The Divergent Paths of Power: Why China’s Rise Has Been Less Violent Than Russia’s

Historical Context: Empires of Trauma

China and Russia are both post-imperial civilisations struggling to reconcile historical grandeur with the limits of contemporary statehood. Yet the stories they tell themselves about decline and restoration differ profoundly.

For China the nineteenth-century “Century of Humiliation” became a moral lesson: foreign invasion and domestic chaos led to ruin; unity and economic strength are the path to redemption. This narrative, embedded in the Communist Party’s self-image, prizes stability and gradual restoration of dignity.

For Russia the trauma was more recent. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was experienced by elites as a geopolitical catastrophe—a world-historical humiliation demanding correction. Vladimir Putin’s regime has portrayed her foreign policy as a fight against dismemberment by Western powers, leading to a siege mentality that justifies violence as defensive revival.

Strategic Culture and the Uses of Force

Alastair Iain Johnston’s work on Chinese strategic culture shows that Chinese statecraft combines an underlying realism with a deep aversion to uncontrolled war. Andrew Scobell calls this the “cult of defence”: every offensive act must be framed as the protection of sovereignty.

China’s wars have therefore been bounded and instrumental—Korea (1950–53), India (1962), Vietnam (1979)—and since then, Beijing has preferred calibrated coercion: island-building, cyber operations, and trade retaliation. M. Taylor Fravel’s extensive study demonstrates that China has often chosen compromise in border disputes, emphasising negotiation over expansion.

Russia’s tradition, by contrast, has been steeped in military fatalism. From the Tsars to the Soviets, the idea that Russia’s security depends on buffer zones has persisted. Stephen Kotkin observes that Russian rulers have habitually overreached—driven by the mismatch between global ambition and economic fragility—turning to war as a mechanism for political renewal.

Economic Logic and Interdependence

China’s ascent has been achieved through integration, not isolation. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the Party’s legitimacy has hinged upon prosperity, making war a threat to domestic order. Zheng Bijian’s “peaceful rise” encapsulated a strategy of embedding China within the global economy, using infrastructure finance and trade dependence to gain leverage.

Russia’s economy has remained dependent on hydrocarbons and the rents of extractive industry. Such a model generates short-term power but long-term fragility. Without global integration or technological diversification, Moscow has fewer incentives to avoid conflict and fewer tools to exert non-military influence.

Leadership and Political Psychology

Leadership narratives reinforce structural divergence. Putin views himself as a restorer of imperial greatness; his psychology, as described by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, is shaped by the secret police ethos of control through coercion.

Chinese leaders, from Deng to Xi Jinping, have anchored legitimacy in order, development and the avoidance of chaos. Odd Arne Westad notes that Chinese elites have learned to equate external restraint with internal survival—a lesson born from centuries of dynastic collapse following foreign wars.

The Practice of Modern Power

In practice, China exercises “coercion without war”: lawfare, economic punishment, grey-zone operations and the steady accumulation of administrative control. Her militarisation of the South China Sea, cyber intrusions and Belt and Road lending display ambition wrapped in legality.

Russia, conversely, has chosen spectacle over subtlety: invasions of Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and mainland Ukraine reflect a belief that raw power compels respect. As Bobo Lo notes, Moscow’s foreign policy seeks recognition through confrontation; Beijing’s seeks it through endurance.

Systemic Position and Incentive Structures

China’s position within the international system is one of growing integration; Russia’s, one of exclusion. Interdependence disciplines China, while sanctions radicalise Russia. Beijing’s fear is disruption; Moscow’s is irrelevance.

Konstantin Sonin argues that personalist autocracies, such as Putin’s, are prone to costly wars because leaders prioritise regime survival over societal welfare. China’s collective authoritarianism, by contrast, diffuses risk—producing a bureaucratic caution absent in the Kremlin’s circle of courtiers.

Conclusion

China and Russia are both revisionist in aspiration, but not in method. China revises through the patient construction of alternative institutions and the slow rebalancing of economic gravity. Russia revises through violent interruption of the existing order.

The difference lies in history’s imprint and in each regime’s bargain with its people. For China, prosperity is the proof of greatness; for Russia, victory is.

---

Reading List

• Johnston, Alastair Iain. Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History. Princeton University Press, 1995.

• Scobell, Andrew. China’s Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

• Fravel, M. Taylor. Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes. Princeton University Press, 2008.

• Lo, Bobo. Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics. Brookings Institution Press, 2008.

• Hill, Fiona, and Clifford Gaddy. Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Brookings Institution Press, 2013.

• Westad, Odd Arne. Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750. Basic Books, 2012.

• Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000. Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Bijian, Zheng. “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great-Power Status.” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005.