OPINION — For the past month, it was an onslaught of news and photos of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in meetings with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin, China and then at the 80th anniversary military parade in Beijing celebrating the end of World War II and then press reports of the first joint submarine patrol between the Russian navy and China’s PLA navy. Mr. Putin must be pleased with the attention Mr. Xi was providing to him personally, and to a Russian Federation that invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a sovereign nation that had security assurances in 1994 from Russia.
Indeed, Mr. Putin must be pleased with the international attention he’s getting, despite the devastation he’s inflicting on Ukraine and the tens of thousands of casualties on both sides due to Russia’s invasion and Putin’s refusal to seek a halt to these hostilities. President Donald Trump invited Mr. Putin to Alaska to discuss ending this conflict, but apparently this public attention and request from Mr. Trump wasn’t enough from a seemingly over-confident Mr. Putin.
What is ironic is the attention and support Mr. Xi provides to the Russian Federation and its leader, Mr. Putin. Certainly, students and others in China must be aware of China’s contemporary relations with Russia (Soviet Union) and relations dating back to the 19th century. Are the textbooks informing students of the 42 divisions – over one million troops -- the Soviet Union deployed on China’s border in 1969, with indications that Moscow was considering a nuclear strike on Chinese nuclear facilities? Or the military clash that year on the Ussuri River, with both sides taking casualties?
In fact, Russia is the only country that has not returned Chinese territory taken during the Century of Humiliation and the unequal treaties imposed on a weak China during the 19th century and the rule of the Qing dynasty. The Treaty of Peking (1860) ceded to the Russian Empire land east of the Ussuri River to the Pacific Ocean, to include Vladivostok. Over 1.5 million kilometers were ceded to Russia during this period and incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia hasn’t returned this seized territory to China. Others have: Britain returned Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories to China in 1997; Portugal returned Macau to China in 1999.
At the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1, 2021, Mr. Xi said: “After the Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.”
These were powerful words and a commitment to ensure that China is never again so humiliated. The irony, of course, is that China has permitted Russia to retain Vladivostok and other territory seized during this period of weakness during the Qing dynasty. Hopefully, textbooks in China accurately document this period and the treatment China received from the Russian Empire.
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In fact, it’s not hard to understand why China was so eager to work with the U.S. to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Indeed, China contributed substantially to the eventual defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and contributed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1986 decision to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 1988. Mr. Gorbachev said Afghanistan had become “a bleeding wound”. By 1991, Mr. Gorbachev resigned from the Soviet Union that was bankrupt and demoralized; this was the end of the Cold War.
It would be unfortunate if we now entered a second Cold War. China should reconsider its support to Mr. Putin with his war of aggression in Ukraine and his goal of recreating the Russian Empire. China has made significant economic and military progress since the 1979 normalization of relations with the U.S. Indeed, it was China’s relationship with the U.S. that contributed to China’s economic renaissance, now with the second largest economy in the world. China’s relations with the Global South and others are based not only on the Belt and Road initiative, but on its support to sovereign, independent countries. A close relationship with a revanchist Russian Federation is not in China’s interest.
This column by Cipher Brief Expert Joseph Detrani was first published in The Washington Times.
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