Xi, Putin and the new world order

04/22/23 • 25 min

Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

In the postwar world, Stalin and the Soviet Union wielded greater power over Mao Zedong's new communist China. Today, following China’s rise as an economic superpower and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that has the upper hand – and on whom Russia’s future depends. When Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit in March 2023, he was greeted with elaborate ceremony and deference. With Russia cut off from the West, China now supplies 40 per cent of its imports, a proportion that will only grow. The leaders are united, too, in their fight against the US for global dominance – but there are tensions and limits within that alliance.

In this magazine cover story, the New Statesman’s global affairs editor Katie Stallard looks at the parallels with the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, and the two countries’ shared and sometimes violent history, from the first official Russian expedition to Beijing in 1618 to today’s alignment. She hears from others on why their explicitly anti-US world-view has an appeal in the Global South, particularly in Africa. Will the relationship survive China’s growing economic and diplomatic supremacy? And how dangerous is it for the rest of the world?

Written and read by Katie Stallard.

This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 19 April 2023. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy The strange death of moderate conservatism.

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Written and read by Katie Stallard.

This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 19 April 2023. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy The strange death of moderate conservatism.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Confessions of a philosopher: Bryan Magee’s final interview

As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the New Statesman’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture. Magee’s 1987 BBC television series The Great Philosophers, described by one critic as “two boffins on a sofa”, examined some of life’s most recondite questions in an accessible way. Magee was also a prolific author (of philosophy, poetry and fiction), a Labour and then an SDP politician. But when Cowley later met Magee, sent to interview him by the Times in 1997, he was struck by something the philosopher said as he left: “I get the impression that you feel I am lonely and unfulfilled.”

Was he? Eleven years later, now editor of the New Statesman, Cowley visited Magee in a nursing hospital in Oxford, shortly after publication of the 87-year-old’s book Ultimate Questions. The issues that had made Magee restless in his sixties still loomed large: “What the hell is it all about?” he asked, and compared himself unfavourably to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, men he had known (“they were a whole class above me in intelligence”). In this rich and beautifully observed profile, Cowley explores these themes, as well as the formative years of one of Britain’s most interesting thinkers.

Written and read by Jason Cowley.

This article originally appeared in the 08 April 2018 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

If you enjoyed listening to this, you might enjoy Grayson Perry on the rise and fall of the Default Man

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Next Episode

The slow, sad death of the print newspaper

The freelance journalist Tim de Lisle is a lifelong newspaper addict, and still buys two papers a day, three at weekends. In this elegy to their demise, he tracks his own love affair with them, from a schoolboy in search of the football results, to sports reporter, music critic and media studies lecturer. Is the future of news entirely digital, or could some form of print survive – as vinyl and cinema have survived streaming?

In this rich, personal piece, De Lisle talks to industry-watchers and travels to Scotland to meet two of the UK’s most successful local newspaper editors. With print, one feels “released from the clammy embrace of the algorithm”, he writes. “You get past the cacophony of politics to read about real life, from families to food. It’s better for your mental health, your general knowledge, your membership of the human race.” But can anyone afford to fund it – and is its audience a dying breed? The singer Katy Perry, for one, hopes not. She recently tweeted: “One of my favorite [sic] sounds ever is the sound of a crisp new newspaper being read over breakfast for an hour or so... The popping out of it, the folding, the scribbling on the crossword... I hope it never goes out of fashion in our digital world. It is too romantic.”

Written by Tim de Lisle and read by Rachel Cunliffe.

This article was originally published on the Newstatesman.com on 15 April 2023, and in the 21-27 April print edition. You can read the text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy listening to the battle for the soul of English cricket.

Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.