Xi Has Spent Decades Preparing for a Cold War With the U.S.
Xi Has Spent Decades Preparing for a Cold War With the U.S.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s strategy draws on his understanding of Soviet failures
By Lingling WeiFollow
July 4, 2025 10:00 pm ETShareResize
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Chinese leader Xi Jinping often talks about the fall of the Soviet Union as a lesson for China. Photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Press Pool
In the U.S.-China conflict, President Trump is waging an economic assault. But Chinese leader Xi Jinping is fighting a Cold War.
Xi is entering trade negotiations with a grand strategy he has prepared for years—one that, according to policy advisers in Beijing, is inspired by his understanding of what the Soviet Union got wrong during the first Cold War.
Well aware of the U.S.’s continued economic and military superiority, the advisers say, Xi is seeking to avoid direct confrontation, while holding China’s ground in a protracted, all-encompassing competition.
Xi aims to achieve what Mao Zedong used to call a “strategic stalemate”—an enduring equilibrium where American pressure becomes manageable and China buys time to catch up to the U.S.
“For China, ‘strategic stalemate’ is the most realistic and preferred outcome in the foreseeable future,” said Minxin Pei, a Claremont McKenna College professor and editor of the quarterly journal China Leadership Monitor. “Strategic patience, conservation of resources and tactical flexibility will all be critical in achieving this stalemate.”
In some ways, Beijing is pursuing a sort of guerrilla warfare, sparked by Henry Kissinger’s analysis of the nature of asymmetric conflicts: “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”
Chinese goods for export at a logistics hub in Zhejiang province, China. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Chinese jet fighters on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean. Photo: People’s Liberation Army/AFP/Getty Images
One key pillar of the lessons Xi has drawn from the Soviet collapse is economic: The Soviets put all their economic bets on heavy industry, focused on energy and weaponry. Beijing by contrast is trying to produce everything, fortifying the Chinese economy against trade and technological restrictions from the U.S. while still leveraging world markets’ appetites for its goods.
Another pillar is geopolitical, where the goal is to avoid Soviet-style isolation. This involves weakening U.S. alliances while promoting what Beijing calls “multialignment,” where countries engage with multiple global powers rather than choosing a single side.
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Also key to the strategy is to continue China’s military buildup but without a costly arms race with the U.S. The country’s official defense budget has grown at a stable rate of about 7.2% over the past three years. While that exceeds China’s overall economic growth, it is below 1.5% of its gross domestic product.
And crucially, the main pillar involves further strengthening Communist Party control over all aspects of society.
Xi often talks about the Soviet fall as a lesson for China. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces?” Xi said in a closed-door speech to senior party officials in January 2013, shortly after he took the reins of the party. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce.” Translation: The party must allow no challenges to its authority.
Turning point
China has a long history of studying the Soviets. In 1953, the year Xi was born, Mao launched a campaign to promote the Soviet model for China’s political, economic and military systems. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a party revolutionary who fought alongside Mao, went to Moscow in the late 1950s, when China had almost no industry, to visit industrial sites and learn about their operations and technology.
That profoundly shaped Xi’s youth, leading to a deep-rooted admiration for Soviet values, history and culture. His “Russia complex,” as some party insiders called it, was so deep that nearly three decades of a Soviet-China split didn’t shake it.
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But by the time Xi was a rising political star in the late 2000s, the Soviet Union had collapsed and his view had shifted. As head of the Central Party School, an elite party academy, he used the Soviet unraveling as a cautionary tale, highlighting ideological decay and a loss of political control as the key reasons for the collapse.
After taking power in 2012, Xi commissioned a documentary about the end of the Soviet Union that portrayed Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, as a villain who abandoned the party.
But even then, Beijing’s study of the Cold War focused on how China could avoid a similar demise; Xi didn’t yet see China as a contender in a superpower clash with the U.S.
China’s Mao Zedong reviewed an honor guard during a visit to Moscow in 1957. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
