IR Theories in the 1980s
and the Case of the Beijing-Moscow-Washington Triangle
Princeton Project
Yu Bin (March 31, 2013, 7727 words)
I. Introduction: A Glimpse at the 1980s
By any standard, the 1980s was perhaps the least eventful, or most stable, decade of the
twentieth century for Northeast Asia. The “big four” (China, Japan, Soviet Union/Russia
and the United States) did not experience any revolutions, wars or regime changes, either
within or between them.1 The fortune of the “big four” in the 1980s may also have had
global implications, as the four included the two superpowers and the Moscow-BeijingWashington trio that happened to be the biggest three “political-military states” of the
Cold War. Despite their super-state status and spectacular maneuvering, all of them in the
1980s were said to pale in comparison to Japan, the world’s most successful “trading
state.”2
Mainstream Western international relation (IR) theories tried to capture this relatively
“quiet,” if not boring, phase of the twentieth century. Realism, which had dominated the
IR field after the end of World War II, found that the last phase of the “Western civil
wars,”3 the Cold War, was not bad at all, and some even wished it would continue into
the future. After all, it was a super-stable “long peace” at the systemic level in the wake
1
A quick overview shows the following events in the twentieth century: Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05;
Republic China in 1911, World War I in 1914-18, Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Communist Party
founded in 1921 and the First Civil War started in 1927, Japan’s occupation of China’s Manchuria in 1931,
Japan’s all-out war in China in 1937-45, U.S. declared wan on Japan in December 1941 after Japan’s Pearl
Harbor attack, Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August 1945, the Korean War in 1950-53, SinoIndian border war in 1962, the Vietnam War of 1964-75, China-Vietnam border war in 1979, collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, etc.
2
Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New
York: Basic Books, 1986). Ezra Vogel, Japan as No. 1 (Charles Tuttle Publishing, 1980).
William Lind, cited by Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clashes of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (summer
1993), pp. 22-49.
3
1
of two “hot” global wars in the first half of the century that engulfed much of the world.4
Meanwhile, liberalism went as far as to claim to have seen the light at the end of the
tunnel of international conflict by declaring the “end of history” for ideological conflicts
in the world,5 while conveniently forgetting that such an “end” was, at most, the windup
of almost two centuries of Western ideological “clashes.”
Despite their huge differences, Western realism and liberalism both depicted the
continuity of the existing world system, be it balanced between Western democratic
capitalism and Western Communism, or led by Western liberalism for the post-history
world. None, however, foresaw the beginning of end for the mighty Soviet empire after
the end of the 1980s.6 The optimism of these dominant Western IR paradigms in the
1980s, warranted or not, was soon to be replaced by at least two powerful counter trends
in the early 1990s: Samuel Huntington unleashed his brilliant and provocative treatise of
“civilization clashes”7 turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy for 9/11; and Alexander
Wendt fired the first round of his salvo of constructivism as an antithesis to the
entrenched realism and liberalism.8
Beyond and beneath these IR paradigms was the vast region intersected by four great
powers in their timeless search for power and wealth, interests and influence, and identity
and security. It was also a region pregnant for radical and cumulative changes: China just
took the first step toward its historical rise, or revival, that continues to unfold; Japan’s
hard-earned “No.-1” title9 would fade during the “lost decade” of the 1990s and beyond;
the mighty Soviet empire would soon imploded with the least impact for the rest of the
4
John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace,” International Security (Spring 1986).
5
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989).
6
It was not until the end of the 1980s that Martin Aalia started to conceive his provocative piece predicting
the end of Soviet system with the famous pseudonym “Z.” Aalia, however, was a historian and his more
pessimistic view of the Soviet Union was largely marginalized by the mainstream of Soviet studies in the
West. See “To the Stalin Mausoleum,” Daedalus, vol. 119, no. 1 (winter 1990), pp. 295-344.
7
Huntington, “The Clashes of Civilizations?” 1993.
Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics,”
International Organization, vol. 46, no. 2, 1992.
8
9
Ezra Vogel, Japan as No. 1 (Charles Tuttle Publishing, 1980).
2
world in the history of empire collapsing,10 only to be regretted by Vladimir Putin as “the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.11 In the midst of all of this, the
United States would soon be overwhelmed with the brave new world of “unipolar
moment,”12 a pleasant “shock-and-awe” for both IR scholars and policy makers.
The sea changes that occurred at the turn of the decade (1980s to 1990s) were not without
“early warnings.” One of them was the “softening” of the Beijing-Moscow-Washington
strategic triangle formed a decade before with the widening of the Sino-Soviet rift. At the
early 1980s, developments at both systemic and regional levels would point to a closer
relationship between Washington and Beijing in facing a more assertive Soviet Union
around the world, including the Soviet 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Precisely at this
point did China move away from its quasi alliance with the U.S. and embark upon a slow
but steady normalization with the Soviet Union. And the rest was history.
What were the motivations of China’s decision? How did the Chinese perceive the Soviet
Union? What were the impacts of these perception changes on China’s foreign behavior
in the 1980s? Why didn’t the normalization of US-China relations at the end of the 1970s
lead to closer strategic ties between Beijing and Washington in the early 1980s? How did
major IR theories capture, or miss, these policy changes of both China and its superpower
counterparts? What were the implications of the withering-away of the strategic triangle
for IR theories, and vice versa? These questions, among others, will be examined in this
paper. The goal is to assess the explanatory capability, or lack thereof, of Western IR
theories regarding China’s major foreign policy thrusts, as well as regional politics in the
1980s.
10
See Dmitri Trenin, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2011), pp. 6-13
11
BBC, “Putin deplores collapse of USSR”, April 25, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4480745.stm.
Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1, America and the World
(1990/91), pp. 23-33.
12
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II. Rise and Fall of the Strategic Triangle
While the realist-liberalist dichotomy raced to capture the shape and substance of world
politics in the 1980s at the systemic level, the Beijing-Moscow-Washington strategic
triangle—an interactive process and a driving force of “high politics” (strategic and
military areas) in northeast Asia prior to the 1980s—seemed to have every reason to
continue through the 1980s.
Indeed, the onset of the 1980s witnessed a series of assertiveness in both Soviet and
American foreign behavior leading to heightened tension between Moscow and
Washington: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979; U.S. President
Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire Speech” on March 8, 1983; the U.S. Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) proposed by President Reagan on March 23, 1983; the Soviet shoot-down
of the KAL 007 over Sakhalin Island on September 1, 1983; NATO’s final decision to
deploy intermediate-ranged missiles on November 22, 1983; and the Soviet decision to
break off both the Intermediate Nuclear Force (IINF) and the Strategic Arms Reduction
Talks (START). Even in U.S.-China relations, the 1980s was preceded by two major
events that seemed to seal Washington and Beijing in their joint effort to oppose
Moscow: the US-China normalization of diplomatic relations in January 1979 and
China’s border war with Vietnam in in February 1979.
Beyond the policy world, the dynamics of the triangle politics between the three large
powers in the 1960s and 1970s definitely kindled the intellectual curiosity of the IR and
area scholars to this emerging “league of its own,”13 though not without serious
See, for example, Steven I. Levine, “China and the Superpowers,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (Winter
1975-76); Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Sino-Soviet Conflict in the 1970s: Its Evolution and Implications for the
Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1978); Henry Kissinger, White House Years
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), esp. 837; Strobe Talbott, “The Strategic Dimension of the Sino-American
Relationship: Enemy of Our Enemy, or True Friend?” in Richard R. Solomon, ed., The China Factor
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981); Herbert J. Ellison, ed., The Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Global
Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Gerald Segal, The Great Power Triangle
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1982); Douglas T. Stuart and William T. Tow, eds., China, the
Soviet Union, and the West: Strategic and Political Dimensions in the 1980s (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1982); Lowell Dittmer, “The Strategic Triangle: An Elementary Game-Theoretical Analysis,” World
Politics (July 1981); Ilpyong Kim, ed., The Strategic Triangle: China, the United States and the Soviet
Union (New York: Paragon House, 1987); Harvey W. Nelsen, Power and Insecurity: Beijing, Moscow, and
13
4
questioning about integrity of concept. Despite these never ending academic polemics,
the dynamics of the triangular politics also reshaped the professional path of some
leading Cold War policy makers from being pure “Sovietologists” to “grand” strategists
with “Chinese characteristics.” The “making” of Henry Kissinger and his successor
Zbigniew Brzezinski in the U.S. National Security Council, together with their only
political “constituents” (Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter), represented a generation of
Cold War thinkers, movers and shakers of U.S. grand strategy, whose accomplishments
were not repeated by later generation of top foreign policy makers.
While Moscow and Washington at the onset of the 1980s raced to hammer the last nail
innto the coffin for détente following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the last week
of the 1970s, Moscow and Beijing were probing for more consonance, which was the
case even in the last few years of Brezhnev’s life. His April 1982 speech in Tashkent
called for Sino-Soviet effort to improve bilateral relations. Normalization talks resumed a
few months later at the deputy foreign minister level for the next six years (1982-88).
Although China still demanded the removal of the three major “obstacles” before
normalizing relations with Moscow,14 Beijing seemed eager to seize every opportunity to
improve ties with Moscow, including a series of unprecedented “funeral diplomacy”
interactions between November 1983 and March 1985.15 In the midst of this
unprecedented “probing” for opportunities, Soviet First Vice Premier Ivan Arkipov
visited China in December 1984, the highest-ranking visit of a Soviet official in fifteen
years. Moreover, the visit by Arkipov, who was the top Soviet official overseeing the
massive Soviet aid programs in China in the 1950s, turned to be a rather emotional
“reunion” with some of his Chinese counterparts whose careers were invested heavily
into the Sino-Soviet “honeymoon” of the 1950s. Meanwhile, the lack of a major political
breakthrough similar to the 1972 Nixon “shock” was more than compensated for by
Washington, 1949-1988 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989); Min Chen, The Strategic Triangle and
Regional Conflicts: Lessons from the Indochina Wars (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991).
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; stopping assistance to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia; and
reduction of Soviet troops along Sino-Soviet border and from Mongolia.
14
After Leonid Brezhnev’s death on November 10, 1983, his successor Yuri Andropov died on February 9,
1984, and Konstantin Chernenko died on March 10, 1985. In all of these cases, China sent high-level
officials to attend the funerals of these Soviet leaders.
15
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tangible progress in other areas of bilateral relations such as culture, sports, economics
and trade, etc. throughout the 1980s. The corner was finally turned in 1989 when
Gorbachev visited Beijing for the official normalization talks.
How and why did “strategic triangle” politicking start to lose its steam in the early 1980s,
precisely at a time of unambiguous Soviet use of force in China’s peripheries?16
Traditional realist theories certainly predict, as well as prescribe for, “balancing” acts
from the U.S. to counter the Soviet threats in the early 1980s, which was the case of
Reagan’s harsh reaction to the Soviet Afghan invasion. The question here is why
Beijing’s policy toward the Soviet Union failed to live up to the notion, and expectation,
of “parallel” interests and actions with Washington. Moreover, a glimpse of the PRC
media’s reaction to the Soviet invasion shows perhaps the most negative and pessimistic
evaluation of the Soviet intentions regarding the PRC. Worse still, the early 1980s was
also a time when Moscow did not seem to hide its threats to the Polish government
during the 1980-81 crisis regarding the Solidarity movement, suggesting the possibility of
another Czechoslovakia-type invasion by Moscow. Indeed, the so-called Brezhnev
Doctrine legitimized “regime change” of fellow communist countries, long before its
wider and more frequent use by Western democracies after the Soviet collapse. Despite
these unambiguous signs of Soviet threats, the Sino-Soviet leg of the triangle was clearly
deviating, at the onset of the 1980s, from the “normal” strategic calculating and
maneuvering pattern. The long-anticipated Beijing-Washington strategic alliance never
took shape, despite U.S. efforts to forge closer ties with Beijing.
The full potential of China’s distancing from its quasi alliance with the United States had
yet to be fully felt at the beginning of the 1980s. The delicate tangle between the two
largest communist states at this moment of history, however, also paralleled a unique
phase of Western IR theory development, in which some monumental scholarly inquiries
started to yield significant outcomes in the field with far-reaching consequences in both
the scholarly and policy worlds. In retrospect, none seemed capable of explaining and
predicting the withering strategic triangle.
16
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the first time that the Red Army was directly deployed for a combat
mission outside the “normal” spheres of Soviet allies after World War II.
6
III. Structural Realism: A Forest Without Trees?
The theoretical implications of structural realism, which made its debut the same year
(1979) as Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, should never be underestimated. It was perhaps
the first-ever successful assault on the largely European “church” of IR studies firmly
held for millenniums by European thinkers from Thucydides, Machiavelli, and E. H. Carr
to Hans Morgenthau.17 The conception and formation of this Americanized realist theory
(structural or neo-realism), however, occurred at a time of relative decline in American
power during the 1960s and 1970s.18 Obviously, power (and the amount of power), which
was central to classic realism, did not prevent the world’s most powerful military from
“losing” a small and poor country (Vietnam) after decades of direct and indirect
intervention. Meanwhile, decision makers also manipulate the notion of national interests
that classic realism takes for granted as the key variable for both theorization and foreign
policy making.19
Against this backdrop, Waltz’s effort to elevate classic realism to the level of the
international system was both timely and admirable. The theoretical vigor and higher
level of conceptualization of structural realism were achieved, however, at the expense of
its explanatory capability in the real world. Despite the considerable continuity between
classic and neo-realist schools as structural realism adopts the key concepts of power,
interests and rationality from traditional realist theory,20 its over-emphasis on the
international system and structural constraints placed on the states leaves less space to
comprehend the responses of states to outside stimuli, let alone when they take initiatives.
In this regard, system structure is seen as the most important determinant of foreign
Henry Kissinger noted that, “The American approach to foreign policy was somewhat more ideological
and missionary, the European approach more traditional and realistic.” Kissinger, Does America Need a
Foreign Policy (New York: Touchstone Books, 2001), pp.
17
18
The liberalist counterpart is Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (Princeton University Press, 1984).
19
Russell Baker, “What L. B. J. Knew,” New York Times, March 18, 1997, p. A19.
20
For traditional realist IR theories, see Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations; The Struggle for
Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 5.
7
policies, and is used to explain important features of the international system—either it is
stable or unstable, and war-prone or war-averse. Structuralist approaches also assume that
all of the diverse motives of foreign policy decision makers can be subsumed under the
single simplifying assumption that states seek an abstract universal goal, such as survival.
This over-simplification of a complex and constantly changing real world was apparently
behind a general and genuine indifference, on the part of structural realism, to the
triangular politicking between Beijing, Moscow and Washington. For example, Waltz
went so far as to claim that “As a future superpower, the People’s Republic of China is
dimly discernible on a horizon too distant to make speculation worthwhile.”21 This was in
sharp contrast to a rather lively discourse among “less structured” realists in the 1980s.
Yet even among those traditional realists, the role of the PRC within this “strategic
triangle” was controversial at best. Scholars debated both the terminology and definition
of triangular politics, as well as its various forms and theoretical assumptions. One
“puzzle” was the huge disparity between the theoretical assumptions of a three-power
game and the reality that China was far weaker than the two superpower players in every
respect. China’s role in this largely bipolar world was complex and even paradoxical, if
not incomprehensible. Many were undecided as to whether the PRC should be considered
a global power at all. It was at the most a regional power, because it could not project its
force very far beyond its borers. Others commented that “if China matters at all on the
international scene it is largely because the two super powers continue to act as if it does
not matter.”22
This raised fundamental doubts, at least for some, about whether the strategic triangle
was an appropriate concept for analyzing PRC-U.S.-USSR relations. Part of the
ambiguity and confusion surrounding this concept is explained by the failure of scholars
to see that the notion of triangular politics was basically a complex and dynamic pattern
of political/strategic interaction among the three players. This differed essentially from
the notion of tripolarity, which is both a more static concept based largely on the
21
See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 100.
See Lawrence Freedman, “The Triangle in Western Europe,” in Gerald Segal, ed., The China Factor
(London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 105.
22
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distribution of power among relevant actors and a basically structural feature of the
global system or subsystem.23
The limitations of realist theory in explaining the variations of China’s “deviating”
behavior from “parallel,” or alliance, politicking in the early 1980s are obvious. A
common denominator is that any changes in the inter-state relations must come from
outside forces, either from structural changes (realist) or from reciprocal interactions
between states (triangle theory). The role of domestic attributes in a state’s foreign
behavior is not considered to be significant. As a result, these theories tend to assume that
given the consistent Soviet threat, states like the PRC and the U.S are expected to take
similar or identical moves to counter the Soviet Union, regardless of the differences in
their domestic attributes. These theories therefore cannot explain why states behave
differently under similar circumstances.
IV. Liberalist “Clue”
By any standard, China’s role within the triangular politics was a legitimate treatise
within the realist paradigm in the 1980s, whether China was strong or weak, and
communist or not. Meanwhile, the liberalist components of the IR field were, at best, in a
“laissez-faire” mode for issues of triangular politics,24 while making unprecedented
headway in its own backyard in the 1980. One case was Doyle’s 1986 “Liberalism and
World Politics”25 that injected new stimuli to the IR world,26 as well as providing
directions and confidence for policy makers.
For the inherent difficulty of measuring polarity and defining a system’s structure, see Joseph L. Nogee,
“Polarity: An Ambiguous Concept,” Orbis 18 (Winter 1975).
23
24
The issue was largely off the radar screen of the major liberalist efforts in the 1980s, whose intellectual
interests focused on the issues of international institutions (Keohane 1984), political economy (Rosecrance
1986) and enduring power of democratic capitalism (Fukuyama 1989).
Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review, 80:4 (December
1986), pp. 1151–1169.
25
The piece is said to be the “most cited article in the 100 year history of the American Political Science
Review,” According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_W._Doyle#cite_note-1, accessed
March 17, 2013.
26
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The key proposition of Doyle’s democracy-peace theory holds that inter-state peace is
achievable and sustainable only between democracies. This implies, as well as predicts,
that any genuine and lasting rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow would have to
be attained when both of them become democracies. Under Doyle’s theory, this is
because the absence of war between them was possible only when “the citizens who bear
the burdens of war elect their governments.”27 Regardless, liberalism had a rather
unintended, and even unrecognized, role in the discourse regarding the withering of the
strategic triangle in the 1980sby examining the relevance of domestic factors as a source
of states’ external behavior.
In the case of China and the Soviet Union, the independent variables for their respective
policies toward each other would have to be redefined. Instead of the liberalist ideology28
and political institutions that are said to make democracies avoid war, at least toward
each other, it was the weakening of the ideology factor (communism) that started the ball
rolling toward initial rapprochement in the early 1980s. Eventually, the de-ideologization
of the 1980s in bilateral relations led to the disappearance of ideology in the relationship
during the 1990s. As a result, the two largest Eurasian powers have managed, from the
early 1980s, to maintain the longest period of stability in the history of their bilateral
relations (1949-2013).29 This stability is also accompanied, over time, by the most equal
and mutually beneficial bilateral ties since the 1700s, which had until the late 1970s been
largely zero-sum and asymmetrical in that Russia’s historical expansion to the Far East
was at the direct expense of the China-centered East Asian system of tributary states.30
27
Doyle, p. 1151.
28
Fukuyama, 1989; Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 1987).
There were twenty-three “bad years” between 1960 when Moscow withdrew experts and aids from China
and 1982 when Brezhnev made his Tashkent speech for normalization with China. In comparison, there
were only ten “good years” of Sino-Soviet “honeymoon” (1949-59) during this period.
29
Within this regional hierarchy, the “middle kingdom” presided over an expansive “tributary system.”
Those “peripheral” states would acknowledge China’s cultural supremacy in exchange for autonomous
rule. See Doak Barnett, China and the Major Powers in East Asia (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings
Institution, 1977), pp. 21-22.
30
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V. Westphalianization of Sino-Soviet relations
At the heart of Sino-Soviet relations prior to the normalization process in the 1980s was
the ubiquitous ideology factor, which contributed to both the “best” (1949-1959) and
“worst” (1960-1982) relations in the second half of the 20th century between Moscow and
Beijing. During this period, the ideology factor served as an amplifier, first to exaggerate
commonalities between China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and later their
differences in the 1960s and 1970s. Neither was normal, and both were highly emotional,
leading to a state of affairs that deprived both sides of pragmatic compromise and conflict
management when needed.31 It is not surprising that the process of normalizing relations
began by minimizing and/or neutralizing the ideology factor in bilateral relations.
In retrospect, the rise and fall of the ideology factor in Sino-Soviet relations was largely a
twentieth-century phenomenon. Prior to analyzing the weakening of the ideology factor,
it is necessary to construct a historical backdrop that gave rise to it in bilateral relations.
Specifically, this ideology factor was at the center of the largely asymmetrical
relationship, in which Russian/Soviet “intangible” influence on China in the 20th century
was perhaps unprecedented and unparalleled by that of any other power. In the early 20th
century, the timing of the Bolsheviks’ unilateral declarations (25 July 1919 and 27
September 1920) to end Russia’s extraterritorial rights in China, for example, was
perhaps the single most powerful catalyst for many aspiring young Chinese intellectuals
to switch their beliefs from liberalism to Bolshevism.32 Both the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party (KMT) were molded after the Soviets,
ideologically and organizationally. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Stalin
31
Shen, Zhihua, ed., Zhongsu Guanxi Shigang, 1917-1991 [History of Sino-Soviet relations, 1917-1991]
(Beijing: Xinhua Chubanshe, 2007), pp. 99–402.
Prior to the May 4th Movement (1919) in China, most educated Chinese were drawn to “Mr. Democracy”
and “Mr. Science” as China’s salvation. During the Versailles Settlement in the first half of 1919, Western
democracies insisted that China’s Shandong Province be transferred to Japanese control, despite the fact
that China joined the Allies in World War I. The mood in China therefore switched overnight from proWestern liberalism to anti-Western imperialism. China’s public opinion at this point, however, was still
quite suspicious of the Bolshevik Revolution. Bolsheviks’ public renunciation of Czarist Russia’s special
privileges in China in late July, therefore, decisively turned the tide of China’s public opinion. Ironically,
when the July 25 declaration was officially published on Soviet newspapers, the portion of the original
declaration was dropped regarding Russia’s unilateral return to China of Russia’s holding of the Manchuria
Railroad and related properties. For details, see Shen Zhihua, ed., Zhongsu Guanxi Shigang, 19171991[History of Sino-Soviet relations, 1917-1991] (Beijing: Xinhua Chubanshe, 2007), 6–12.
32
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actively manipulated China’s domestic politics, particularly the CCP-KMT conflicts. In
the end, it was three wars that secured Soviet influence in China: the Soviet defeat of the
Japanese Kwangtung Army in Manchuria in August 1945, the advent of the Cold War in
1947, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.
In 1949, China adopted the “lean-toward-one-side” policy, joining the Moscow-led
communist camp.33 This was followed by more Soviet influence in both the PRC’s
domestic and foreign affairs. In hindsight, China perhaps had little choice, with the Cold
War was well on its way to divide the world into two confrontational camps. Beijing did
briefly toy with the non-aligned movement in the early 1950s as a “third way” between
the two blocs. But it was short-lived and inconsequential at best.34
China’s breakup with Moscow from 1960 was by no means the end of the Soviet
“shadow” over China. The two communist giants competed for ideological correctness,
both within and outside the communist world. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, overture to
the West and withdrawal from Cuba were all perceived by Mao as betrayals to
communism. Mao went as far as to internalize the ideological competition with Moscow
by labeling some of his long-time colleagues (Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, etc.) as
“revisionists” or as “China’s Khrushchev” during the ten-year Cultural Revolution (196676), accusing those top leaders of revising or betraying genuine communism. Sovietmodel of top-down bureaucratic institutions were seen as anti-revolution, and even going
toward “capitalism.” Instead, Mao overplayed his wartime mass-line only to find that the
water (masses) could not only keep the boat (the Party) afloat, but could also engulf the
boat. Ultimately, China paid a tremendous price for this frenzy of ideological purity and
its “splendid isolation” from both the East and West. In the midst of the fierce
competition for ideological correctness, the old and lingering Russian threat,35 now
33
Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung 4 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), 415.
34
The initiators of the movement included India, Egypt, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, and China.
Long before the British and other Europeans made any serious inroads into China’s coastal region,
Russia began its relentless eastward expansion through military operations, diplomatic efforts, and
commercial activities. After several military clashes, Russia and Qing signed the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk.
By the late 1800s, Russian expansion into China’s periphery regained momentum and clashes became
35
12
morphed into the Soviet threat, became increasingly real. On several occasions during the
1960s, the idea of carrying out a surgical strike against China’s nuclear facilities was
actively considered by both Washington and Moscow.36
When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Mao’s China was in deep crisis. Its
political elites were brutalized and deeply factionalized, the Party discredited, the people
traumatized, and the economy on the edge of collapse. The devastating earthquake in
Tangshan that killed 240,000 people was seen by some as a heavenly sign of disapproval
of the existing policies. In contrast to China’s plight, the Soviet Union was still one of the
two superpowers, with strategic parity with the United States. It had been on the
offensive all over the world in many spheres. Even in sports, the Soviet athletes
outperformed the American counterparts in almost every category of medal counts in the
1976 summer Olympics in Montreal. Meanwhile, the U.S. was on the post-Vietnam
retreat, and by the end of the 1970s the Iranian revolution humiliated the U.S. twice, in
both the hostage crisis and the failed rescue mission afterward.
frequent. The 1860 Treaty of Peking opened the entire northern frontier of China to Russia’s political and
commercial influences. Barnett, 1977), pp. .
According to S.C.M. Paine, Russia’s encroachment into China’s northern and western frontier regions
culminated in the mid-19th century with three major “unequal” treaties (Treaty of Aigun in 1858, Treaty of
Peking in 1860, and Treaty of Livadia in 1864) with China, which ceded to Russia 1.722 million square
kilometers (sk), or 665,000 square miles, of China’s territories. This was roughly equivalent to all of the
United States east of the Mississippi River. See S.C.M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their
Disputed Frontier (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), particularly pages 28–29.
Russian scholars continue to regard Russia’s expansion into China’s peripheral areas as natural, and
therefore “legal.” For recent Russian views, see Alexei D. Voskressenski, Russia and China, A Theory of
Inter-State Relations (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 16–17.
For the Soviet threat to nuke China’s nuclear facilities, see Dittmer, Sino-Soviet Normalization, 189–194;
and Wishnick, Mending Fences, 34–36. For the U.S. temptation, see William Burrand and Jeffrey T.
Richelson, “Whether to ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle’: The United States and the Chinese Nuclear
Program, 1960-64,” International Security 25 (Winter 2000/01): 54–99; Patrick Tyler goes as far as to
document that Nixon and Kissinger were actually toying with the idea in 1969 of remaining neutral in the
event of a Soviet attack on China’s nuclear weapons facilities. The goal was to extract Soviet help in
America’s “dignified exit” from Vietnam. Kissinger was said to even authorize a classified study of how
the US might mount a nuclear attack on China. No such study, focusing exclusively on China, had ever
been undertaken thus far, according to Tyler. Only Soviet hesitation eventually squashed the idea. See
Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, An Investigative History (New York: A Century
Foundation Book, 1999), pp. 38–40 and 61–64.
36
13
Many in China emerged from Mao’s radicalism only to find that Soviet “revisionism”
was actually not that bad. Indeed, many, if not all, thought that China would have been in
much better shape had the country followed the planned, orderly and centralized Soviet
model, despite its bureaucratization. The post-Mao reformers endeavored to rebuild
China’s political, economic and educational systems from the ashes of Mao’s over-play
of the people’s power. Indeed, China’s historical economic reform, to be unleashed three
years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was preceded with an across-the-board
restoration of a Soviet-type system. Whatever the case, the post-Cultural Revolution
China was perhaps the first large-scale social experiment of the 1968 Huntingtonial creed
that “Men may, or course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty
without order. Authority has to exist before it can be limited.”37 It is interesting to note
that the Soviet reforms under Gorbachev traveled in exactly the opposite direction:
dismantling the vast bureaucratic ways of the government, ruling party, and the military
without replacing it with a new system.
While the post-Mao China was replacing ideology with pragmatism, and disorder with
order, Deng and his allies also launched a sustained debate regarding the “criterion of
truth”（真理标准）with an unambiguous preference to practice (实践), not dogmatic
inherence to political ideologies, as the guide to policy making. The “practice-truth”
debate also paralleled an internal debate regarding the nature of the Soviet system. The
outcome of this reassessment of the Soviet Union was to separate Soviet domestic and
foreign policies. Specifically, the Soviet system was considered socialist in nature,
though its foreign policy remained “social-imperialist,” or even aggressive (such as in
Afghanistan, etc.). The internal debates38 gradually led to more balanced views of the
Soviet Union, thus clearing the conceptual and ideological obstacles to improving
relations with the Soviet Union by the late 1970s. The process of de-ideologcalization
37
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968), 7-8.
38
Area specialists did document the evolving perceptions of the Soviet Union among Chinese policy elites.
See Gilbert Rozman, The Chinese Debate About Soviet Socialism, 1978-1985 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987); A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985); Steven M. Goldstein, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Sino-Soviet Relations,”
in Tomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 224–65.
14
was also accompanied by China’s initial opening to Eastern European countries in the
late 1970s and growing interests in their models of economic reform, particularly in
Yugoslavia and Hungary, where considerable reforms were done under the communist
political systems. Ultimately, the “practice-truth” debate led the Chinese political elite to
take a closer look at the Soviet system itself without the passion of ideology.
The softening of China’s rhetoric and policies toward Moscow at the turn of the decade
was not unnoticed by Moscow, whose China policy also reciprocated with moderation
and pragmatism. In his April 1982 speech in Tashkent, Brezhnev called for Sino-Soviet
effort to improve bilateral relations. This was followed by twelve normalization talks in
six years (1982-88), numerous high-level exchanges during the same period and final
normalization of relations during Gorbachev 1989 visit to Beijing.
The ideology issues, however, were barely beneath the surface of normalizing bilateral
relations during the 1980s, when both China and Russia were overtaken by events at
home. China in particular seemed to always be a step behind the Soviet political
developments. No sooner did Beijing “rediscover” the virtues of Soviet socialism, in the
aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution, than when Moscow started to depart from it. In
the late 1980s, a growing ideological divide was emerging between Gorbachev’s radical
and glaring political transformation and Deng Xiaoping’s gradual economic reforms.
While China’s perceptions of the Soviet Union shifted from excitement to bewilderment
to alarm, the Soviet view of China moved from criticism to respect to disdain. By the late
1980s, China’s reform had generated considerable social tension between the elite and
the society, culminating in the 1989 riot and crackdown. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s Russia
quickly replaced Deng’s China to become the West’s “pet” communist. The subsequent
Soviet collapse practically eliminated any possibility for ideological uniformity between
the two continental powers. In security terms, the end of the Soviet empire considerably
reduced a direct threat to China national security. This nonetheless also exposed China to
the Western anti-communist crusade, whose brunt was to be felt later.
15
The early 1980s was also the beginning of departing from this asymmetrical relationship.
Few at the time, however, expected that the two would be able to live normally with one
another for such a sustained period in the wake of more than two decades (1960-1982) of
intense rivalry across the political, economic, and military spheres. Regardless, bilateral
relations since then have been transformed from the worst security nightmare to one of
common strategic vision for regional and global stability; from ideological rivals within
the communist world to coexistence between the two largest states on the Eurasian
continent with entirely different cultural and political systems; from absence of any
meaningful economic intercourse to rising trade relations ($88.16 billion in 2012); and
from sharing the longest fortified border to one of stability and flourishing commerce. In
the past seventeen years of their “strategic partnership” (1996-current), the two
continental powers have been taking joint actions on various multilateral issues at forums
like the UN, SCO, and Korean and Iranian six-party nuclear talks, promoting a “fair and
rational world order” based on sovereignty, equality, dialogue, and a new international
security mechanism.39 All this happened when the two former rivals underwent major
transformations themselves.40
Since the 1990s, both sides have departed significantly from their respective past
legacies. The issue of socialism is no longer relevant much for relations between Moscow
and Beijing. Indeed, managing the transition away from the past with minimum social
tension and political instability are perhaps more important for the two nations. The two
sides have tried, with greater degrees of success and sophistication, to prevent new
ideology issues from escalating into policy issues.
In historical hindsight, the gradual and steady softening of the ideology factor in SinoSoviet relations in the late 1970s an early 1980s constituted the first step toward
normalization of mutual perceptions throughout the 1980s and bilateral relations at the
Xinhua, “China-Russia Joint Statement Regarding the International Order of the 21 st Century,” July 1
2005.
39
Despite the growing critiques of Putin’s recentralization policies in Russia, some do argue that Russia
has essentially become a “normal” country. See Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country, Russia after
Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Indeed, Russia has in many ways changed
enormously from its communist legacies, though continuing to carry with it the burdens of the past.
40
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decade’s end. A historical parallel of this, though to a lesser degree, was the Treaty of
Westphalia of 1648 following the devastating Thirty-Years’ War (1618-48) in much of
continental Europe, which led to the end of religious wars and the recognition and
practice of secular authorities. The de-ideologization of Beijing-Moscow relations does
not mean the end of competition and conflict between the two large Eurasian powers in
the future, as was the case of the post-Westphalia Europe, where inter-state rivalry and
wars based upon secular reasons such as territory, prestige, alliance, etc. continued and
even grew in both scale and intensity. The point here is that a significant destabilizing
and antagonistic factor (ideology) was scaled down and finally disappeared between
China and the Soviet Union/Russia. This was achieved despite enormous changes in both
countries in the 1990s and beyond.
VI. Conclusion: West and Rest in the Search for Theoretical and Ideological Purity
“All theory is gray. The golden tree of life is green,” wrote German writer Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Goethe’s ostensible theory aversion, though playful
in its appearance, was quite different for a whole generation of Germans thinkers and
philosophers obsessed with theorization.41 Enlightened and emboldened by the
Renaissance and science, they were searching for ultimate solutions for problems in both
the human and natural worlds.42 Few, if any, were aware of the limits of applying natural
science approaches to the human world, which is inherently changing, subjective and
unpredictable. Goethe was not the last one to apply the brakes on the West’s constant
search for ultimate explanations and panacea for the human world.43
41
Some of them were Christian Wolff (1679-1754, philosopher), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, philosopher),
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher), Karl Marx (1818-1883, political theorist),
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher), Max Weber (1864-1920, philosopher, educator), etc.
42
The positivist thinking, pioneered by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), argues that society operates according
to general laws like the physical world. See T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of
Cometean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See Gabriel A. Almond and Stephen J. Genco, “Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics,” World
Politics, Vol. 29, No. 4. (July 1977), pp. 489-552; Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, The
Elusive Quest: Theory and International Politics (University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Alex L.
George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington D.D.: United States
Institute of Peace, 1993); Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political
Science (Yale University Press, 2005).
43
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Despite these cautions for rigid and mechanical applications of natural science methods
in the socio-political world, Western theorists continue to search for the parsimonious
theories of fewer variables and greater explanatory ability. For example, Western Marxist
and liberalist theories, no matter how different they are, all explain the causality of state
behavior from a single variable of internal political institutions. Whereas Marxism and its
Leninist variant trace the roots of inter-state conflicts to financial capitalism-turnimperialism, Liberalism theorizes exactly the opposite that democratic capitalism is
inherently peaceful.
Western political ideologies, too, constantly search for fewer and fewer variables in order
to change the world. Both Marxism and liberalism strive to shape the rest of the world
into their respective pure, or ideal, types of political systems (communism for Marxism
and democracy for liberalism). None of them accepts gray area, or any third way. All see
the world in black and white terms. Each justified and operationalized its own version of
“limited sovereignty” concept for “regime change” of others. Together they dragged the
whole world into the Cold War, a highly ideologicalized and militarized setting, which
was conveniently, albeit brilliantly, theorized as the “long peace,” if one discounts
millions of casualties in those “limited wars” outside the West (Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, etc.).
When this last portion of the Western civil war abruptly came to an end with the collapse
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it was also the end of West’s internal balancing
mechanism. And, for better or worse, the U.S. military finally overcame its Vietnam
syndrome with the successful execution of the first Gulf War (1990-91) by employing
precision-guided munitions and an all-volunteer army. The latter also means the final
severance of the societal connection with, and constraints over, the world’s most
powerful military and its civilian leaders aspiring to become “armchair killers.”44 In the
post-9/11 setting, the “shock-and-awe” operation was perhaps the finest hour of a leanand-mean U.S. military, with which ordinary citizens no longer have to bear any burden
Cited from Eliot Cohen, “Armchair Killers,” presentation at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University,
May 4, 2005. Also see his book, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
(Free Press, 2002).
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for its overseas operations. One wonders how Michael Doyle would modify his 1986
democracy-peace treatise.45 Welcome to the brave new world of the unipolar moment,
civilization clashes, weapons of mass destruction and preemption.
The above reasoning is by no means intended to criticize the West for many problems in
the world. Nor does it intend to defend the non-Western part of the world including those
huge blunders under Mao’s romantic and tragic overplay of people’s power. The point
here is that the inability of Western IR theories to capture the nuances of Sino-Soviet
relations in the 1980s was not merely an academic issue, but perhaps part and parcel of
the West’s own history, culture, and religion, which tend to simplify the complex world
into eloquent theories and ideologies while ignoring the deeper history and ideational
idiosyncrasies that cannot be easily quantified, theorized and comprehended.46 Partly
because of this, main IR paradigms in the 1980s seemed to have had little to do with the
cumulative changes either within or between China and Soviet Union. Moreover,
triangular politics models seemed to be thriving in times of intensive confrontation in the
1970s, while fading away when relative stability, or “normalcy,” returned in the 1980s.
In the final analysis, there is perhaps nothing wrong with these IR theories and political
ideologies, as each of them occupies its unique position within Western culture and
history. Western democracy, too, deserves serious attention by the non-Western world.
The problem is their use, misuse, over-use and selective use, both within and outside of
the West. The issue is how to get there, whether those countries should take protracted
process toward democracies as many Western democracies did or be shock-and-awed
into this stage of human development.
In this regard, the 1980s is relevant again as a phase, not only for developing great IR
theories as described at the beginning of this paper, but also the beginning of two large
communist states to depart from orthodox communism with different methods. Deng’s
“When the citizens who bear the burdens of war elect their governments, wars become impossible,” cited
from Doyle, 1986, p. 1151.
45
See Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thoughts: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and
Why (Free Press, 2003).
46
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pragmatism was by no means a quick fix of the post-Mao mess in China, but first and
foremost a different mode of thinking. For the first time in the twentieth century, China’s
political and intellectual elites started to experiment with various political theories and
ideologies including China’s own traditional philosophies, instead of switching from one
paradigm to another.47 After thirty years of crossing the river by groping for the stepping
stones (摸着石头过河), China today has become a country that would shock perhaps
both Adam Smith and Karl Marx if they’d rise from their graves and find out how their
pure types of political theories are mixed and stir-fried by the Chinese. Meanwhile, the
country has experienced the longest political stability in the past 170 years, despite an
untidy and even frustrating reform process with many unintended outcomes.
In contrast, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin resorted to, and were consumed by, radical
switch from one Western ideological paradigm to another: radical democratization under
Gorbachev and “Shock Therapy” under Yeltsin. Together, the two managed to achieve
the most rapid peacetime decline in history by any country: small or big, and Western or
non-Western. It is anybody’s opinion as to which approach is “better” or “worse” than
the other. The point here is that they were very different in methods, process, and
outcomes.
China switched from Western liberalism to Western Marxism in 1919; “leaned to one side” (Moscow) in
1949 and confronted both Soviet Communism and capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
47
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