Mending Fences

The Evolution of Moscow's China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin

Elizabeth Wishnick

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295802459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Mending Fences illuminates the forces driving Moscow's China policy, from the Ussuri River clashes in 1969 to the "strategic partnership" of the 1990s. Elizabeth Wishnick, noted expert on the Russia and China, analyzes the efforts of Soviet leaders simultaneously to maintain their supremacy in the international communist movement, defend their borders from a perceived China threat, and ensure the compliance of regional authorities in enforcing China policy. Although a consensus in favor of containing China prevailed within the Moscow policy community throughout the 1970s, major shifts in China policy came with changes in the Soviet leadership, most notably in the mid-1980s. As many Russians became disenchanted with Western models of market democracy and with their country's sharply curtailed role in international affairs in the post-Soviet era, the Yeltsin administration touted a growing "strategic partnership" with China. Wishnick outlines the successes of Russian-Chinese cooperation and analyzes the main barriers to full-scale partnership, including historical grievances, limited economic ties, tensions in regional relations. Despite ongoing efforts by Russian and Chinese leaders to resolve these issues, she concludes that the future of the Sino-Russian partnership will depend on an unpredictable interplay of forces of domestic and international change. Mending Fences is the result of a decade of research in Moscow, Beijing, and the regions along the Russo-Chinese border. Fluent in Russian and Chinese, the author has drawn on recently declassified documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the KGB, and the Khabarovsk Regional Communist Party; numerous interviews with influential Russian and Chinese officials and scholars; and regional and national periodicals and books from both Russia and China. The first work in recent years to analyze Russian-Chinese relations from Moscow's perspective, Mending Fences is a necessary addition to the literature on the late Cold War era and the strategic triangle between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China.

1 / Introduction

Relations between Moscow and Beijing have gone full circle in the past half century—from alliance to containment and now back to strategic partnership. Moscow’s part in this dynamic is the subject of the present study, which seeks to resolve some of the remaining mysteries about the slow evolution of the Soviet Union’s, and now Russia’s, China policy since 1969.¹

While highlighting the importance of the foreign policy process for policy outcomes (in Russia and more generally), the book tells the tale of relations between the two great neighbors from border confrontation in 1969 to strategic partnership in 1999, and explains the persistence of conflict during the Brezhnev era and the sources of change in relations in subsequent periods. Although a key focus of the study is on post-1991 developments, discussion of the post-1969 history of relations is crucial to understanding the contemporary relationship. Historical grievances continue to cast a shadow on Sino-Russian relations today, especially in the border regions.² Thanks to the availability of new documentary evidence, recent scholarship on both sides of the Amur River has begun to reexamine many contested issues, and the publication of new historical analyses has fueled debates on current developments.³

To understand the ebbs and flows in Moscow’s China policy, it is necessary to look within the Soviet and post-Soviet political process. Although international developments, especially interaction in the Sino-Soviet-American strategic triangle, have exerted an important influence on Moscow’s relations with China, the main sources of stasis and change have come from within. As Robert Putnam has shown, two sets of negotiations often take place to resolve international problems—one in the international arena, and another at home.⁴ Leadership change in Moscow played a key role by bringing into power new coalitions of political leaders with different interests in China policy.

This study reconstructs the strategic environment facing the top decision-makers in Moscow during the Soviet period and shows how they formulated China policy in response to three audiences that were instrumental in legitimating Soviet power: the international communist movement, political and military officials in Moscow, and leaders in the Russian border regions. Motivated by concerns specific to their constituent members, the three audiences elaborated divergent historical narratives of relations between Moscow and Beijing and used these accounts to press their interests in China policy.⁵

Above all, Soviet leaders aspired to present a united front to the world on China policy. Because China’s alternative vision of socialist development challenged the Soviet Union’s leadership of the communist movement as well as the validity of its own path to socialism as a model for other ruling parties, Soviet leaders made sure that officials in Moscow and the border regions spoke with one voice and sought to coordinate a unified response by socialist bloc countries.

While researchers typically have confined their analyses of the influence of policies on specific constituencies to democratic states, this study shows that Soviet leaders continuously sought the support of officials in Moscow, the border regions, and the international communist movement.⁶ New evidence from archives and interviews shows that these three audiences were hard to please. Often the means used by Soviet leaders to maintain the appearance of unity within these three spheres, especially in the international communist movement, worked at cross-purposes with Moscow’s strategic goals in the US-USSR-PRC triangle.⁷

By the early 1980s, the crisis in Poland over the Solidarity movement and the rise of Eurocommunism created new obstacles for the achievement of united responses within the socialist community regarding China and many other central questions. As border tensions receded from memory, Soviet regional officials pressed for reopening Sino-Soviet border trade.⁸ Meanwhile, in Moscow, different views on China policy became more apparent, although proponents of retaining the previous policy of containing China held the upper hand until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

Gorbachev’s commitment to the reform of the Soviet model led to the promotion of reformers who had long favored a reassessment not only of China’s post-1979 reform model but also of the USSR’s China policy. Gorbachev’s reform program called for involving the Soviet Union in new forms of economic cooperation, and in the mid-1980s, the Soviet leader finally acceded to the wishes of regional leaders to reopen border trade with China. Moreover, as Gorbachev sought new approaches to socialist development, he encouraged fellow socialist leaders to do the same while admitting the possibility of different roads to socialism. No longer was unity on China policy an essential component of intra-bloc relations.

The demise of communism and then the collapse of the Soviet Union itself coincided with the rise in centrifugal tendencies within the Russian Federation. The demands of the regional audience began to influence national policy more than in earlier decades. Similarly, by the early 1990s, the factional politics underlying the formulation of Russia’s foreign policy became more apparent and the range of perspectives on Russia’s China policy began to be defined more sharply. The Yeltsin administration quickly became disenchanted with Russia’s initial pro-West foreign policy orientation and began to pursue a strategy more balanced between East and West. Sino-Russian partnership became the Yeltsin team’s new watchword, although this new policy faced criticism, especially in the Russian border regions. In Moscow as well, moderates who favored closer ties with the West and nationalists who feared China’s rise in power criticized increased Sino-Russian cooperation.

DOMESTIC-INTERNATIONAL LINKAGES IN THE STRATEGIC TRIANGLE

While there is a voluminous literature on the US-USSR-PRC strategic triangle,⁹ the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet dispute has received the lion’s share of attention. As Donald Treadgold pointed out, there are few attempts to explain the specific configuration of international and domestic developments influencing Moscow’s behavior in the triangle.¹⁰

According to realist theories of international relations, less powerful states respond to threats from a greater power by balancing against that power.¹¹ In the context of a strategic triangle, however, balancing becomes a matter of degree. When one of the three states perceives at least one of the other two as a threat, that state tries to avoid having simultaneously poor relations with the other two and endeavors at all cost to prevent collusion between them.

The term “collusion” simplifies reality—when two of the three sides share parallel interests, the third may perceive collusion between the side it considers to be its main enemy and the secondary adversary. The aim of each is to avoid collusion of the two others, and to blackmail one’s main enemy by threatening collusion with the third.¹² The way one state avoids collusion by the other two depends on the patterns of alignment in the triangle.

Analysts of triangular interaction typically look for patterns of tactical flexibility, whereas Brezhnev-era China policy—with a few exceptions in the early 1970s and early 1980s—was remarkably consistent and largely unresponsive to change in the international environment. While Soviet leaders had a compelling interest in fashioning an international environment that would enable them to achieve their foreign policy goals, the pressures generated by American and Chinese actions in the triangle were by no means determining.¹³ To fully understand Soviet behavior, it is necessary to examine the choices made by policymakers in Moscow.

Balancing behavior typically includes increasing military capabilities as well as seeking allies against the threatening state. From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, however, the strategy employed by Soviet policymakers focused on two main tasks, which often worked at cross-purposes. Because Soviet policymakers saw Chinese policies as a military threat and a challenge to Soviet preeminence in the communist movement, building up Soviet capabilities had an important political component.¹⁴ While Soviet leaders devoted considerable resources to shoring up the USSR’s defenses against China, especially in the border area, they mounted an equal effort to respond to China’s political challenge to Soviet leadership of the communist movement by coordinating a countervailing strategy with allied parties, the Moscow policy community, and regional communist party officials in the Russian border regions.

The second component of Soviet strategy involved efforts to prevent China from increasing its security through an alliance with the United States. However, the measures the Soviet leadership employed to meet China’s political-military challenge created a security dilemma for the Chinese leaders and drove them to seek closer relations with the United States.¹⁵ These measures also limited the ability of the Soviet Union to balance the Chinese threat with closer ties to the United States because they reinforced American views of a Soviet threat.

By the 1980s, however, the domestic-international linkages in Moscow’s China policy began to evolve. As tensions emerged in Sino-American relations and Soviet-American relations reached an unprecedented low point in the early 1980s, China sought a more independent foreign policy stance and simultaneously embarked on a major program of economic modernization. Within a few years, the Soviet Union, too, began a program of domestic reform. As the differences in Soviet and Chinese domestic strategies narrowed and the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s leadership became more tolerant of diversity in the international communist movement, China’s challenge to Soviet domestic interests was reduced greatly.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, domestic factors once again began to work at cross-purposes with Moscow’s goals in the triangle. Once President Boris Yeltsin decided on a foreign policy balanced between the West and the East, the Russian leadership focused on the development of a strategic partnership with China to offset perceived pressures from the United States. However, the Russian border regions, which initially favored the improvement of Sino-Russian relations, especially in the economic sphere, soon began to express their opposition to what some regional leaders saw as a one-sided orientation toward China. While policymakers in Moscow viewed China as the centerpiece of Russian foreign policy, in some of the border regions China was regarded as a potential threat, and regional leaders expressed their preference for a foreign economic strategy directed at a broader range of states, including the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

POLITICAL STRUCTURE, COALITION POLITICS, AND BREZHNEV’S CHINA POLICY

Ever since George Kennan’s pioneering analysis of the impact of Soviet totalitarianism on Soviet foreign policy, analysts of the domestic sources of Moscow’s foreign policy have noted that the nature of the regime influences foreign policymaking.¹⁶ In particular, the Soviet Union’s adherence to a Leninist conception of party and bloc structure played a key role in its China policy.

The limited de-Stalinization of Soviet ideology begun in the Khrushchev era had profound implications for Moscow’s relations with its socialist neighbors in Eastern Europe and China and raised questions about the legitimacy of the Soviet system itself. When Chinese departures from the Soviet model began to coincide with mounting challenges in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet leaders, especially in the Brezhnev era, formulated a China policy premised on the need to maintain the legitimacy of the Soviet model of socialism as well as the Soviet Union’s leadership of the communist movement.¹⁷

Many scholars have examined the deterioration of the Sino-Soviet relationship in the 1950s, which ultimately led to sharp public exchanges of ideological polemics in the early 1960s.¹⁸ By 1966, the Chinese Communist Party refused to send representatives to the Twenty-third Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and the split between the two parties became official. The extremism of the Cultural Revolution deepened the ideological fault lines between the two neighbors. Tensions between the two countries were reflected in periodic border skirmishes in the 1960s, which escalated to actual exchanges of fire on Damanskii/Zhen Bao Island in the spring of 1969 and in other border areas throughout the summer.

While the September 1969 meeting between Zhou Enlai and Aleksei Kosygin diffused the military confrontation in the border regions, the Soviets and the Chinese maintained a Cold War of their own for another fifteen years. From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, the Brezhnev leadership advocated normalizing Sino-Soviet relations while pursuing a containment policy towards China.¹⁹ Soviet strategy, involving a massive military build-up in the Far East and interference in Third World conflicts to counter Chinese interests, not only confirmed Chinese fears of a Soviet threat but also undermined détente with the United States.

The Soviet leadership selected this course of action to defend their vulnerable border, ensure military superiority in case of hostilities with China, and compensate for the foreign policy costs of continued ideological differences with China over issues such as relations with the West, socialist states, and the international communist movement.²⁰ These ideological differences led key Soviet policymakers to overestimate the military threat posed by China, particularly to the Russian border regions, although military observers proved more sober in their analysis of the limitations of Chinese military power.

Soviet political leaders used ideological concepts to justify their policy choices in an effort to legitimate their own political power.²¹ Because only they had the authority to set the ideological parameters of debate on key issues, adherence to the party line became the prerequisite for a role in the policy process and the main criterion for membership in the communist movement.²²

Marxist-Leninist ideology served as a rationale for policy in that it functioned as a conceptual framework, which influenced the choice of alternatives, provided a sense of purpose, and facilitated agenda-building.²³ This framework presented barriers to policy innovation, since there was no real provision for responding to problems that departed from accepted doctrinal concepts, barring revision of the concepts themselves.²⁴ A Soviet leader’s decision to revise the ideology could undermine his own power (as happened with Gorbachev) because ideological concepts endowed his rule with legitimacy.²⁵

As long as Marxist-Leninist ideology justified Soviet policy, the Soviet Union required that other socialist states legitimate its preeminent role in the communist world and mirror Soviet policy choices. According to Ken Jowitt, this is because the structure of the socialist bloc paralleled that of the Leninist party. In Jowitt’s view, Leninist parties are novel in that they combine modern and traditional elements. While providing a framework for addressing contemporary problems such as class struggle, he argues, Leninist parties are structured according to status considerations typical of traditional peasant societies: (1) insiders (i.e., party members) are distinguished from outsiders (non-members); (2) security is derived from member...