PEARLS AND IRRITATIONS

Moscow-Beijing relations – A Moveable Feast

Begins: It was Kipling, born 1865 India and died 1936 London, who famously said ‘East is East, West is West and never the Twain shall meet.’

Kipling seemed proved right when the honeymoon relations between the Soviet Union and Communist China in the fifties erupted into the vicious Sino-Soviet dispute of the early sixties.

The dispute, the scholars said, was would be long-lasting. The hawks said it could and should be exploited by the West.

But the dispute did not last as long as some in the West hoped.  It was due to Khrushchev reneging on a 1957 promise of nuclear aid to China. 

He had wanted to make yet another attempt at rapprochement with the US, just at the moment when Beijing needed Soviet nuclear aid.

Beijing had needed the promised aid so it could develop its own bomb to counter US nuclear threats against its moves in the late fifties to capture Nationalist-held Offshore Islands. We know much more about those threats from the writings of 

Daniel Ellsberg before his recent death. 

The sight of the impulsive Khrushchev dumping his 1957 promise in yet another vain effort to woo the US infuriated the Chinese.

(Khrushchev had been deceived by the US once before, with the CIA U2 spy plane flight and crash forcing cancellation of the planned ’Camp David spirit’ 1960 Paris Summit where he had hoped to launch his first effort at rapprochement with the West, and by the Eisenhower refusal of an apology for the flight after the crash.)

In any case Beijing by 1964 was able by its own efforts to develop the bomb, and had decided it could shelve the Offshore islands problem.

Ironically it was just in 1964 that a Sinophobic Canberra set out to take the advice to try to use the dispute in its favour.  

In a secret move (which I witnessed because I was in Moscow at the time) it set out to persuade the Soviet leadership to join the West in halting alleged Chinese aggression in Vietnam.

That move went nowhere, predictably. And when the US in the early seventies set out to use the dispute in the opposite direction – this time with the Kissinger-Nixon move to win over the Chinese against Moscow – Canberra with its earlier amateurish move to win over Moscow against China was left nonplused.

When Beijing skilfully chimed in with the US move, with its ping-pong/panda diplomacy, even Sinophobic Canberra was forced to respond. 

But the pro-China mood did not last long.  The deep-state/military-industrial complex fearing it would be deprived of an enemy soon managed to revive anti-China suspicions. 

And with war raging over Ukraine there was no problem ramping up anti-Russia suspicions.

Despite past differences Russia and China are now firmly bound together. Kipling has finally been proved wrong.

And the deep-state/military-industrial complex finally has the enemy it wanted.