Strategic Thought on Russia and Central Asia

Abstract

Russia matters more for China than for any other great power. Despite trade ties that have trailed those of a number of other partners of China, it has strategic significance beyond other Asian states, except Japan in the period of its aggression. In China’s view, Russia has stood in the forefront for about three centuries. It first succeeded in making its presence felt in the seventeenth century, signing the unprecedented Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 leading to the establishment of a border post for trade as well as the opening of Beijing’s first foreign mission and then posing a threat that prompted a race for territory in Central Asia. Well before the Opium War brought European infringements on China’s territory, Russia loomed as a security concern not by sea, as in the case of other emerging threats, but by land in the north, from whence Asian invaders from time immemorial had descended. Treaties stripping China of land, incursions into Central Asia, and spheres of influence reinforced by railroad construction and a new Russian city of Harbin, caused its presence to be strongly felt through the final decades of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. “Tsarist imperialist aggression” was often recalled during the time of the Sino-Soviet split and is still remembered as one of the worst “humiliations.” Yet, Russia also benefits from a positive strategic image as the country that stood with China against the United States in the 1950s and since the mid-1990s has become its closest strategic partner in opposing U.S. hegemonism.