China and Russia Contra Liberal Hegemony

Abstract

Sino-Russian security and economic cooperation has broadened and deepened in non-linear but progressive fashion since the late 1990s. Contra realism, it is not simply American material power that drives this increasing cooperation; U.S. power has at best remained constant. Instead, two conditions combine to deepen Sino-Russian cooperation. First, enduring liberal hegemony, or a combination of material power, prestige, and soft power, makes America threatening, under broad conditions, to any authoritarian regime’s domestic power and foreign influence. Second is the steady twenty-year movement of Russia’s regime under Vladimir Putin away from liberal democracy and toward a China-style authoritarian capitalism. These two conditions make cooperation on either side of the liberal-nonliberal ideological divide increasingly easier than cooperation across it. Several types of qualitative evidence support these claims, including: (1) private and public statements from both Beijing and Moscow on the liberal-democratic threat and efforts to prevent “color revolutions”; (2) specific deepening of bilateral cooperation after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014; (3) efforts by Moscow and Beijing to counter liberal hegemony’s spread in their regions; (4) the tendency for anti-liberal elites in neighboring states to cooperate more with China or Russia. I address realist counter-arguments skeptical of any systematic causal role for ideology. Insofar as America tires of its role as liberal hegemon, or the “China Model” becomes so prestigious as to threaten the Putin regime, the impetus to Sino-Russian cooperation identified here will fade.