Nancy Qian

Opinion | For clues on Beijing’s plans for Taiwan, look to Russia

China has learned from Russia’s post-1991 experience, pursuing its economic liberalisation with more care, but still failed to avoid some pitfalls of pro-market policies

While the strongman playbook might dictate taking Taiwan by force to distract from economic woes, Beijing is likely to move cautiously with an eye on Russia’s experience

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President Xi Jinping (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a photo on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on September 15. Photo: AP

Nancy Qian

Published: 3:30am, 17 Sep 2022Updated: 4:30am, 17 Sep 2022

As China prepares for its 20th Party Congress in October, when President Xi Jinping is expected to accept a third term, observers worry about uncertain days ahead, especially regarding Taiwan. But one doesn’t need a crystal ball to glimpse its future. China’s leaders, for their part, are looking at Russia.

China has mirrored Russia’s historical trajectory for most of the past 100 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, both were large empires with outdated institutions that could not protect their people from foreign wars, corruption, inequality and poverty. While Russia’s per capita income in 1900 was around one third that of the United States, Chinese incomes were half those of Russia.

In 1949, the new People’s Republic was modelled on the Soviet system. In both, a command economy replaced markets and the central government influenced every aspect of people’s lives – what they produced and ate, where they worked and lived and what they could say, read and write.

But Beijing and Moscow struggled to maintain production because workers enjoyed little reward for their labour. Among other strategies to get people to work harder, the Soviet and Chinese governments set up systems that threatened farmers with starvation if their production did not meet state quotas. This led to more than 7 million famine deaths in the Soviet Union in 1932-33 and between 16.5 million and 45 million famine deaths in China in 1959-61.

People labour on a communal farm during the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961). Photo: Getty Images

These economic calamities posed a serious political threat to the regimes. After all, the Soviet and Chinese communists were supposed to be modernisers who empowered the people and delivered economic prosperity.

To survive, each regime touted its role as a defender of the people against foreign invaders. The Soviet Union and China suffered more losses than any other country in World War II. In the decades thereafter, the Cold War kept alive fears of foreign invasion and the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes.