🇨🇳 China: The World’s Shopkeeper
Russian commentary (from talk-shows to Eurasianist essays) presents China as a state whose foreign policy is driven by turnover, contracts, and supply-chain dominance. Military might is acknowledged, but it is treated as a guarantor of trade routes, not as an end in itself. That is functionally the same lens through which Napoleon once viewed Britain.
🇬🇧 Britain: The Shopkeeper Who Sold the Shop
Since 2014 and especially post-Brexit British decline has become a running gag. “Англия – страна магазинов (England-the-country-of-shops),” Russians say. Then the punch-line: “но магазины закрыты” the shops are shut.
Energy, infrastructure, football clubs all sold to Qatar, China, or U.S. funds. Once the trader backed by warships; now the merchant without muscle.
🇷🇺 Russia: The Anti-Shopkeeper
Moscow defines itself against both. It fights, sacrifices, defends sovereignty, even with half-empty shelves. China accumulates. Britain liquidates. Russia endures.
⚔️ Merchant vs. Warrior
Russia admires China’s success but distrusts its logic: efficient, transactional, unheroic. So it casts itself as the last “warrior civilization”, standing guard while others trade. Two centuries after Napoleon’s insult, Russia repeats it.
