Introduction

It is often remarked that understanding the past is difficult enough without then attempting the near-impossible task of trying to predict the future. Nonetheless, a reasonably intelligent analyst back in the mid-1980s could be forgiven for making at least two predictions with some degree of confidence: one, that the USSR would remain in its essentials the same – that is, economically inefficient, politically repressive, globally challenging, but strategically incapable or unwilling to give up its increasingly costly possessions in Eastern and Central Europe; and two, that even if China could look forward to better times in a post-Mao age – difficult to imagine otherwise – it would take generations before it could ever become a serious actor on the world stage. Few back then could have imagined, and none as far as we know did, that the Soviet system of power would implode in little under ten years; or that backward, communist-led China would have become the second-largest economy in the world in just over 20 years. China was of course beginning to change by the late 1980s. Incomes were rising. Foreign investors were beginning to take note. Growth was on the up. The country was clearly on the move – so much so that The Economist talked in November 1992 of ‘one of the biggest improvements in human welfare anywhere at any time’, and six months later, Business Week of ‘breathtaking changes’. Still, all this was taking place in a country where hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were poor, where China's overall weight in the international economy remained pathetically low, where an inefficient state sector remained dominant, and where all manner of obstacles still stood in the way of further economic reform.

For all these reasons, and no doubt a few more besides, most experts would more likely have put their money on Russia succeeding than China. With its vast energy wealth, educated work force, proximity to Europe, and emerging democratic polity, Russia's future looked decidedly more rosy than that of China with its limited resources, ageing population, sclerotic party leadership, and huge rural hinterland.