Mending Fences illuminates the forces driving Moscow’s China policy, from the Ussuri River clashes in 1969 to the strategic partnership of the 1990s. Elizabeth Wishnick, noted expert on the Russia and China, analyses the efforts of Soviet leaders simultaneously to maintain their supremacy in the international communist movement, defend their borders from a perceived China threat, and insure the compliance of regional authorities in enforcing China policy. In the post-Soviet era, as many Russians became disenchanted with Western models of market-democracy and with their country’s sharply curtailed role in international affairs, the Yeltsin administration touted a growing strategic partnership with China. Wishnick outlines the successes of Russian-Chinese co-operation and analyses the main barriers to full-scale partnership, including historical grievances, limited economic ties, tensions in regional relations. Despite ongoing efforts by Russian and Chinese leaders to resolve these issues, she concludes that the future of the Sino-Russian partnership will depend on an unpredictable interplay of forces of domestic and international change. Mending Fences is the result of a decade of research in Moscow, Beijing, and the regions along the Russo-Chinese border. Fluent in Russian and Chinese, the author has drawn on recently declassified documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the KGB, and the Khabarovsk Regional Communist Party; numerous interviews with influential Russian and Chinese officials and scholars; and regional and national periodicals and books from both Russia and China. The first work in recent years to analyse Russian-Chinese relations from Moscow’s perspective, Mending Fences is a necessary addition to the literature on the late Cold-War era and the strategic triangle between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China.
