Strategic Partners: Russian-Chinese Relations in the Post-Soviet Era (review)

It is hard to imagine two more different politicians—Boris Yeltsin, the mercurial leader of Russia's fledgling democratic revolution, who unleashed a chaotic process of market-oriented reform on an unprepared population, and Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative, who has sought to stabilize the reform process by reasserting the strength of the Russian state, often at the expense of a democratic society. Despite fundamental differences in personality, style, and priorities, Jeanne L. Wilson argues in Strategic Partners: Russian-Chinese Relations in the Post-Soviet Era that Russia's two presidents have shared a fundamental commitment to developing a partnership with the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The successful establishment of such a relationship in the past decade is all the more surprising given that the two neighbors have had a difficult history, come from very different cultural traditions, and embarked on sharply divergent reform trajectories in the 1990s. Terming the Sino-Russian partnership "a Russian success story" (p. 6), Wilson downplays the importance of individual political leaders, crediting instead the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for building on progress made in relations under Mikhail Gorbachev's rule. The author portrays Russian policy as motivated by ongoing realist concerns, particularly the need to accommodate a rising power situated on Russia's underdeveloped and demographically declining periphery, and constrained by Russia's overall economic weakness. Wilson asserts that Russian policy has focused on bilateral priorities, such as the border demarcation process (obviating the need for the costly border defense required in the 1970s and 1980s) and weapons sales to China, which have sustained production in Russia's ailing defense industries, particularly in the Russian Far East.

The most interesting chapter is the conclusion, which provides alternative explanations for the development of Sino-Russian relations since the Yeltsin era and aims to establish causality. Had this chapter been used as the introduction, with subsequent chapters then going on to test the competing explanations, the book would have gained in analytical power. The author's intention, however, was to write chapters that could stand alone, and, consequently, the book ends up being more descriptive than analytical.

Instead of testing alternative explanations, the author emphasizes the continuities in post-Soviet China policy, while downplaying other factors, such as the role of individual leaders or officials. Wilson contends, for example, that any Russian leader who hoped to focus limited resources on economic reform would be compelled to find a way to coexist with Russia's largest neighbor. Although there may have been a shared consensus in both the Yeltsin and Putin administrations on the need to develop a solid bilateral relationship with China, it is a leap to contend, as does Wilson, that "Russia's relationship with China was virtually a nonissue, receiving limited attention" (p. 9).

A wider reading of Russian sources provides ample evidence of debates within policy and scholarly circles about hot-button issues such as the geopolitical implications of Russia's arms sales to China, the priority of China in Russia's Asia policy, the likelihood of the economic absorption of the Russian Far East into the Chinese economy, and the excessive emphasis on natural-resource sales in Russian exports to China.

While Wilson mentions some of these issues in passing, her rational-actor model leaves out much of the drama surrounding the unfolding of the Sino-Russian partnership in the 1990s.

Although Wilson's book is meant to focus exclusively on Russian policy toward China, an examination of Chinese views on Russian initiatives shows, to the Chinese leadership at least, that individual leaders have made a difference, but not always as expected. The Yeltsin presidency appeared to bode ill for the newly normalized relationship between Moscow and Beijing, yet Yeltsin surprised his Chinese counterparts with his commitment to developing a Sino-Russian partnership. While Wilson discounts the impact of the...