The World

‘The Chinese nation has stood,’ declared Xi, ‘grown rich and become strong – and now it embraces the new brilliant prospect of rejuvenation.’ This meant an expansion of Chinese power, military and economic, as he offered loans, roads, ports and technology to extend his ‘Belt and Road’ network of power, without having to conquer an empire. It was an autocratic version of the Marshall Plan. The trajectory of the Xi era was upwards: ‘The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered an irreversible process.’ But it could be delivered only by the Party founded by Mao. ‘Don’t forget the original intent,’ warned Xi. That meant that any resistance to the Party must be crushed. Xi, a harsh authoritarian, cracked down on dissent, tightening police supervision of citizens and internet using the new technologies of surveillance and face recognition, while in Xiangjing he conducted an ethnic purge of the Muslim Uighurs, a million of whom were confined to education camps. But the unification of China, meaning the conquest of Taiwan, was the spark wheel of Xi’s world mission, not just as Chinese nationalist and Maoist heir but also given his father Xi Zhongxun’s ‘United Front’ work. It was, writes Jospeh Torigian, ‘always both a national and a family affair’. As Chinese growth faltered under his rigid autocracy, Xi surely pondered a ‘short, victorious war’ – the risks of ‘rolling the iron dice’ to retake Taiwan that could win him immortality or destroy his rule altogether. Simultaneously, his natural ally, Putin, promoting his resurgent Russia, was weighing up a similar gamble.

Putin had faced minor sanctions for annexing Crimea, but his war in Ukraine was stalemated. His view of Ukrainian illegitimacy was only confirmed when Ukraine elected a clown as president: Volodymyr Zelensky, forty-year-old son of a mathematics professor, was a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from east Ukraine who had become the most popular man in the country when he starred in a TV series, Servant of the People, in which he played an everyman history teacher who becomes president of Ukraine. When he decided to run for president, he called his party Servant of the People. In March 2019, he won a landslide victory: in the era of Trump, the preposterous Neronian fusion of politics and showbusiness seemed to confirm the decadence of democracy. Indeed, Trump’s corruption – his refusal to recognize the difference between his interests and those of the state – soon tainted Ukraine. He tried to withhold Ukrainian military aid unless Zelensky smeared his Democratic rival Joe Biden, a gambit that led to his impeachment. Trump survived his congressional trial. Zelensky emerged unscathed.

Diminutive, emotional and playful, Zelensky seemed too soft to handle his dictatorial antithesis, the lethal Putin, who believed that the actor personified Ukraine’s failure. Zelensky had shown courage in entering this brutal arena, but he struggled to govern Ukraine and halt its rampant corruption. It looked as if his presidency might fail. In one of his movies, Rzhevsky versus Napoleon, Zelensky had played Napoleon invading Russia. But in real life the threat was from the east.

Yet, if ever a crisis came, the essential relationship in the tripolar World Game was between Xi and Putin, who had met thirty times. ‘I’ve had closer interactions with President Putin than with any other foreign colleagues,’ said Xi in June 2019 as Putin showed him the Romanov palaces of his home town, Petersburg. ‘He’s my best and bosom friend.’ Xi boasted of their personal affinity: ‘We’ve taken a high-speed train ride together, watched an ice-hockey friendly, celebrated his birthday and bantered about light-hearted matters, literature, art, and sport …’ But while Russia’s rigid dictatorship was still dependent on its oil income, its bigger brother China was at a historic zenith, a moment unique in its history. Then Xi faced that challenge: a pandemic.