Putin Was Xi’s Role Model. Now He’s the Junior Partner.

Four years of war and economic isolation have reduced the Russian president to a supplicant in a relationship growing more imbalanced—and at times tense.

Before Putin made his 14th trip to meet with Xi in China, he publicly signaled that the two countries would strike a breakthrough agreement on energy. Indeed, his May visit had no bigger ambition than persuading Xi to greenlight a second natural-gas pipeline between Russia and China—known as the Power of Siberia 2, a project two decades in the making that Moscow desperately needs.

But the Russian delegation that flew to Beijing ahead of Putin ran into a brick wall. Chinese officials made it clear to the visiting head of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant, that they would sign up to the pipeline only if Russia sold them gas at the same lower-than-market rate Moscow sells domestically, said people with knowledge of the talks. In essence, Beijing was asking the Kremlin to subsidize the project.

Driving home their point, Beijing’s officials told the Russians not to raise the issue again until the terms changed, the people said.

A day later, Putin left the Chinese capital having signed 42 agreements and joint declarations. The pipeline deal wasn’t among them. Beijing offered no public explanation.

“Xi received Putin like an emperor receiving his visitor in his castle,” said Joerg Wuttke, a veteran German business executive with long experience in China-Russia relations, “and sent him home.”

Putin’s visit came just days after Xi had met President Trump in the Chinese capital in a summit both sides staged as one of equals. Trump called his Beijing visit a “G-2,” short for Group of Two. China relishes that status, though it has stopped short of embracing the label publicly, wary of alienating the Global South audience central to Xi’s goal of reshaping the world order.

To be sure, there are no signs the strategic partnership between Beijing and Moscow is about to break apart—if anything, China’s support for Russia has only deepened since its invasion of Ukraine.

Beijing has kept Russia’s war economy running: buying its oil at a discount, supplying the components its defense industry needs and providing the financial infrastructure that allows Moscow to weather Western sanctions. U.S. and European officials have called on Beijing to pressure Moscow to end the war, to little effect.

Xi appears to understand the lesson from the 1960s, when Soviet heavy-handedness toward China as the “younger brother” helped fracture that earlier alliance. For now, Xi is careful to treat Putin with respect in public even as he seeks to extract concessions in private.

Still, the May visit couldn’t be more different from the two men’s first meeting in 2013, when Xi chose Moscow for his first foreign trip as Chinese leader. Xi expressed his admiration for the Russian leader, calling him his “role model,” according to people with knowledge of the conversation.

What Xi admired, the people said, was Putin’s ability to command a seat at the world’s top table despite running an economy highly dependent on oil and gas—rather than a diversified one like those of the U.S. and China.

Now, Putin’s Ukraine war didn’t just bog down Russia. It handed Xi the leverage to finish a structural power shift that was already underway, turning what was once a partnership of near equals into a relationship China now dominates in almost every dimension.

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a response to The Wall Street Journal that China and Russia maintain close cooperation in energy and other fields. The two leaders, it added, have built “a high degree of mutual trust and deep friendship.”

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that any interpretation of Russia as the junior partner was mistaken as the relationship “is founded on the principle of equality. The sides take into consideration one another’s interests.”

Those strains are at the heart of an audacious idea foreign-policy experts have dubbed a “Reverse Nixon”: dangling the prospect of U.S. investment to lure Russia away from China, much as President Richard Nixon used Sino-Soviet tensions to open relations with Beijing in the 1970s. Early in Trump’s second term, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the U.S. couldn’t allow Russia to become China’s “permanent junior partner.” But the idea was stillborn after Putin refused to end his war in Ukraine.

Russia has reason to be disappointed with its relationship with Beijing, even wary. Trade between the two countries has doubled since the start of the war, but most of the growth was seen in the first years following the 2022 invasion, according to Chinese data.

A flood of Chinese goods into Russia has inundated domestic producers with cars, heavy machinery, textiles and even chicken breasts that are cheaper and often of better quality than what Russian companies can produce.

An outcry from Russian businesses has caused political problems for the Kremlin. Following pressure from Putin’s KGB-era colleague and friend Sergei Chemezov, who heads Russia’s main defense conglomerate, the government took measures meant to increase the price of Chinese autos to help protect local car producers.

“Competition is indeed fierce, but it’s an engine for progress,” said Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman.

Russia has also increasingly discovered Chinese espionage attempts among midlevel government officials, but Moscow has been hesitant to make them public or bring them up with Beijing for fear of upsetting the relationship, according to analysts and a person close to Russia’s intelligence services.

“Russia is acting pragmatically in the relationship,” said Elina Ribakova, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “They know where they stand with China.”

When Xi and Putin met in 2013, China accounted for roughly 10% of Russia’s overall trade, with Europe still the dominant economic partner. Today that figure stands at nearly 40%. China accounts for around a third of Russia’s export revenues. Russia represents less than 4% of China’s overall trade.

Some analysts predict China will never sign the Siberia 2 deal with Russia despite last year’s memorandum of understanding.

Their reasoning was structural. The world has enough gas, and China’s consumption of imported gas is projected to peak in the mid-2030s.

“Why should they commit to a pipeline that takes five to six years to build, and then increase the dependency on Russia, whereas they can get gas from whatever other countries?” said Wuttke, a partner at Washington-based DGA Group.

Beijing, meanwhile, is in no hurry, even though the recent U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has given Chinese officials reason to reconsider the reliability of the oil and natural gas it gets from the region.

“It’s better to still marinate the Russians,” Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said of China’s approach to the negotiations. “Wait for the Russian economic situation to deteriorate even further—the Russians really on their knees—to subscribe to terms that are beneficial to China.”

The strategy has history on its side. The first Power of Siberia pipeline was negotiated for 15 years before Moscow and Beijing finally agreed to terms in May 2014. The signing occurred just two months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which threatened Moscow’s access to European financing and forced a breakthrough in the yearslong pricing deadlock with the Chinese. While Russia managed to guard its upstream assets from Chinese ownership, Beijing held the upper hand on pricing, securing a heavily discounted rate tied to oil prices.

Power of Siberia 2, however, would pump gas from fields that once supplied Europe. Its success would vindicate Russia’s pivot to Asia, the strategic gamble Putin made when the Ukraine war severed Moscow’s economic ties with the West. Its failure would signal something more damning: China, which holds nearly all the cards in the relationship, has no intention of being Europe’s replacement for Russia.

China’s leverage extends far beyond energy. Xi has used the country’s economic power to force Putin to make a concession in the past year, said Chinese government advisers and diplomats familiar with the matter. Moscow acquiesced to the Chinese yuan to be the primary currency for a planned regional-development bank covering Central Asia, known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Development Bank.

Moscow had resisted that arrangement for more than a decade, wary of China’s expanding footprint in territory it has long considered its sphere of influence. Lately, Russia’s financial isolation has forced the country to reconsider, and it has signaled it is open to joining the bank as a member, according to the Chinese advisers and diplomats. In return, Moscow has sought assurances that the bank would operate outside the constraints of Western sanctions.

Other China-led multilateral lenders have been unwilling to offer such workarounds. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western pressure led to Russia getting cut off by both the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, the Shanghai lender affiliated with BRICS, a bloc of developing countries that’s an acronym for its main members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Organizers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are expecting to secure a memorandum of understanding from prospective members to launch the bank in August, ahead of a leaders’ summit. Such a move would thrust former Soviet states, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, closer to Beijing, which is working to become the dominant force in Central Asia.

A question of face

The visuals from Putin’s recent visit to Beijing drew immediate notice. Chinese state media photographed Putin alongside a giant portrait of the two leaders. Viewed from the side, the portrait appeared to show Xi looming over Putin, who is looking up adoringly.

Chinese diplomats told the Journal that the staging wasn’t meant to belittle Putin in any way. Putin’s sensitivity to this kind of status symbolism is well documented. When former President Barack Obama once compared Putin’s slouch and body language to “the bored kid in the back of the classroom,” the comment infuriated him. Putin’s relationship with Obama went into a deep freeze.

“He’s very emotional about this,” said Sergey Radchenko, a Russia scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Anybody who has treated him with a slight—this registered with Putin.”

The history of Sino-Russian relations offers a cautionary tale about what happens when the senior partner overplays its hand. When Mao Zedong visited Moscow in 1950 to forge the Sino-Soviet alliance, Soviet propaganda posters depicted Stalin as slightly taller than Mao—a carefully calibrated signal of who was the elder brother. (In reality, Mao had at least four inches on the diminutive Stalin). It was that kind of insistence on dominance that eventually blew the alliance apart in the 1960s, a rupture that took decades to repair and handed Washington enormous strategic advantage.

“The lesson of this relationship,” said Radchenko, “is that you don’t use your position as the senior partner to humiliate the junior partner.”

So far, he said, Xi has played along with that lesson—giving Putin room, maintaining the appearances of equality in public, even as the underlying reality has shifted decisively in China’s favor.

But managing a weakened partner is proving harder than expected for Xi.

Beijing has grown uneasy about Russia’s deepening military entanglement with North Korea, which has sent troops to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. The arrangement has unsettled Chinese officials, who have long considered Pyongyang within their own orbit.

In particular, Beijing is worried that any Russian transfer of technology would improve North Korea’s nuclear or submarine capabilities and immediately push South Korea and Japan closer to the U.S.—directly undermining Beijing’s attempts to exploit friction between Seoul and Washington and draw South Korea toward China’s orbit.

When Putin made his first foreign trip after his March 2024 re-election—a vote widely criticized in the West as neither free nor fair—his original plan was to visit Beijing and then travel directly to Pyongyang. The Chinese side asked him to create distance between the two stops—because a back-to-back China-Russia-North Korea sequence would feed exactly the “axis of authoritarians” narrative Beijing is eager to avoid. Putin obliged, rerouting to Vietnam to provide cover.

Asked about Moscow’s deepening ties with Pyongyang, China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing respects “the friendly exchanges” between the two countries and their relationship is “conducive to promoting peace and stability.”

Putin has pushed privately for a trilateral summit between Russia, China and North Korea, said people familiar with the matter—a proposal Beijing declined.

Xi instead headed to Pyongyang himself in early June, for the first time in seven years. Analysts said the visit was an effort to reassert that Beijing, not Moscow, remains North Korea’s principal patron.

To that end, Beijing has shelved its longstanding demand that Pyongyang commit to denuclearization before receiving deeper Chinese engagement and support.

“In principle China hasn’t abandoned denuclearization—realizing a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula remains the long-term goal,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank. “But in the near term, China will no longer make denuclearization a precondition of every interaction with North Korea.”

For now, Beijing’s long game remains intact. China is quietly building relationships inside Russia that extend well beyond Putin—cultivating ties with officials and elites who will shape the country after he is gone. Anti-Western sentiment, some analysts say, has become so structurally embedded in Russian society and institutions that it will outlast the man who stoked it.

The trajectory points toward something that would have been unimaginable to the Russia of a decade ago.

“China really has a very good chance to turn Russia into a kind of giant Laos, giant Pakistan,” Gabuev said. “A country much more dependent on China, much more connected to China, much more looking up to China as a model and as a source of modernity.”

Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com