In this latest Strategic Update, LSE IDEAS co-founder Professor Michael Cox highlights China as a significant player in the current tragedy occurring within Ukraine. Prof Cox traces the relationship between the People’s Republic and the USSR, through to the latter’s collapse into the Russian Federation, their formation of a strategic partnership against a unipolar post-Cold War order, and the rise in power of Xi Jinping alongside two international crises caused by Russian aggression in Ukraine. This Update finds that, whilst there are limits to their shared interests, China is politically committed to its Russian partner, and this status-quo leaves us in a more dangerous world.

Read the online edition:

Putin, Xi and the Challenge to the West

Download the PDF:

 Putin, Xi and the Challenge to the West

About the author

Professor Michael Cox was appointed to a Chair in International Relations at the LSE in 2002. He was later a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS and  is now Emeritus Professor in the Department of International Relations. He  is  the author, editor and co-editor of  several books including works on   the Cold War, US foreign policy, E.H. Carr and John Maynard Keynes. His most recent  volume, Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden, appeared in 2022 and is  now translated into Italian published by Vita E Pensiero Press in Milan. He has also just brought out a  volume with  LSE Press entitled Afghanistan: Long War – Forgotten  Peace, and   is now working on a study of  the China- Russian relationship entitled Comrades? to be published by Polity Press in 2023.