Riyadh has maintained its cooperative relationship with Russia since Putin sent troops into neighbouring Ukraine in late February. In fact, at the start of the war, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Co invested at least $500m in Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil, just as the West was punishing these Russian energy giants with sanctions. By 1989, that included General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a reformist. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru That certainly seemed to be the case under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao - corruption was on the rise and his authority was being openly ignored and even challenged. Earlier this year, a Chinese friend spent 83 days alone, locked in a Shanghai hotel room. The outline of a runway and the extraordinary 9km long artificial island emerged as we approached. Now he had the ammunition to destroy his most potent political rivals. He ordered the arrest of Zhou Yongkang in 2014, who until two years before had been a member of the politburo standing committee, and one of the most powerful men in China. Convicted in 2015, Zhou too is in prison for life. In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed. Nothing that Mao would recognise, Prof Karl says.