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. “People rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child,” Xi remarked, prompting discussion 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.
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 for leaders. In China, a man of 72 can statistically expect to live another nine years. Putin, meanwhile, is already nearing normal Russian life expectancy at birth.
Neither man has shown the least inclination to surrender power—so how long they think they have matters. While Putin appears more focused on his own personal immortality, Xi’s desire for a different kind of immortality may prove more geopolitically significant.
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 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 ones. His relatively casual approach may represent the different obsessions of the two dictators.
Putin, for his part, has shown a long-standing fixation on the idea of extending his lifespan. In early 2024, he announced the “New Health-Saving Technologies” initiative, focused on geriatric medicine. This June, the Russian Ministry of Health sought rapid proposals on aging and especially bioprinting, 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, population, even if they are unlikely to produce results given a sclerotic and politicized scientific establishment whose members are fleeing abroad.
But Putin’s personal interventions suggest he has bigger ambitions. Russia’s president has placed pseudoscientific crank Mikhail Kovalchuk, the brother of a close billionaire ally, in prominent scientific positions. After Kovalchuk was rejected for higher offices by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2009, Putin effectively destroyed the institution’s power in 2013.
Kovalchuk is a genetic engineering enthusiast who claims that nanorobots could make people immortal and fears that Americans are stealing Russians’ precious bodily fluids. Another prominent Putin-backed scientist and crank theorist said that scientists “love to discuss the problem of human immortality.” For a leader who has always emphasized his physical virility, these are tempting delusions.
Aging is certainly a problem for Xi, but there’s 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’s back and whose occasional disappearances from public view may be linked to health issues. (One recurrent claim in the diaspora rumor mill is that he suffers from gout.)
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 in 2018. His health is managed by a long-standing medical team devoted to the leadership, introduced after the unexpected death of a top party figure in 1950.
But Xi doesn’t seem to share Putin’s immortality obsession. China’s scientific targets under his control have been pragmatic, manufacturing- and energy-oriented, and highly successful. While he is a long-standing advocate of so-called traditional Chinese medicine, which is big business in China, and scientists include routine obeisance to his ideas in papers, Xi has avoided promoting individual cranks.
China has plenty of individual scientists pushing the envelope on ideas like head transplants or modifying fetuses. But they don’t have official approval, and in some cases, like geneticist He Jiankui, their work has resulted in jail time for breaking medical rules.
Yet ironically, it’s China, not Russia, whose leaders have a traditional fixation on the idea of bodily immortality. Bodily immortality was an obsession 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.
Many of these potions involved mercury, lead, and arsenic. They were not successful.
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’s rule became a byword for tyranny, and he spent his last years searching vainly for immortality before dying just before his 50th birthday—likely of poisoning from the elixirs he was drinking.
He wouldn’t 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 “the Daoist emperor.” He fixated on a concoction called “red lead” 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 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.
But while bodily immortality might have a poor odor in Chinese history, there’s another type of immortality that’s far more respectable: self-apotheosis. As Michael Puett detailed in his study To Become a God, 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 “this 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.”
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’s territory is still a powerful one. The language around Mao, one of Xi’s role models, constantly referred back to metaphors of immortality.
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’s more likely to be through his project of restoring national greatness—whether that’s a moderately prosperous society by 2030, or conquering Taiwan.
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