China Unbound: A New World Disorde
Joanna Chiu
Hurst Publishers: 2021
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When presidents Putin and Xi met in Beijing on at the Winter Olympics, they pledged a new relationship that was ‘superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era’ and governed by a friendship that had ‘no limits’. Subsequent statements have made more of it being a ‘non-alliance’ than of having no limits, which leaves analysts groping to figure out the real nature of the relationship. In her study of China’s global reach under Xi, Joanna Chiu’s chapter on China’s relations with Russia, written before the recent war in Ukraine, reflects the same ambiguity. The two leaders, she tells us, had met almost thirty times before 2018. On one of those occasions, she observed Xi presenting Putin with a Friendship Medal in the Great Hall of the People. On another, they had guzzled vodka and shared sandwiches ‘like university students’, according to Putin. They were best chums.

And yet, Chiu concludes, the ties between the two countries are likely to experience more ups and downs, and ‘the chumminess between Putin and Xi can only go so far’. This is one of a number of judgements in a book that will satisfy neither hawks nor doves, though both will find useful material in it. Its warm endorsements from a wide range of China scholars are similarly contrasting. While Jan Wong says it is ‘a devastating analysis of the Chinese police state gone global’, Howard French notes that ‘it delivers urgent and much-needed caution against xenophobia towards Chinese people at a time of growing tensions with a new superpower’—and both are true.

• Tags: China, Issue 28, Joanna Chiu, John Gittings