How the Russian president became China’s ultimate self-help muse

Beijing Books Building evokes much of contemporary China’s Soviet-inflected inheritance. A short walk west of the Communist Party compound at Zhongnanhai, this imposing tiled cuboid faces onto Chang’an Avenue, a ten-lane traffic artery whose kilometre-long city blocks and hulking horizontal government buildings dwarf any visitor to the heart of the socialist capital, much like Moscow’s broad avenues and Stalinist skyscrapers.

Yet the biography section inside the building’s five-storey Xinhua Bookstore exhibits a distinctly post-Soviet link to the Russian capital. Its shelves may be filled with an array of books on world leaders past and present, but one man overshadows them all with reams of dedicated, researched material: Russian President Vladimir Putin. These lavish tomes range from quotation collections to Putin-themed Russian-language textbooks and guides to the secrets of global diplomacy. But the most common genre by some distance is self-help: manuals in which Putin is presented as a model for Chinese men seeking to boost their masculinity. The Russian leader grins and glowers out from the covers of evocative titles including Hardman Putin, Putin: The Perfect Man in the Eyes of All Women and Putin’s Guide to Being a Man.

The now seemingly-endless Xi-Putin era has also been one of blossoming Moscow-Beijing relations. As noted by Natasha Kuhrt, an expert on Russia’s relations with East Asia at King’s College London, warming ties have their roots in the late Soviet 1980s, but Putin inherited a promising legacy after thorny issues around border disputes, arms sales, and Russian regional discontent were already resolved when he embarked on his own political projects.

“Since Putin fused the Kremlin’s objectives with oligarchs’ business interests, Russia and China have had to interact more,” says Kuhrt, pointing to the increasingly regular summits which have accompanied deeper trade and resource-based ties in recent years. “It’s a strong relationship now because Russia and China have a lot of joint arrangements that they have to keep going.”

But even if the Chinese Communist Party still governs a nation of Soviet-style cities, today’s globalised consumerist China demands new models. This is no longer an arena for the “new socialist person”, but for the confident manager, urban flaneur or tech innovator, characters better suited to a ruthlessly competitive market society. Some exemplars of such figures are homegrown. Indeed, Putin: The Perfect Man in the Eyes of All Women spends a lengthy introduction drawing parallels between the Russian leader’s can-do spirit and that of Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Elsewhere, Putin is compared to tennis champion Li Na, whose confident and humorous post-match persona exemplify her bold and forthright character.

All of this points to Pujing’s embodiment of a kind of self-possessed individualism which is often idealised in contemporary China. As anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has documented, new ideas around choice and self-worth have underlain a wider “individualisation of Chinese society” in the post-Mao, post-collectivist era. Willfulness, poise and ability to “dance on a knife edge” has, A Biography of Putin tells us, been evident in the leader since his early years managing the Kursk and Beslan disasters. The breathless pace of life in today’s urban PRC forces much of the potential audience for these books into their own perilous daily dance, negotiating the social and financial pressures of family expectations and a constant sense of rush around educational and professional opportunities.

Combined with his national “saviour” role, the Chinese Putin’s composure under pressure also makes him an individual metonym for the kind of confidence which powerful states should exhibit on the world stage. As Hardman Putin emphasises, his ability to “keep his enemies close” emerged particularly in dealings with American presidents such as Barack Obama. This is telling, for as Natasha Kuhrt notes, “there was a stress in the Russian media during the Obama years on Obama being a wimp and Putin being a strongman.” Unlike the patrician former US president, Pujing thus boasts a rugged individualism which China at large could adopt in its interactions with geopolitical adversaries.

As with nationalism of any stripe, there is also a clear gendered dimension to this celebration of rugged individualism. In the bruising realms of domestic Russian politics and global geopolitics, Pujing’s “hardman” characteristics are evident in his swashbuckling, action-man lifestyle. Whether flying into the heart of a Chechen warzone or hunting, fishing, swimming and snowmobiling, he is constantly on the move, demonstrating fearlessness, ability to get the job done and refusal ever to be fully satisfied. “A man must be brave,” and “A man must be resolute at key moments,” declares Putin: The Perfect Man in the Eyes of All Women.

As a sub-category of the self-possessing individual, the active macho male is also an important aspirational character in Chinese views of self and the world. As noted by Geng Song, a scholar of masculinity at Hong Kong University, “the performance of Chinese masculinity is increasingly an individual performance in recent times.”

China’s early post-Mao decades witnessed what some saw as a “crisis of masculinity” as intellectuals sought out redemptive male heroes amid a sense that radical campaigns had emasculated the country’s men. Men had been powerless to prevent the untold damage on society wrought by the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, while socialist ideas around female liberation, it was thought, had also elevated women at men’s expense. Encounters since then with shifting contours of global masculinities, from brash American individualism to the softer aesthetics of Korean and Japanese male idols, have magnified this sense of crisis in some quarters. According to Song, conservative sections of society – including the government – now emphasise assertive manhood as “part of promoting a more masculine image for Chinese men on the international stage.” Indeed, a controversial December 2020 statement saw China’s Ministry of Education condemn the purported “feminisation” of young Chinese men, recommending more sport in schools as an antidote.