Global shocks, regional conflicts and the quest for stable prosperity: Which way forward for China and Russia?

Almost two decades into the third millennium, China and Russia have emerged as the main challengers to the US post-unipolar role in an evolving international order. Since the end of the Cold War, limited domestic political representativeness and increasingly liberal market policies have coexisted in both countries, with the mix between rising economic performance and repression of do¬mestic dissent through coercive practices becoming a stable – albeit socially regressive- equilibrium. However, while China exerted a stabilizing power on the global economy, leading the worldwide recovery after the crisis (Lin 2011), Russia struggled to recover from post-crisis reduced world demand, and sub¬sequently lower quantitative easing by the main advanced economies. By examining key economic trends, the chapter locates the two countries’ relative positions in the global economy, connecting the evidence with the hy¬pothesis of China as an order-maker, and of Russia as an order-taker, respec¬tively (Section 1.2). Engaging the political econ-omy literature on the relation between domestic institutions and economic performance, the analysis then questions the sustainability of their respective models of de¬velopment (Section 1.3), connecting these trends to major simultaneous dynamics in the global political economy. Based on IR scholarly research on policy roles, an inside-out perspective is first adopted, to explore the implications of China and Russia’s domestic choices for the global economy, and for the broader construction of their foreign policy roles (Section 1.4). The focus then shifts to outside-in dynamics (Section 1.5), to investigate the net effect of key external developments on the evolution of China and Rus¬sia’s foreign policy roles and performances. The global crisis and recession of 2008–2010, the international responses to the war in Eastern Ukraine, the pro¬tracted conflict in the Middle East, North Korea’s nuclear challenges, the EU uncertainties and the US unilateralist turn are singled out as particularly con¬sequential occurrences. Speaking to the IR literature on the relation between evolving polarity, norm change and systemic order transition, the chapter con-cludes on the implications of the dynamic interaction between external driv¬ers and the two countries’ policy choices, respectively, for the future interna¬tional order.