A bad year for autocrats. Xi and Putin are the big losers of 2022

Authoritarian leaders are impregnable only until the moment when they are not

Whatever happened to the strongmen? This year was supposed to belong to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Remember that “no limits” partnership sealed by the Chinese and Russian leaders at the opening of the Beijing winter Olympics in February. And now? As the year draws towards a close Putin is mired in a disastrous war in Ukraine and Xi faces public protests unprecedented during his 10-year rule. 

We should not run away with ourselves. Firm predictions that these regimes are on the verge of collapse would be as foolhardy as those that not so long ago imagined that liberal democracy was destined for history’s dustbin. The turnabout is striking for all that - a timely reminder that authoritarian regimes are impregnable only until the moment, well, when they are not. History is littered with deposed emperors and tsars.

For Putin, hubris, self-deception and miscalculation have proved a toxic mix. A deluded attempt to reinvent himself as Peter the Great saw him swallow his own propaganda about the invincibility of the Russian military. The champion of Russian nationalism, he failed to understand the mighty force of Ukrainian patriotism. And he badly misread the “decadent” west. For all their flabbiness, liberal democracies will take a stand when they have to.

The costs for the strongmen have been large. Beyond the devastation of its army in Ukraine, the impact of sanctions on an enfeebled economy and the loss of the nation’s most valuable energy market in Europe, Putin’s Russia is looking decidedly lonely on the international stage. Xi may have kept to the letter of their partnership, but China’s support for the war has scarcely been enthusiastic. February saw the firmest of handshakes between the two men. By the time they met in Samarkand in September the photo calls spoke more to distance than to warmth

Moscow has been obliged to look to Tehran rather than Beijing to restock its depleted weaponry. India has been tip-toeing gently towards the western camp. Former Soviet republics in central Asia and the Caucasus have made little secret of their reassessment of Russian power. Armenia has asked France’s Emmanuel Macron to act as mediator in its conflict with Azerbaijan.

Much of the global south may have been reluctant to support the west’s sanctions. For all that this month’s meeting of G20 nations in Bali offered ample evidence of rising disenchantment with the Kremlin. Putin had never been much loved, one Asian diplomat in Bali was heard to say. His problem now was that he was no longer feared.

Xi too has been the author of his own troubles. October’s 20th National Congress of the Communist party gave him the free hand he has always wanted to rule as China’s emperor. The latest upsurge of protests in Shanghai and in other cities against Beijing’s Covid lockdowns might be interpreted as a significant but far from existential challenge to Xi’s authority. But, by tightening the party’s grip on every dimension of Chinese life,  Xi has torn up the bargain at heart of China’s rise.

The Chinese leader is said to be an obsessive student of the fall of the Soviet Union. Rising stars in the party are obliged to watch long videos of Mikhail Gorbachev’s supposed mistakes. Cadres at Beijing’s Central Party School are told over and again that China must not make Gorbachev’s error of loosening the party’s hold on power. Political “reform” is cast as the slippery slope to collapse. 

Xi has learned the wrong lesson from history. The Soviet Union disintegrated because its state-directed economy could not match the innovative energy of the western market system. Yet Beijing is now taking China along the same road of centralised control. The private sector businesses that drove China’s rapid technological advance and annual growth rates touching 10 per cent must now take their instructions from party apparatchiks. 

The bargain struck by Xi’s predecessors - the people were promised rapid increases in prosperity as a quid pro quo for the limits on their private freedoms - is being broken. The zero tolerance Covid policy seems to encapsulate the change - the offer now is one of ever-tighter political repression without the prosperity. China is growing old as fast as its economy once expanded. All those forecasts of an effortless climb to global economic hegemony are looking distinctly flimsy.

The discomfort of Xi and Putin has been shared by acolytes in the west. Jair Bolsonaro has fallen to electoral defeat in Brazil. Donald Trump may yet secure the Republican nomination for the US presidential election in 2024, but the Republicans’ poor showing in this autumn’s midterm elections has marked him out as a loser among much of his own party. True, the populist far right in the shape of Giorgia Meloni has taken power in Italy, but beyond a clash with Macron about migration, she seems intent on playing the European game.

None of the above, is cause for complacency among liberal democracies. The course of the war in eastern and southern Ukraine remains uncertain. Putin promises to be dangerous in defeat. Germany’s Olaf Scholz has yet to discard the exports-come- before-security mercantilism of his predecessor Angela Merkel. Britain has placed itself on the sidelines of international diplomacy. Macron is too fond of grandstanding. Joe Biden’s second term intentions remain unclear.

The essential truth here is that world no longer belongs to the west. The troubles faced by Xi and Putin are no guarantee of sustained security or a rule-based international order. Democracies need each other. That said, the events of 2022 have said something important about their inner strength and about the brittleness of the world’s autocracies. The tragedy lies in the terrible price paid by Ukraine.