Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 99–130
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Since 1996, Russia and China have been united in what both call a ‘strategic partnership’. There is a good deal of presentism – the infinite extrapolation of now – in Western analyses of the relationship. But as English historian A.J.P Taylor said of the lessons of history, the only visible pattern to the relationship between Moscow and Beijing over the past six decades is that there is no pattern. The current stage will more than likely give way to another that could surprise us, as previous ones have. The direction of such shifts has generally defied expectations. The explanations – China’s dependency on Russia, ideological bonds, animosities rooted in history and race – adduced to predict the course of Russia–China relations repeatedly proved invalid. The relationship was never as solid as it seemed, nor as dangerous. The policies of third countries did influence its course at times, but the prime movers were the principals themselves.
Reverence, realpolitik, reconciliation
For roughly a decade after Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, China and Russia were united by a fealty to Marxism–Leninism. There was, to be sure, hardnosed calculation on both sides. The Soviet-run Comintern gave the CCP some spectacularly bad advice in the 1920s – to ally with the Nationalists, who turned on it, quickly and mercilessly. True to form, Stalin hoped that a weak, Kuomintang-run China would allow him to retain the concessions it had given the USSR in Manchuria. He did not cast his lot with the CCP until the tide turned in its direction and he concluded that a Kuomintang victory would redound to the benefit of the United States. Mao was thus mindful that the Kremlin’s rhetoric about revolution had not negated its realism. But the Chinese communists were eager to transform China and places beyond, and Stalin, while more cautious by instinct and temperament, regarded the establishment of the PRC as evidence of socialism’s forward march. Mao did not plan to mimic the particulars of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, but he did consider it a valuable example of how to force-march a backward country toward modernity.
Solidifying this period of doctrinally based kinship was a Chinese sense of vulnerability to the United States, particularly after the Korean War, when America extended the doctrine of containment to Asia and deployed permanent military forces in South Korea and, worse in Mao’s eyes, Japan. Even before that, in February 1950, China and the Soviet Union signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which replaced the treaty between the USSR and the Kuomintang regime. Though the product of hard bargaining, it was an asymmetric accord that codified China’s dependence on the Soviet Union for economic aid and protection.
Mao’s reverence toward the USSR proved fleeting and in any event was mixed, even while Stalin was alive, with irritation at having to play the role of disciple. The catalyst for change was Nikita Khrushchev, whom the Chinese leader...
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Rajan Menon is Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations, Lehigh University, and Fellow, New America Foundation.
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