.”
Disrupting the emerging China-Russia alliance system, which includes both the SCO and BRICS, will require not only positive incentives to reward those fence-sitting countries that make progress toward democracy and markets but also negative consequences for those that demonstrate they are too close to Russia and China. CCP-led international organizations normalize and enable the belligerence of Moscow and Beijing, so their members should not be immune from the resulting sanctions.
