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Relations between China and Russia is like that popular saying: “Those who fight desire each other.” This Monday, the Government of the United States confirmed that President Vladimir Putin has asked his Chinese counterpart for military help to complete as soon as possible an invasion of Ukraine that is resisting him more than expected, according to senior officials of the president’s administration. Joe Biden. If it occurs, this collaboration should not mislead us as far as history is concerned.
The reality is quite different. Except for specific moments, China and Russia have always been enemies. Throughout the Middle and Modern Ages, they only shared destinies during the domination of the Mongols in the 14th century.
In the past century, conflicts have been common, from the disputes over Eastern Siberia to the desire to control Central Asia or the Arctic, passing through the serious border clashes during the cold war, which even threatened to unleash the Third World War. which has been talked about so much lately.
In fact, the same president of the United States, Joe Biden, referred to it last week, when he announced new measures to punish the Russian economy: “We will defend every inch of NATO territory. We are not going to fight a war against Russia in the Ukraine. The confrontation between NATO and Russia would be the Third World War. Something that we have to prevent at all costs. Far from lowering the tension, Putin announced, a few days earlier, that he had placed his country’s nuclear forces on maximum alert.
“A bloody incident”
This is not to be taken lightly, since Russia currently has 5,977 nuclear warheads, according to a recent report by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Of these, 1,500 are pending dismantling, but 4,477 are available for use. However, it is also true that this same threat from the Kremlin is not new, since there have already been others in the past precisely against China. The most serious of all occurred in 1969, when ABC reports suggested that the world was going to blow up: “The Chinese government sent a delegation to Russia to negotiate, but later the USSR was involved in a new bloody incident and accused Beijing, hinting that it intended to carry out a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.”
As with the current war in Ukraine, the planet was watching with trepidation the possibility of a new large-scale confrontation like the one that had devastated Asia and Europe in World War II. With a stroke of the pen, the ideological affinity that supposedly existed between the two vanished, as on so many other occasions throughout the 20th century. In the 1950s, the USSR and China swore together to defend socialism against Western capitalism. A decade earlier, Stalin supported the Chinese Communist Party after it won its civil war and took control of most of the country.
In 1949, Mao Tse-tung even promised “10,000 years of friendship and teamwork between them”, later signing a treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance. Even thousands of Soviet specialists helped create a solid infrastructure in Beijing. The deal was so important to Mao that he even traveled to Moscow to negotiate it in person, leaving his country for the second time in his life. Stalin’s treatment of him, however, left much to be desired, as he kept the Chinese leader abandoned for weeks in an inhospitable dacha on the outskirts of the Soviet capital. Only after many concessions did he agree to finance his partner, to return to him some territories occupied after World War II, and to defend him in case of invasion.
the nuclear threat
The new Chinese communist government soon realized that this “friendship” with the Soviet dictator rarely came for free, because when he decided to intervene in the Korean War to prevent the defeat of the communist north, the Russian leader warned that he would have to pay religiously each shipment of weapons that he provided. A strange marriage of convenience that, furthermore, went to hell as soon as Stalin died in 1953, as Mao took the opportunity to try to make China the new leader of the socialist bloc.
The Chinese communist leader did not like the direction that Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was taking in international policy, as he had begun to push for “peaceful coexistence” with the West. To gain the upper hand, Mao Tse-tung even publicly insinuated that he would have no fear of unleashing a nuclear war against the United States, the great enemy of the communist bloc in the Cold War. And then he declared that he did not recognize the borders that Beijing and Moscow had established in the 19th century.
In anticipation of a possible invasion, the Soviet Union sent nearly 300,000 soldiers to its border in 1967. Diplomatic relations between the two were never the same, especially when the conflict between them broke out two years later with the surprise attack from 300 Chinese military personnel to 55 Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island. Most were killed at close range. In 1965, the Moscow government had already warned Beijing that its borders were sacred: “Whoever dares to violate them will unleash the most resolute aftershocks.” Obviously, he ignored it.
“A Revolutionary War”
Khrushchev claimed that the island belonged to his country under an agreement signed in 1860 by the tsars, but Beijing argued that this was “unfair.” He urged the USSR to return no less than 20,000 square kilometers of territory and six hundred islands with an area of more than 1,000 kilometers more. “If a handful of warmongering maniacs dared to attack Chinese sites, the aggression would be repulsed and 700 million Chinese would wage a revolutionary war,” the main Chinese news agency warned.
Two weeks after the attack, an infantry division attacked the island again, forcing the Soviets to withdraw after heavy fighting. They responded with rocket launchers and annihilated their enemies. The terrible death toll was not very hopeful: 58 from the USSR and several hundred in China. The biggest fear was still that a nuclear war would break out between the two that would affect the entire world. At the last moment, however, urgent talks at the same Beijing airport, photographs of which were published by ABC, began new border negotiations… without bombs involved.
The solution was not final. “It is almost impossible for the USSR and China to reach a real solution to their border rivalries. The arguments published by the two parties in recent years prove that the road they should travel is too long and thorny, ”explained this newspaper in 1969. And he was not wrong, because the tension continued.
Post-Soviet Russia
In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping signed a treaty on the demilitarization of the aforementioned border and declared the normalization of bilateral relations. In 1991, Russia finally ceded the controversial island of Zhenbao and half a hundred kilometers from its border. This did not prevent the next president of the People’s Republic of China, Jiang Zemin, from labeling Gorbachev a “traitor to communism” when the dismemberment of the USSR took place.
Beijing also had its pluses and minuses with Borís Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, while they were closing their border conflicts of the past. In the fall of 2003, new territories came under the control of the Beijing government. In 2005 they signed a new treaty by which the two powers undertook not to be the first to attack the other with nuclear weapons. The alleged rapprochement continued three years later, with another agreement in which the border was supposedly delimited.
With Putin in power, Moscow has continued to deepen an enduring alliance with Beijing, albeit always based on a common enemy: the West. It does not matter whether this is established at a political or economic level, such as energy supply agreements. And, of course, in the military field, such as exchanges of sophisticated defense systems or arms sales. In fact, Putin and the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, meet several times a year. The latter, with the last request of the Russian leader regarding Ukraine, faces a key decision for the future of the world.
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