{"id":28380,"date":"2025-09-06T21:27:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T01:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/putin-and-xis-hot-mic-moment-shows-obsession-with-outlasting-death\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T21:27:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T01:27:04","slug":"putin-and-xis-hot-mic-moment-shows-obsession-with-outlasting-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/putin-and-xis-hot-mic-moment-shows-obsession-with-outlasting-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin and Xi\u2019s Hot Mic Moment Shows Obsession With Outlasting Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic at the recent military parade in Beijing discussing the prospect of human longevity. \u201cPeople rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child,\u201d Xi remarked, prompting discussion<\/a> by Putin on how human organs could now be replaced and people might live forever. Xi responded by saying that maybe even in the 21st century, people would live to 150.<\/p>\n

At 72, Xi and Putin are almost exactly the same age. By recent U.S. presidential standards, they might seem like sprightly younglings, but that makes them a decade older than the global average<\/a> for leaders. In China, a man of 72 can statistically expect to live another<\/a> nine years. Putin, meanwhile, is already nearing normal Russian life expectancy at birth.<\/p>\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic at the recent military parade in Beijing discussing the prospect of human longevity. \u201cPeople rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child,\u201d Xi remarked, prompting discussion<\/a> by Putin on how human organs could now be replaced and people might live forever. Xi responded by saying that maybe even in the 21st century, people would live to 150.<\/p>\n

At 72, Xi and Putin are almost exactly the same age. By recent U.S. presidential standards, they might seem like sprightly younglings, but that makes them a decade older than the global average<\/a> for leaders. In China, a man of 72 can statistically expect to live another<\/a> nine years. Putin, meanwhile, is already nearing normal Russian life expectancy at birth.<\/p>\n

Neither man has shown the least inclination to surrender power\u2014so how long they think they have matters. While Putin appears more focused on his own personal immortality, Xi\u2019s desire for a different kind of immortality may prove more geopolitically significant.<\/p>\n

Listening to their hot mic moment, Putin certainly sounds to me like the more serious of the two, while Xi may be enjoying some avuncular bullshit. Even autocrats have to make small talk, after all. Xi may not rise to the level of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who once, according to biographer<\/a> William Taubman, told President Dwight Eisenhower that the Soviet Union had cross-bred zebras and cows to make a new striped animal. But Xi does make jokes, if not very good<\/a> ones. His relatively casual approach may represent the different obsessions of the two dictators.<\/p>\n

Putin, for his part, has shown a long-standing fixation on the idea of extending his lifespan. In early 2024, he announced the \u201cNew Health-Saving Technologies<\/a>\u201d initiative, focused on geriatric medicine. This June, the Russian Ministry of Health sought rapid proposals<\/a> on aging and especially bioprinting<\/a>, the potential replacement of human organs by 3D-printed models using organic materials. These are legitimate projects for a country with an aging, and shrinking<\/a>, population, even if they are unlikely to produce results given a sclerotic and politicized scientific establishment whose members are fleeing<\/a> abroad.<\/p>\n

But Putin\u2019s personal interventions suggest he has bigger ambitions. Russia\u2019s president has placed pseudoscientific crank<\/a> Mikhail Kovalchuk, the brother of a close billionaire<\/a> ally, in prominent scientific positions. After Kovalchuk was rejected<\/a> for higher offices by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2009, Putin effectively destroyed the institution\u2019s power in 2013.<\/p>\n

Kovalchuk is a genetic engineering enthusiast who claims that nanorobots could make people immortal and fears that Americans are stealing Russians\u2019 precious bodily fluids<\/a>. Another prominent Putin-backed scientist and crank theorist<\/a> said that scientists \u201clove to discuss the problem of human immortality.\u201d For a leader who has always emphasized his physical virility, these are tempting delusions.<\/p>\n

Aging is certainly a problem for Xi, but there\u2019s much less sign of him being particularly interested in scientific solutions. Like all Chinese leaders, details of his health are a closely guarded secret, but he is an overweight man who, according to Taiwanese intelligence sources, secretly smokes behind his wife\u2019s back and whose occasional disappearances from public view may be linked to health issues<\/a>. (One recurrent claim in the diaspora rumor mill is that he suffers from gout.)<\/p>\n

After the chaos caused by an aging and eccentric Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party effectively imposed retirement ages, limiting the top leader to a decade in office. Xi smashed those rules<\/a> in 2018. His health is managed by a long-standing medical team<\/a> devoted to the leadership, introduced after the unexpected death of a top party figure in 1950.<\/p>\n

But Xi doesn\u2019t seem to share Putin\u2019s immortality obsession. China\u2019s scientific targets under his control have been pragmatic, manufacturing- and energy-oriented, and highly successful<\/a>. While he is a long-standing advocate of so-called traditional Chinese medicine<\/a>, which is big business<\/a> in China, and scientists include routine obeisance to his ideas in papers, Xi has avoided promoting individual cranks.<\/p>\n

China has plenty of individual scientists pushing the envelope on ideas like head transplants<\/a> or modifying fetuses. But they don\u2019t have official approval, and in some cases, like geneticist He Jiankui, their work has resulted in jail time for breaking medical rules.<\/p>\n

Yet ironically, it\u2019s China, not Russia, whose leaders have a traditional fixation on the idea of bodily immortality. Bodily immortality was an obsession<\/a> of Daoist thinkers, a varied group of mystics, cranks, and proto-scientists. Some sought to live forever through spiritual contemplation and breathing exercises, but many believed that they could discover an immortality elixir, a concoction that would transform their body and soul forever.<\/p>\n

Many of these potions involved mercury, lead, and arsenic. They were not successful.<\/p>\n

For the Confucian intelligentsia who set the cultural norms, the idea of physical immortality had a disreputable smell, partially because of its Daoist origins and partially because it was an obsession of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China. Despite his success, Qin\u2019s rule became a byword for tyranny, and he spent his last years searching vainly for immortality before dying just before his 50th birthday\u2014likely of poisoning from the elixirs he was drinking.<\/p>\n

He wouldn\u2019t be the only one. At least half a dozen, and maybe more, Chinese emperors died of elixir poisoning over the centuries to come, with the likely last case occurring as late as 1725. One particularly nasty case was in the 16th century, when the Jiajing emperor was known as \u201cthe Daoist emperor.\u201d He fixated on a concoction called \u201cred lead\u201d made from alchemical ingredients and the menstrual blood of malnourished teen virgins. His combination of physical and sexual abuse of women led to a failed attempt<\/a> to kill him by over a dozen of the women he held in slavery, but his own self-poisoning likely led to his death at 59.<\/p>\n

But while bodily immortality might have a poor odor in Chinese history, there\u2019s another type of immortality that\u2019s far more respectable: self-apotheosis. As Michael Puett detailed<\/a> in his study To Become a God<\/em>, early Chinese emperors believed that through the correct sacrifices to the right spirits and gods at the right places, they could ascend to Heaven. This had geopolitical implications, since \u201cthis created a dynamic in which the ruler tried to gain more land and undertake more travels in order to appropriate more and more divine power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Xi presumably does not believe he can sacrifice to the gods on the sacred mountains and become immortal. But the idea that a leader could become figuratively immortal through restoring national greatness and expanding China\u2019s territory is still a powerful one. The language around Mao, one of Xi\u2019s role models, constantly referred<\/a> back to metaphors of immortality.<\/p>\n

Putin may be scrambling to find somebody to mix him up the modern equivalent of a mercury and arsenic cocktail. If Xi dreams of immortality, though, it\u2019s more likely to be through his project of restoring national greatness\u2014whether that\u2019s a moderately prosperous society by 2030, or conquering Taiwan<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic at the recent military parade in Beijing discussing the prospect of human longevity. \u201cPeople rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child,\u201d Xi remarked, prompting discussion by Putin on how human organs 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