Restless Empire (60 page)

During the last years of the Soviet era, China spent almost two decades in a stale relationship with Moscow. It was mostly driven by an exaggerated and ideologically based fear of Red Army power. Deng Xiaoping tried to limit the conflict in the mid-1980s, mainly because of a growing concern that the United States could be getting too preponderant in international affairs. But very little came out of the détente with the Soviets, even after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. The Chinese leaders feared that Gorbachev was out to cut a deal with the United States and Western Europe, leaving the Soviet Union free to step up its military presence in eastern Asia. In 1988, as it became clear that the USSR was not only planning to withdraw from Afghanistan but also wanted the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia, Deng increased diplomatic contacts with Moscow. These contacts culminated in Gorbachev’s visit to China in the spring of 1989. The visit had a great symbolical importance. Mao Zedong had gone to Moscow right after becoming leader of the PRC. Gorbachev came to visit Deng in Beijing.

Gorbachev’s visit should have been a triumph for Deng Xiaoping. It completed Sino-Soviet normalization on criteria put forward by China. But the summit in Beijing could not have come at a more awkward moment. In May 1989, as Chinese and Soviet leaders met in The Great Hall of the People, tens of thousands of students occupied Tian’anmen Square right outside. Many held banners in support of Gorbachev’s democratic reforms. Deng would not be distracted. At eighty-five, he lectured the Soviet leader on the need to put the past behind them. “Looking at the past,” Deng said, “many of the expressions that were used by both sides were empty. . . . The question was not [about] ideological differences. We too were wrong.” The problem had not been different views on Communism, Deng maintained, but Moscow accepting China’s position. “Read my speech [at the Moscow meeting in 1963] . . . its leitmotif is [that] the Soviet Union wrongly imagined the place of China in the world.” Deng listed a series of Russian land grabs from China in the past, ending with “the Chinese province of Outer Mongolia, which today is called the Mongolian People’s Republic.”
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Deng was willing to let the past be past, but only on conditions of historical memory set by Beijing.

The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 came as a complete shock to the Chinese leaders. They simply could not imagine that a Communist Party general secretary could accept, first, the banning of the party and, then, the dissolution of the Soviet state, almost without a shot being fired in anger. Whereas the Chinese had used massive force to crush unarmed protest in 1989, Gorbachev had accepted change from below, and allowed the Soviet republics to secede peacefully after first dismantling Moscow’s control over Eastern Europe. Three main explanations developed in the CCP, all of which would have significance for the future: Gorbachev was a fool, seduced by US charms and his own ego into leaving the Soviet peoples defenseless against foreign exploitation. Or the Soviet version of socialism had been so unproductive and behind the times that it had dug its own grave. Or the Soviets had
been overextended; they had tried to do too much abroad and when they finally got to domestic reform, it was too late. None of these explanations were mutually exclusive, but where leaders put the emphasis signaled how they wanted to approach China’s own development in the future. Even today the Soviet collapse is a hotly discussed topic among Chinese leaders. They want to learn from the Soviet disaster so as not to follow its example.

After the Soviet Union was replaced by fifteen separate republics in 1992, the Chinese leaders struggled to keep up with the rapid changes along their northern borders. Eager to portray itself as the epitome of stability in a chaotic world, the CCP in the late 1990s pointed to two examples of what not to do. The wars in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated that post–Cold War Europe was unstable. The chaos in the former Soviet Union showed what could go wrong if large states collapsed. Very soon, though, China began trying to set up mutually beneficial links with Russia. Jiang Zemin and his successor Hu Jintao despaired of working with the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who disliked the CCP for being autocrats, and whom they excoriated as a drunk. But the Chinese leaders found it much easier to work with Yeltsin’s successor, the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Putin made no secret of his admiration for China’s authoritarian government, social order, and economic success. In July 2001 Russia and China signed a new agreement of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, to replace the treaty that had lapsed under much acrimony in 1979. The new pact underlined mutual consultations and economic cooperation, in fields such as energy and military technology. The text had a vague anti-US tint, promising to cooperate against countries “interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state under all sorts of pretexts.” It also prohibited any support to “terrorists, splittists and extremists” in each country. Finally, Russia recognized Taiwan as part of China and China affirmed that it had no territorial claim against Russia. It was a creaseless treaty, symbolizing a new era in the relationship, but forcing either side
to do very little that it did not want to do or preventing it from doing what it had the power to do already.
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China’s main interest in Russia after 1991 has been economic. With a large population, high growth rate, and limited access to resources, China’s leaders see Russia—with its smaller (and shrinking) population, low internal growth, and an abundance of raw materials—as a supplier of resources China will need for its modernization. Chinese leaders tend to think of such a relationship as mutually beneficial and to be irritated by Russian concerns about growing Chinese influence and physical presence in the eastern parts of Russia. Chinese businessmen are also horrified by the complexities of doing business in and with Russia: The bureaucracy, the corruption, and the amount of time needed even for the simplest of transactions hold back business links, the Chinese think. From a Western perspective watching some of these exchanges is truly instructive: The Chinese—often themselves accused of unconventional business methods—lecture Russians and Central Asians on proper financial conduct, responsibility, and international standards. China is increasingly aware of Russia’s centrality for any future Chinese development plans, but the development of economic interaction has been slow. China’s acute energy needs may put an end to the lethargy, however. The two countries have been negotiating massive new oil and gas pipeline deals, although both construction and exports are so far hampered by disagreements on prices and volume.

U
NTIL
1991, C
HINA’S CONCERN
with Central Asia was exclusively about the Soviet Union, an inimical power that was the main threat to Chinese security. At that time the Muslim regions in the west were part of the Soviet state, and in the east the People’s Republic of Mongolia was firmly under Soviet control. China itself controlled Tibet and the southern parts of Mongolia. The vast territory from the Korean borders to the Caspian Sea—a distance almost half the circumference of the globe—seemed frozen in time. Then the Soviet Union collapsed,
and everything thawed. The change took the CCP leaders entirely by surprise. Even more than in their relationship with the new Russian state, Beijing hesitated and procrastinated in forming clear policies for the Central Asian region. It is only since the early 2000s that China has begun to expand its power and influence among its Asian neighbors to the north.

The PRC’s first concern as the USSR collapsed was with military and security issues. Beijing had two main aims. First, it wanted to make sure that the sudden dissipation of authority over sophisticated weapons systems—including nuclear weapons, in the case of Kazakhstan—would not endanger China or its regional interests. Second, it aimed to avoid any support being given by the new states to their secessionist-minded ethnic brethren inside China’s own borders or to those who supported cross-border political projects built on Muslim or Buddhist identities. By the late 1990s both of these threats seemed to have been averted. China cooperated with a US-led program to peacefully rid Central Asia of the weapons of mass destruction its states had inherited from the Soviet Union. It also cooperated with Russia to curb secessionism. In 1996 the two signed an agreement with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions. Out of that treaty came the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) five years later. SCO’s charter binds the members to seek “multipolarity” (read: avoid a US-dominated world), to combat “terrorism, separatism and extremism,” and to support the “territorial integrity of States and inviolability of State borders.” China, Russia, and the authoritarian leaders who had taken power in the new states were exquisitely lucky with the timing of their new initiative. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration was willing to ignore the anti-American foundation of the organization and concentrate on working with it to fight real or perceived Islamist threats. In all matters, China was the main beneficiary of the organization named after its economic capital. The SCO helped secure China’s borders and defeat internal opposition.
Under it, China became open to settlements of disputes over territory and water with the smaller member states. And the SCO under scored China’s central role in Central Asia. After a century, Beijing was back in the driver’s seat in the region.
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China’s relations with Mongolia are even more complicated than those with the post-USSR republics. Mongolia is a vast country, half the size of India but with less than three million inhabitants. For seventy years, as the People’s Republic of Mongolia, it was a de facto part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet presence had a fair amount of support among Mongolians. The ethnically homogeneous population is strongly anti-Chinese, mainly because Qing rule in Monglia had been deeply unpopular toward the end of the empire and because a very large number of Mongolians believe that China has never really given up its claim on their territory. Even so, China’s economic pull has proven irresistible to the democratically elected governments in Ulaanbaatar, and China is today the largest investor in the country. The Mongolians, however, are trying to compensate for their increasing economic dependence on China. They are inviting US and Russian companies, as well as companies from elsewhere in Asia and Europe, to help develop their country’s phenomenal natural resources. They may succeed in this strategy, not least because China for internal reasons has to be careful how it treats Mongolia, since there are at least twice as many Mongols inside China as in the independent republic to the north.

Economic plans and needs are increasingly taking over as drivers in the relationships between China and all of the Central Asian states. They are giving this region a much greater importance to China than it had in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The 2008 economic crisis concentrated the minds of many Chinese planners, public and private, on the need for access to Central Asia’s abundant natural resources. Chinese companies have invested heavily in the oil and gas sectors in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, with massive loans to those crisis-ridden governments in return for the deals. One of the world’s longest pipelines
now transports gas from Turkmenistan to China. All other great powers, including India, view China’s increasing economic predominance in Central Asia with suspicion. But there is little they can do about it, as long as China can and will invest more in the region than any others.

L
IKE TODAY’S
C
HINA
, contemporary India was born in the bloodshed and chaos of the 1940s. China took a long time to reach some form of stability, but from the start India developed a democratic and durable political system, which has mostly kept the country on an even keel. During the Maoist years the Chinese Communists looked down on India because they thought its politics and overall development were too closely patterned on the model set by its former colonial masters. Mao himself felt that the lack of revolutionary spirit and its massive size made India a possible threat in the future. In the short run, he relied on the combination of what he saw as Nehru’s foreign policy naïveté and Indian disunity to steer the country away from conflict with China. To his associates the Chairman wondered whether the Indian state project was viable; he saw India more as an “abstraction” than a country, he said. The 1962 war was in many ways a shock for China; its leaders had not expected the Indians to take such a forward attitude to the border problems. Despite the Chinese victory, Beijing realized that India—especially as a de facto ally of the Soviet Union—would be more of a problem than it had bargained for.

The Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 proved all of China’s suspicions about India’s aims. Instead of viewing the entry of Indian troops into East Pakistan in support of a popular rebellion there as an act of liberation, China insisted it was a naked power grab. Deng Xiaoping told the Americans, “It is the dream of Nehru, inherited by his daughter, to have the whole South Asian subcontinent in their pocket.”
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The first Indian nuclear test in 1974 surprised the Chinese, who had not thought that India had such capabilities and suspected the Soviets of having supplied the know-how. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assumption of emergency powers in 1975 was also seen by the Chinese as a Soviet ploy, especially since it came right after the Soviet-supported Indian annexation of Sikkim, which China also claimed to have rights over. There was a temporary increase of tension at the border. In 1986, India created a new province out of its northeastern territories called Arunachal Pradesh, which incorporated areas the Chinese thought of as theirs. Tension rose again, but open clashes were averted. Relations between the two giant nations remained as frozen as they had been since the late 1950s.