Commentary
When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in March, it was to firm up a new Sino-Russian strategic partnership crafted last year. Yet there is always a hierarchy in every alliance, and it is increasingly apparent that Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.
It wasn’t always so. From the founding of communist China (People’s Republic of China) in 1949 and up to the early 1960s, Beijing was definitely subordinate to the Soviet Union. Particularly in the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked to the USSR as an ideological brother-in-arms and an economic and administrative model to be emulated….