During the cold war it was natural to lump Russia and China together. They were the two great communist powers - the leading ideological adversaries of the west.
Then came 1989 - the year of the crushing of the students’ revolt in China and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Communism had failed. Free markets and democracy seemed poised to sweep all before them. The spirit of the time was captured in Francis Fukuyama’s famous article on "The End of History", published in Washington’s National Interest magazine that summer. Mr Fukuyama did not argue that history had ended in the sense that there would be no more great events. Rather he claimed ideological victory for the west, suggesting that "liberal democracy may constitute the end point of man’s ideological evolution".
Even though it swiftly became fashionable to dismiss Mr Fukuyama, a variant of his thesis has powerfully influenced US foreign policy ever since. The chain of thinking works something like this. Communism failed as an economic system. Russia and China have had to embrace free markets. Economic freedom will, in time, produce political freedom. A liberalised economy will generate new forces and tensions that will make it impossible to maintain an authoritarian political system.
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