Over the last ten years, Western leaders and media have worried about China and Russia gaining power and threatening the liberal world order dominated by the United States. Putting China and Russia in a basket of “bad actors” may be a recent trend, but each of these countries has its own history of resentment toward the West going back to the Opium and Crimean Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, when, defeated by Europe, they faced internal turmoil and were forced to reform. While addressing these challenges and selectively borrowing Western ideas, imperial China and Russia and their successor states also had to deal with each other as two great land powers with a long shared border. Culturally different, they went through similar historical cycles of crumbling empires, revolutions, civil wars, frail republics, World War II, and socialist and postsocialist states, finally settling into their own peculiar blend of state capitalism....
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