{"id":12209,"date":"2023-04-26T16:28:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T16:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=12209"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:32:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:32:38","slug":"how-does-china-and-russias-relationship-affect-the-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/how-does-china-and-russias-relationship-affect-the-west\/","title":{"rendered":"How does China and Russia’s relationship affect the West?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philip Snow’s ambitious new book \u2013 China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and<\/em> Concord \u2013<\/em> covers several centuries of history between the great powers, and asks what their current relationship status means for the rest of the world<\/h2>\n

Philip Snow has written a big book about a very big subject \u2013 Russia-China relations. It starts in 1689 with the Treaty of Nerchinsk by the Amur River and moves through the subsequent centuries\u2019 Big Brother\/Little Brother, \u201cunlimited friendship\u201d to the current somewhat cautious alliance between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. How much is genuine friendship, how much is pragmatic alliance, and how much the realpolitik of a shared border? Snow\u2019s approach in China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and<\/em> Concord<\/em> (Yale University Press) is chronological, and while there are a wealth of historical lessons, there\u2019s also a detailed consideration of where the Sino-Russian relationship is today \u2013 post-USSR, post-Mao in an era of Xiconomics and Putin\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\"Philip<\/p>\n

Perhaps you could start by telling us a bit about how you came to be interested in both Russia and China and to initially visit the two vast nations?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

As a boy in the 1960s I accompanied my parents, the novelists CP Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson, on trips to the Soviet Union where they endeavoured to build up a dialogue with Russian writers in the depths of the Cold War. In the early 1970s I also developed an interest in China, then just emerging from two decades of isolation. I studied Chinese at Oxford, and after graduation worked as a liaison officer for the Sino-British Trade Council, ancestral organisation of the CBBC. During my Oxford degree course I spent some months working to improve my spoken Mandarin at a language centre in Singapore, where I encountered a team of Soviet students who had been sent there because they were unable to go to Beijing. The experience left me intrigued by the history of contact (or lack of contact) between these two great peoples.<\/p>\n

The timing of this new book seems apposite in the light of a seemingly stronger overt relationship between Beijing and Moscow than in recent decades and a time of heightened tension both in Ukraine and the Taiwan Straits. But this has been an intermittent friendship with many ups and downs hasn’t it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

During the first 170 years after formal relations were established in 1689, Sino-Russian contacts were remarkably peaceful, with Russia observing neutrality in the Qing dynasty\u2019s conflicts and the Qing allowing Russian merchants to trade, first in Beijing and later at the border<\/a> entrep\u00f4t of Kyakhta. From the mid-1850s, however, the Tsarist government switched to a policy of territorial expansion at China\u2019s expense, first detaching the whole of \u2018Outer Manchuria\u2019, a region the size of France and Germany combined, and then moving on to create spheres of influence in the rest of Manchuria, Mongolia and Xinjiang. All of this aroused much Chinese anger as nationalist feeling mounted in the final years of the Qing.<\/p>\n

Following the downfall of Tsarism in 1917, the new Soviet Russia sought to present itself as a benevolent patron to the emerging Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties. But both the two parties disliked being micromanaged by the Kremlin, and both also suspected the Soviets of continuing to pursue the old Tsarist goals. After the PRC was established in 1949 the Soviet Union poured in political advisers to guide their Chinese \u2018younger brother\u2019, and scientists and engineers to effect \u2018the biggest technology transfer in history\u2019.\u00a0 Within a few years, however, Mao Zedong and his followers were taking steps to break free from this Soviet tutelage. Clothed in ideological verbiage, this drive for independence soon broadened to cover the old territorial grievances, with worsening border clashes that in 1969 threatened to explode into nuclear war. The rift still wasn\u2019t totally healed by the end of the Soviet period, but both the post-Soviet Russian and Chinese governments have worked hard to forge a new partnership based on equality and to turn their backs on the chequered past.<\/p>\n