Economic security

Trump’s Trade War Is Making Russia and China Comrades Again

Fu Ying recalls vividly how, as a young woman, she’d get woken by sirens in the middle of the night for drills to practice for a Soviet invasion. It was the time of China’s traumatic Cultural Revolution and, although the farm she’d been sent to was more than 200 miles from the border, the threat seemed imminent—strong enough, it turned out, to throw Maoist China into the arms of its capitalist nemesis, the U.S.

Today’s world could hardly look more different. The U.S.-China realignment that began with President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing has been reversed in the most consequential geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China and Russia are now as close as at any time in their 400 years of shared history. The U.S., meanwhile, has targeted both countries with sanctions and China with a trade war.

“There is no sense of threat from Russia. We feel comfortable back-to-back,” says Fu, now chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s National People’s Congress, over drinks in a hotel bar near the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where she’s attending a conference. The two countries have settled the border dispute that produced a brief war in 1969.!