At the Communist Party’s 19th Congress in 2017, Xi Jinping told the assembled cadres that China was ready to “enter the center stage of global affairs.” With the U.S. and its Western allies now imposing harsh economic sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, China’s time may have come.  As generations of Chinese leaders had envisioned, China’s economic prowess now provides it with the capacity to backstop any major country that faces financial sanctions put in place by “imperialist” G7 countries. This ability to support a major international pariah with billions of dollars unambiguously places China as one of the two superpowers in the world.  Any such move to support Russia would help both countries and their leaders in different ways. It would also drive these countries toward an increasingly autarkic Eurasian economic bloc, albeit one which large segments of their respective entrepreneurial and creative elites would find undesirable.  With