When President Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin earlier this year, the choreography was familiar: smiles, handshakes and talk of a “multipolar world order”.
Yet beneath the symbolism lies an imbalance impossible to miss. China radiated the poise of a civilisation sure of its trajectory; Russia exuded the defiance of a power seeking reassurance. The meeting, intended to display Eurasian unity, instead underscored the emotional gulf between the two countries – a partnership born of necessity, not equality.
Russia and China both emerged from command economies and imperial pasts. Both were humiliated by the West at moments of weakness. Both vowed to rise again. Yet decades later, one has re-entered the centre of global life while the other drifts on the margins of history. The difference lies not in resources or size but in civilisational temperament: China’s confidence versus Russia’s longing.
China’s transformation since 1978 is one of the most successful acts of national reinvention in modern history. It moved from collective poverty to planetary centrality without losing its sense of self. The secret was philosophical as much as economic: an instinct for adaptation rooted in thousands of years of continuous statecraft.
Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase “crossing the river by feeling the stones” captured this reflex. Reform was experimental, reversible and pragmatic. China learned selectively from the West, Japan, Singapore and its own dynastic archives. What mattered was what worked.
That humility to learn without shame stems from cultural depth. Through centuries of invasion, collapse and renewal, dynasties fell and ideologies changed. However, the grammar of governance and family endured. Even during the Cultural Revolution, civilisation’s skeleton survived. When market reforms came, they were seen not as Westernisation but as restoration: a return to prosperity after interruption.