OPINION:
Significant news and photo coverage have been given to meetings in the past month between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian ruler Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin, China, and at the 80th anniversary military parade in Beijing, held to celebrate the end of World War II.
The press also reported on the first joint submarine patrol between the Russian navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. Mr. Putin must be pleased with the attention Mr. Xi provided to him personally and to a Russian Federation that in 2022 invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation that received security assurances from Russia in 1994.
Indeed, Mr. Putin must be pleased generally with the international attention he is getting, despite the devastation he is inflicting on Ukraine and the tens of thousands of casualties on both sides because of Russia’s invasion and Mr. Putin’s refusal to seek a halt to these hostilities. President Trump invited Mr. Putin to Alaska to discuss ending this conflict, but this public attention and request from Mr. Trump apparently weren’t enough for a seemingly overconfident 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 (the former Soviet Union) and relations dating back to the 19th century.
Are the textbooks informing students of the 42 divisions, more than 1 million troops, that 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. During that period, more than 900,000 miles were ceded to Russia and incorporated into the Russian Empire.
Russia hasn’t returned this seized territory to China, but others have. In 1997, Britain returned Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories to China, and Portugal returned Macao 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 semicolonial, semifeudal 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 in the Qing dynasty. Hopefully, textbooks in China accurately document this period and the treatment China received from the Russian Empire.
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. Gorbachev said Afghanistan had become “a bleeding wound.” By 1991, Gorbachev resigned from the bankrupt and demoralized Soviet Union; 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 of Mr. Putin in his war of aggression in Ukraine and his goal of re-creating the Russian Empire. China has made significant economic and military progress since the 1979 normalization of relations with the U.S.
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 on the Belt and Road initiative and its support to sovereign, independent countries. A close relationship with a revanchist Russian Federation is not in China’s interest.
• The author is the former special envoy for six-party talks with North Korea and former Director of the National Counterproliferation Center. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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