By Gregory Shtraks
A watershed year for Russia’s ties with China shows the role of domestic politics in driving “great power relations.”
Stories about the increasing synergy in Sino-Russian relations have proliferated over the last few months with Western, Russian, and Chinese analysts unable to agree on the genuine contours of the relationship. However, there exists a consensus that the partnership between Moscow and Beijing has reached a mature phase with broad economic, political, cultural, and security dimensions and stable, institutionalized mechanisms binding the two powers together. These dimensions and mechanisms took twenty years to develop and now form the backbone of what has since 2011 been referred to as a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”
In an attempt to look at Sino-Russian relations from a different angle, this article will discuss the origins of this “strategic partnership,” a term first used exactly nineteen years ago during the April 1996 bilateral summit held in Beijing between Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Several days after the conclusion of that meeting, Jiang and Yeltsin flew to Shanghai to meet with the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan where they signed an agreement on “confidence building in the military field of border areas.” This led to the formation of the so-called Shanghai-5, a loose coalition that and would eventually evolve into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Thus, the framework for both the bilateral and multilateral aspects of the Sino-Russian relationship were created nearly simultaneously. To assess the reasons for this development, we will examine the international balance of power in 1996, explain the domestic political situations in Russia, China, and the United States, and determine whether that point in history holds any lessons for today’s policymakers.
Read the full story at The Diplomat