Sino-Soviet Documents Annual, 1989: Relations Restored (review)

262 China Review International: Vol. i, No. i, Spring 1994 Stephen Uhalley, Jr., editor. Sino-Soviet Documents Annual, 1989: Relations Restored GulfBreeze, Florida: Academic International Press, 1993. 324 pp. $72.00. copyrighti994 by University of Hawai'i Press At his May 17, 1989, news conference in Beijing, against the backdrop of the democracy movement surging on the streets outside, Soviet President Gorbachev responded rather sharply to an American reporter's question about the future of socialist renewal. "We have embarked," he said, "upon a path of thorough, revolutionary changes. ... If anyone should think that this path is leading us onto the garbage heap ofhistory, I believe that once again he will be profoundly disappointed " (p. 117). The disappointment, of course, turned out to be Gorbachev's, although in one way or another all of us have experienced the consequences of his failure. Scattered amidst the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the newly restored Sino-Soviet relationship that had been painstakingly reassembled in the 1980s from the shards ofthe original alliance dating back to the Stalin era in 1950. Gorbachev's meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in May 1989 symbolized the end of the Sino-Soviet conflict as well as a new beginning in the relations between the two countries. In Deng's pithy expression, the time had come to "end the past and open up the future." Who could have imagined on that historic occasion that within less than three years the era of Sino-Soviet relations would end forever? Now a weakened and diminished Russia, facing a dynamic if unstable China, is heir to both the Soviet and the earlier tsarist roles in the historic Chinese-Russian relationship. These documents from just five years ago read now like the records from some long lost civilization. It seems much longer ago than five years that Eduard Shevardnadze, now the embattled president of Georgia, was the foreign minister of the USSR, Gorbachev a world statesman, and Deng Xiaoping still a spry eighty-four years old. Stephen Uhalley and his publisher chose well in selecting 1989—the year of Sino-Soviet normalization—as the kickoffyear for a projected annual collection of documents on Sino-Soviet relations. (Presumably, Russia and the other successor states of the former USSR will replace "Soviet" in the post-1991 volumes.) If this first volume is any indication, this series should be extremely useful to students , teachers, librarians, journalists, and others who would like to have access to the major documentary materials without having to rummage in a multitude of scattered sources. The publisher also intends to publish retrospective volumes Reviews 263 covering the period 1949-1988. Newly available documents from years covered in already published volumes will appear in the form ofsupplements to newvolumes . Ifthis ambitious goal is accomplished, it will be a very great service indeed . The only existing English-language documentary collections on SinoSoviet relations that I am aware of date from the 1960s, the era of Sino-Soviet polemics . The materials selected for inclusion in the volume are almost all either English-language dispatches from the official Soviet and Chinese news agencies or translations from the mainstream Soviet and Chinese press. One can easily see the logic in such an approach. All the major public documents pertaining to Sino-Soviet relations in 1989 are presented here. What one does not get, however, are interpretative articles from Soviet and Chinese scholarly or semischolarlyjournals as well as articles in newspapers and periodicals from such sources as the Hong Kong press, which often provides lively commentary, inside information, and informed speculation that may supplement or contradict official sources. Furthermore, by 1989 glasnost had dramatically transformed the hitherto dull Soviet press, but only a couple of articles from the English-language Moscow News convey any sense ofthe diversity of Soviet opinion on China in that year of upheaval. One hopes that in future volumes the editor will attempt to range a little more broadly in Russian and Chinese sources—including neibu (restricted) materials, should any come to hand. It will also be necessary to chronicle major aspects of China's relations with Ukraine, Belarus, and the other post-Soviet republics. Should the gods smile...