Philip Snow. China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict & Concord. Yale University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780300166651.
14 February 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-25 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Liliane Stadler
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany S. Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Kelly Hammond, University of Arkansas 2
Review by Loretta E. Kim, University of Hong Kong. 6
Review by Ed Pulford, University of Manchester 11
Review by Xiao Sun, Princeton University. 17
Response by Philip Snow, Independent Scholar 21
Introduction by Kelly Hammond, University of Arkansas
The title of Philip Snow’s massive new book is apt: China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concordis essentially the thesis of the book. Over the course of the four hundred years or so covered in the book, Snow argues that the power dynamic between the entities called “China” and “Russia” vacillated from mutual admiration and respect to outright contempt that could have potentially escalated to war. Overall, as Loretta Kim notes, Snow argues that this relationship has been “largely productive” over the course of the longue durée. There were hiccups along the way, but the two great Eurasian land powers have never fought a large-scale war with each other.
As Snow points out in his response, the participants in this forum are four academics (three historians and an anthropologist), three of whom were tasked with reviewing a book that all parties agree is an approachable, popular history. Snow notes that he was apprehensive about receiving critiques from the ivory tower. Although each reviewer brings a different set of critical skills to their own reading of the book, their reviews are balanced and thoughtful. The author accurately describes them as “painstaking.”
All the reviewers agree that writing this book was both a worthy and a monumental task. Ed Pulford acknowledges that such an “ambitious work” requires “complex negotiations around readability versus fidelity.” Kim begins her review by noting that the “challenge” of writing this type of history book is that it is “inherently a capacious task.” Xiao Sun concurs with the other reviewers that China and Russia offers a “useful overview” of the “past entanglements” of these two Eurasian powers. Xiao writes that Snow’s tome provides “essential context for understanding current events.”
All the reviewers also agree that writing a book of this scale and scope is a gargantuan task. Snow himself admits that the “book is essentially a work of synthesis,” because “covering four hundred years, it could scarcely be anything else” (xv). He also acknowledges that his subject is well-trodden territory. In the book’s introduction, he tells readers that there are “no fewer than 1,200 books on Sino-Russian relations” held by the Library of Congress in Washington DC (xxi). Everyone agrees that Snow deserves praise for the readability of the book and the variety of historical anecdote he includes, including Snow’s use of interesting metaphors. For instance, he uses an art history term, "triptych,” to describe the complex region of Manchuria, Xinjiang and Mongolia (71). This useful visualization is one that I will repeat (and cite) in undergraduate lectures. He mentions the two powers are sometimes seen as the “Eurasian Mordor,” which is an obvious reference to the Lord of the Rings (xix). He also mentions that Russian and Chinese officials describe their relationship as a “Baked Alaska,” the flambéed dessert which is frozen on the inside, but warm and toasty on the outside (522). These metaphors make the book accessible and approachable.
At the same time, the reviewers contend that the work at times promises more than it delivers. Xiao Sun finds the simple thesis unfulfilling. She raises the important issue that the “balance of power is not always a convincing explanation for the stability of a relationship.” Pulford echos this sentiment when he questions Snow’s dismissal of ideology as an important factor in the Sino-Soviet split (417). This highlights what Pulford believes is “the book’s tendency to sideline sociocultural concerns.” For an economic historian (Xiao) and a cultural anthropologist (Pulford), the reduction of four hundred years of “collisions” between Russia and China simply cannot be reduced to geopolitical tensions (1). Of course, we should not expect a book like this to do everything—it already accomplishes a lot—but it left these reviewers wanting more.
Both Xiao and Pulford also address issues of agency. They argue that there is sometimes undue agency given to the Soviets when Snow writes about the 1950s and 1960s. All the reviewers discuss the book’s “somewhat elevated perspective,” as Pulford writes, with his anthropological perspective producing the most granular and directed comments and insights. Snow states explicitly that he is interested in “the experiences and opinions of ordinary people” to showcase what he calls the “cultural sphere,” but the reviewers note that the perspectives of states and elites dominate the narrative (279).
Kim mentions the slim bibliography “does not reflect the state of the field.” A broad-reaching work like this has an opportunity to showcase the state of the field and give kudos to the work being done by academics who do not have the reach of a book like China and Russia. She argues that the book could have included more sources from the past two decades as well as older “classics.”[1]
Snow’s book forms part of an exciting new wave of publications on the subject, many of which engage actively with each other. This includes Martin Thomas’ well-researched and provocative The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (2024).[2] In this approachable and well-argued narrative, Thomas leads readers to recent and ground-breaking research with extensive notes that are not distracting from his compelling writing. He also includes a substantial bibliography for further reading. Timothy Brook’s Great State: China and the World (Harper, 2020), which is not discussed in the book, is another example of recent scholarship in the field.[3] The reviewers provide a number of suggestions for new and provocative works in the field that would be useful to consult and include in an updated version of the text.
The text constitutes a valuable addition both to the literature and to the public discussion on China-Russia relations. Overall, it was written to remind both pundits and general audiences that assessments about how the China-Russia relationship will fare in the short term need to be concretely grounded in history. Although the relationship appears strained and unpredictable at times, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the exception of military confrontations on their shared borders, as occurred in 1969, the two states have never fought a war. The book does not make any conclusions about the future of the political relationship between Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia. My hope is that readers will appreciate the diversity of views brought to this H-Diplo roundtable and read the book to make their own assessments of China and Russia.
Contributors:
Philip Snow graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Honors degree in Chinese in 1975. In the years since then he has written extensively on China’s international relations and on the history of contacts between the Chinese and other peoples. He is the author of The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa(Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Cornell University Press, 1988–1989), The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press, 2003) and China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023). He lives in Hong Kong.
Kelly Hammond is Associate Professor of East Asian History and the Associate Director of the International and Global Studies program at the University of Arkansas. She is the associate editor for Modern China at The Journal of Asian Studies and a board member of Twentieth-Century China. Hammond is the author of China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II (UNC Press, 2020). She is currently writing a biography of Chinese Muslim General Bai Chongxi (1893–1966). Her most recent article is forthcoming in the Journal of Chinese Military History.
Loretta Kim is Associate Professor and the Director of the China Studies program at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Hong Kong. She is a historian of late imperial and modern China. Her primary research areas include the comparative history of borderlands and frontiers, Sino-Russian cultural relations, and Chinese ethnic minority languages and literatures. She is the author of Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) and The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong: Religion, Ethnicity, and Intercultural Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). She also works on the preservation of languages with relatively small “native” populations and support for ethnic and other social identities that reflect the internal diversity of these groups and organic changes to “tradition” that occur in response to political and economic factors through her research. Her current major projects include a monograph about food customs, natural resources, and regional identity in Northeast China, and articles about intercultural encounters in the eastern Sino-Russian borderlands.
Ed Pulford is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Chinese-Russian “Friendship,” and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. His first book Mirrorlands (Hurst 2019) explores Russian-Chinese senses of identity through the countries’ shared borderlands, while his forthcoming monograph Past Progress (Stanford University Press 2024) explores temporality as a pivot in cross-border relations among China, Russia, and Korea.
Xiao Sun is a PhD candidate in the History Department of Princeton University. Her primary research field is the economic and social history of the People’s Republic of China. Her dissertation, which focuses on the organization of the cotton textile industry in Mao-era China, aims to understand how the constellation of economic, social, and political forces, exercised through actors of multiple levels in the economic hierarchy, shaped China’s fledgling economic system.
Review by Loretta E. Kim, University of Hong Kong
Scholars who undertake the challenge of interpreting the relations between two subjects, x and y, assume various approaches to what is inherently a capacious task. Even comprehending the dimensions of one subject requires the nuanced composition of details from a full complement of sources, and those involving the relations between two or more entities often entail much more than doubling one’s efforts. This ethos is at the heart of Philip Snow’s recent contribution to analyzing the complex dynamics of China-Russia relations in an authentically longue durée study, exceeding his modest reference to the “four centuries” in the book title, which the reader may interpret as alluding to his focus on the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. He writes as a witness to the proverbial winds of change between these states and their societies, with expertise and insights formed by decades of personal experience, through deep immersion in the historiography and primary sources, and as an observer between the two worlds of China and Russia Studies. He reflects upon what he deems salient points for an interested audience.
Snow’s interpretative work on China-Russia relations therefore provides not just a historical background to his concerns about current affairs involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation, nor does it offer a prognosis for the immediate future. The book is an intentional combination of learning from patterns that emerge in the longue durée tapestry, underpinned by significant milestones and the no less important—as he demonstrates throughout this book—minutiae of interactions between individuals who are often left out of the picture in many studies of inter-state and inter-societal relations. He modestly introduces this endeavor to his readers by stating that he learned at the beginning of his research that there are “no fewer than 1,200 books” in the US Library of Congress about the subject and, undaunted by such precedents, that his ultimate goal is to reveal patterns from a “panoramic view of the entire four centuries of Sino-Russian contact” (xxi). The use of “contact” over “relations” in this statement of purpose is apt in describing his contemplation of a topic that indeed has myriad academic interpretations and understandings of varying biases in the popular imagination.[4]
The eight chapters through which Snow guides the reader from 1533 to 2022 can be read with respect to the philosophical pillars that buttress the work and the author’s consideration for various audiences with different interests and needs. Because much of the content takes the form of anecdotes that Snow threads together in each chapter, the book offers a highly accessible introduction to significant highlights in political, economic, and sociocultural interactions between the Chinese and Russians. Although the descriptions of these incidents are dense with details, the frequent use of quotation marks to signify actual utterances and terms adds a conversational tone to the text. The authorial voice is clear and distinctive, which means the narrative is also manageable for readers who are new to the subject, with the division of each chapter into sections divided by time periods and titles with a literary flavor.
The contents of these chapters are also rich. The chapters themselves form three layers. As just described, the first is the chronological narrative, which features individuals and groups representing both the Chinese and Russian sides. While perhaps offering new facts that have not been discussed in many previous treatments of the subject, most of the major points will be familiar to specialists, even if the author expands the conventional narratives of China-Russian relations, focusing on diplomacy and military conflicts with the inclusion of individuals. Some of these actors were not the most significant but have nevertheless influenced how Russian and Chinese states and societies dealt with each other. Bolshevik revolutionary and advisor to the Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) Mikhail Borodin’s wife Fanya Borodina, who was a prisoner-turned-memoir-writer after being kidnapped on her way from Wuhan to Shanghai by Zhang Zongchang, is one such example (239).[5] Snow identifies Zongchang as the “Dog Meat General” of Shandong Province. He was also known as a warlord. Other examples include the writer Ba Jin, an anarchist originally named Li Yaotang, who created his nom de plume with characters from the Chinese-language names of the Russian fellow anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Peter Kropotkin, who were anarchists like he was (190).
The second layer consists of what the book jacket description highlights as the “experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments.” Although it is difficult to discern an emphasis on these differences between state and society, as declared in the summary in the actual text, Snow sheds light and gives voice to many anonymous characters. These include men and women who engaged in Chinese-Russian romances in the 1950s despite the May 1954 decree by the PRC State Council that all interactions between Chinese persons and experts from the Soviet Union would be purely professional (391-392). Readers are later reminded that such defiance of the official dictum continued on into the 1960s in one of many of the multi-part examples that Snow constructs based on certain sub-topics. One case describes “Romeo” and “Juliet” at Leningrad University in August 1961. It ends with the Soviet government (security chiefs) allowing the Russian “Romeo” to defect to China if the Chinese authorities would allow it (425). While the reader is curious about whether the pair encountered a satisfying or tragic ending to their romance, Snow makes the point that the two governments adapted to the imperfect execution of their policies to enforce boundaries and to maintain separate identities between their citizens. Another example of a recurring sub-topic is the use of language as a tool of connection between two disparate cultures, starting with the development of the Russian-Chinese pidgin for trade in the early nineteenth century (93). This continued to be essential and relevant, as Snow shows with more examples of vocabulary created through these interactions in the first decade of the twentieth century (167).
The third layer of this book is formed by the components that substantiate the author’s main argument that China-Russian relations have been largely productive. This motif provides the momentum for the transition from one chapter to another, starting with the first one, which ends with the thought-provoking conclusion that:
[t]he two sedentary powers [Qing and Russian empires] were perhaps also influenced to some degree in their choices by their shared past experience of Mongol invasion. The written record gives no clues on this last point: we can only conjecture. But whatever their calculations, it seems clear they preferred to work with each other (39).
The endings of all subsequent chapters likewise underscore the symbiotic nature of China and Russia as neighbors and ideological kin, whether in the imperial, Communist, or even capitalist phases of their development. While reinforcing how the two states made key decisions that inevitably affected both sides, Snow’s narrative refrains from making overgeneralizations or including hints of teleology. His choice of vocabulary reflects his full command of nuance, with his description of the borderlands shared by Russia and China as “an immense triptych on which an incessant struggle for influence between the two imperial powers would be displayed” (71). Examples include his references to the conflicts between the Qing and Russian empires and official relations between the Russian Federation and the PRC in 2002 resembling a “Baked Alaska” because of their outwardly congenial but internally problematic nature (522). He also recognizes the many surprises in what he constructs as an elaborate and continual negotiation between the Russian and Chinese states. These include the speculation that:
[w]hatever the truth it seems probable that the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP would sooner or later have issued a public anathema against [Soviet Premier Mikhail] Gorbachev as they had against [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev before him. But the anathema never came, for suddenly at the end of December Gorbachev resigned his office as president and the Soviet Union ceased to exist (486).
Snow suggests with this detail that while mutual and fundamental respect for their cooperation as the two leading Communist countries bred a certain degree of acceptance in the PRC and the Soviet Union for what occurred in their domestic politics, tensions, and conflicts simmered. In this example of a swift and simultaneous change in leadership and regime, they prevented overt and profound disputes from arising between them. Although CCP discontent with Gorbachev’s appetite for reform has already been well-established and discussed in China studies,[6] what Snow contributes by articulating it in his research is the phrasing that casts light on the probability that even Beijing was most likely compelled to change its attitude towards Moscow on a dime.
Snow also clarifies that his principal concern is not to advance a particular argument that will overturn an existing paradigm or establish an innovative conceptual framework for China-Russian relations. Although he graciously acknowledges the many contributions to his book from an impressive range of interlocutors, including fellow scholars of Chinese and Russian foreign relations,[7] he also makes it amply clear that narratives take precedence over historiographical discussions in this work. Readers with background knowledge of Chinese and/or Russian history and China-Russian relations will be able to discern the nuanced references to well-established ideas with the empirical content and be more comfortable with the transitions from one sub-topic to another within chapters. However, this book is, by design, not meant to serve as a monograph. Therefore, although Snow includes a select bibliography that offers ample references to secondary sources, this list does not reflect the state of the field. To be fair, the book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic when many academic resources were inaccessible. It would benefit the reader if a subsequent edition of the book could include more works from the past two decades relevant or complementary to Snow’s approach,[8] as well as examples of older “classics.”[9]
Given the timing of its production, Snow’s work is nevertheless impressive because it provides diverse evidence from a variety of primary sources, including evidence from two archives in the Russian Federation, two in the PRC, as well as Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office records of the United Kingdom, personal memoirs, correspondence, and Russian- and English-language newspapers. He also treats some content from academic journals as primary-source evidence to reveal how the shaping of perceptions about China-Russian relations developed, providing a discussion of historiography interwoven and complementing the main narrative. Also helpful is the wealth of illustrations, 38 in all, which range from the seventeenth century to the present. Each of the six maps similarly gives a full range of information. Each map depicts a half-century from the mid-seventeenth to early twenty-first centuries and has a thematic subtitle like “From allies to enemies” for the map of the mid-to late-twentieth century (unnumbered plate in the front matter).
Furthermore, Snow employs conventions in his writing that make the book more inviting to a general audience and also prevent an already voluminous work from becoming unwieldy. He provides full explanations about how he has employed Romanization for Chinese and dealt with the complex variations of personal and place names, remaining faithful to the precise contexts of each period under discussion and using exceptions purposefully. Russian names are primarily rendered in their Anglicized forms, which is suitable for a broad audience, as are other terms that are somewhat more problematic—such as “Altyn Khan” instead of “Altan Khan”—but which nevertheless serve their purpose (4). Snow employs original terms and quotations in Chinese and Russian sparingly. Russianist readers may have more of an advantage and benefit from the Romanization of relatively more Russian terms. A glossary with Chinese and Russian terms which would embody the spirit of presenting a balanced interpretation of the prodigious bonds between China and Russia, would enhance a second edition of this book.
Review by Ed Pulford, University of Manchester
Philip Snow’s substantial monograph, China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict, provides a sweeping overview of four hundred years of interaction between two of the contemporary world’s most consequential polities. At a time when there is a lot of curiosity among Anglophone readerships about the nature of the relationship between these two vast Eurasian land empires-turned-nation-states, this readable book—belying its weighty appearance—represents a valuable addition to a field of study that has been expanding significantly in recent years. In History and Anthropology in particular, growing numbers of scholars have of late turned their attention to relations between China and Russia, or to the complex multi-ethnic borderlands between them. Snow’s ambitious volume has a scope that will complement many of these existing works.[10]
The first chapter’s account of early “collisions” between the two sides from the seventeenth century bears many of the hallmarks of the narrative that will follow. The primary focus is on officials, diplomats, and other representatives of the political authorities on each side (1). As foreshadowed in the preface, this is a book whose emphasis is on the “balance of Sino-Russian power” over time. Those wielding power generally receive most attention (xxi). Snow’s discussion of the first groping negotiations between expanding Tsarist and Qing empires describes the latter as weighed down by Confucianism and by a hierarchy-obsessed “traditional Chinese view” of diplomacy which he contrasts with Russian interest in trade and “modern” state-state relations (14). This era of slow travel and communications, but faster events on the ground, saw the settling of the first border between the two sides with the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk (32).
Chapter 2 focuses on a period of “great equilibrium” from the late-seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, when interaction took place primarily through the combined religious and diplomatic activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Beijing (40). Occasional Russian trade caravans also traversed Eurasia, although their economic benefits were limited until they were “privatised” in the 1760s (79). This long timespan may at times look more like an equilibrium by virtue of the author’s macro-level perspective. More granular recent works of history, such as Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars, reveal more nuance and hazard.[11] Snow’s prose reveals an intriguing time of engagement between the three great Qing emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, as well as Russian rulers such as chinoiserie-fascinated Catherine the Great, who composed racist doggerel about Qianlong (81). The same lofty vantage point beholds two empires juxtaposed across an “immense triptych” of borderland regions comprising Manchuria, Mongolia, and Turkic Inner Asia, and over time becoming increasingly “familiar” parts of one another’s cultural and political worlds (71; 90).
As chapter 3 shows, by the late Qing period this familiarity did not prevent the Tsarist empire from making the most of Beijing authorities’ weakening grip on power and from participating in the multi-sided carve-up of the collapsing realm. Snow covers the interactions of European and Japanese imperial interests in East Asia well during this time. He suggests convincingly that the Russian Empire’s distinctive history of interaction with its neighbour allowed its leaders to adopt a privileged “avuncular” posture in negotiations with the later Qing emperors (110). This in turn facilitated St. Petersburg’s annexations of territory around newly-founded Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, and the laying of the China Eastern Railway which was centred on Harbin.[12]The collaborations of the chief actors in this colonial process are described deftly by Snow, notwithstanding some questionable suggestions that the annexations represented a “recovery” of historic Russian territories, and oddly phrased statements about Tsarist authorities “play[ing] the avuncular card” in Manchuria towards the end of the nineteenth century (111; 147).
Moving into the twentieth century, chapter 4 discusses the events that followed the dual collapses of the Tsarist and Qing imperia from the 1910s. It charts how intellectuals and revolutionaries from each side looked to the other—more often in the Chinese-to-Russian direction—while seeking a new course for their own countries. In China, Snow shows that different Russias served as models for different groups, from those who were engaged in a localized “discovery” of Russian literature, to early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) figures whose admiration for the USSR led to almost all of them becoming “product[s] of Soviet tuition” (187; 227). Future Chairman Mao Zedong represented an important exception to this (228). Mutual influence was not always a function of mutual attraction, and early CCP policy was often defined by “friction” with the Party’s Soviet counterparts, whose projects were complicated by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s and others’ ignorance of China (237; 214). Initial revolutionary conversations were conducted in English between patrician figures such as Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin and Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen (216). This was a far cry from Mao’s later, earthier agitation, which comes to the fore in chapter 5. Covering the 1930s and 1940s period of the Chinese Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, and the Japanese invasion of China, Snow makes a convincing case for how the CCP became locked into a “Soviet idiom” despite periodic efforts to push back on Moscow’s ambivalent tutelage under Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin (310). Even as he became chief molder and discipliner of Chinese Communism, Stalin maintained relations with the Communists’ Guomindang rivals and enthusiastically expanded Soviet control into Xinjiang, while for his part, Mao continued to cultivate ties with West into the 1940s (266-271; 322). Thus, even if the Chairman’s own sons were estranged from him by their years of Soviet tutelage (as well as his laissez-faire parenting), we learn here that (as Shen Zhihua has also documented) the CCP’s “lean to one side” (yi bian dao) policy was far from preordained (342).[13]
Nevertheless, the lean occurred, and the 1950s decade of high friendship discussed in chapter 6 represented an official “best of times” between Moscow and Beijing (346). The formal alliance, sealed by a February 1950 treaty, was accompanied (as Elizabeth McGuire has shown in captivating detail elsewhere) by increasingly intimate entanglements among both revolutions and revolutionaries themselves on each side. It was also accompanied by a panoply of gaudy propaganda, cultural exchange, and the dispatch of thousands of Soviet experts to China to build the new socialist state.[14] Yet the bond turned out to be short-lived, descending by the 1960s into outright “confrontation,” as chapter 7 labels the Sino-Soviet split (421). Together, these two chapters offer a rich sense of the textures and contradictions which undergirded both the friendship and the split. However officially warm as the alliance was, it did not stop Mao Zedong from ignoring Soviet advice (for example, when collectivizing agriculture in the People’s Republic of China [PRC] in 1955) nor did it prevent the two sides competing for influence in Mongolia, or dissuade Moscow from continuing its condescending “avuncular” posture. However unified the two sides were, the border between them was also not particularly open (388; 346; 391). Conversely, even as the relationship worsened from the mid-1950s, Soviet aid to China still increased under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, who was loathed in Beijing. Border talks continued in tandem with armed conflict over Damanskii Island/Zhenbaodao in 1969, and there were a number of “last chances” to mend the relationship (373-374; 454-467; 429).
Both the friendship and the split—for which Snow blames Mao—are at times narrated from a standpoint that implies greater authorial sympathy with the Soviet side (425). The labelling of the worsening friendship as a “rebellion” in the title of chapter 6 only really makes sense if one takes Moscow’s revolutionary position to be a default from which the PRC might deviate. Here, the author paints a picture—not for the first time—of the USSR’s authorities acting calmly and reasonably in the face of Chinese hysterics and “extreme behaviour” (346; 438; 434). Such a characterization may underplay both Khrushchev’s own irascibility and earlier Stalinist extremes. However, the account of this pivotal period from the 1950s to the 1970s is nevertheless valuable in its elucidation. At times, it offers intriguing comparisons with the inter-imperial relationship of earlier eras—of unfriendly friendship and non-categorical enmity (394). Snow’s argument is that the split was “never primarily about ideology. It was about dominance; it was about independence; it was about the raw issues of political, economic and military strength” (417). This is compelling, although the suggestion that Marxism-Leninism was mostly a weapon to wield rather than an article of true belief for some reflects the book’s tendency to sideline sociocultural concerns, which is discussed below.
Out of the ambivalences of both positive and negative relations, the 1980s saw a re-warming of ties. This was symbolized, for example, by a cautious 1983 resumption of local border trade, and ultimately by the cozier post-1990s relationship discussed in chapter 8 (477). Snow examines the last thirty years of Moscow-Beijing interactions through the lens of the officially convivial 2020s bond, noting importantly, for example, that both sides were already discussing global “multi-polarity” in 1997. Thus, the developing rapprochement between them (captured by their joint strategic partnership announcement in 2015) has a longer history than some assume (496; 509). Publics on each side may not always share their leaders’ mutual affection. Today’s “deeply conservative and traditional” relationship rooted in a “shared taste for autocracy” is arguably an outgrowth of a bond that was already observed by post-Soviet Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s to be stronger precisely because of a lack of ideology (521; 498; 505; 488).
Overall, this is an engaging book, which succeeds impressively in its stated aim of teasing out patterns in relations between the states known now as China and Russia and their historical incarnations (xxi). A good range of maps and some cleverly captioned images supplement the narrative well. Over a sweeping historical canvas, Snow makes compelling arguments that this relationship has long been seen in a very specific light on both sides, by elites and—to some extent—ordinary people. During early interactions, Russians were treated in China as more akin to a northern steppe people like the Mongols than a European empire. Yet Snow also traces the emergence of a bond among “old friends” by the nineteenth century, which has persisted up to the present. Even if deep economic ties have been slow to emerge, the language of friendship is still high on the agenda, and we get a strong sense here of an international bond with its own distinctive character (124; 109; 497).[15]
Notwithstanding the book’s somewhat elevated perspective and focus on the wielders of power over its subjects, scholars of borderland regions will appreciate the attention paid here to the “triptych” of Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Mongolia (oddly labelled with the archaism ‘Outer Mongolia’ in discussion of the contemporary period) (513). Periodic attentiveness to linguistic questions between the two empires is also a strength of the book. It draws attention to Russian language tuition under the Qing, all the way to the emergence of a borderland Russo-Chinese pidgin and more recent concerns (87; 93).
Overall, however, matters of society and daily life—what Snow refers to as the “cultural sphere”— take a back seat (279). Readers will need to look elsewhere to find fuller treatments of important themes such as racializing “Yellow Peril” fears, the “underlying dread of China” in Russia, or anti-Russian feeling in China, such as that which emerged towards Shanghai-based refugees following the 1917 October Revolution (279; 169; 182; 201).[16] Furthermore, where the borderlands are concerned, a focus on the “incessant struggle for influence between the two imperial powers” over places like Manchuria and Turkic Inner Asia means we learn comparatively little about indigenous communities beyond hints. For example, some inter-imperial groups like the Nanai or Orochen acted as guides for Russian fur-trappers (71; 138). Discussion of the “scattered people between” Russia and China, or characterizations of wandering Cossack or Qing individuals as “stray,” perhaps represent missed opportunities to at least allude to current debates over the comparative settler colonial experiences of people on the “frontiers” of different empires (329; 70). Deeper discussion beyond the brief and rather breezy comparison of Russian Cossacks with colonists of the American West would, as recent works by Shellen Wu and Steven Sabol have done, have set the relationship foregrounded in the book in a wider comparative frame (9).[17] More attention could also have been given to the multi-ethnic character of nineteenth-century settlement in the Russian Far East, many of whose new residents were from what is now Ukraine.
According too little attention to the lives and experiences of people who inhabit the expansive regions between imperial metropoles also risks implying that these two vast polities have been more coherent through both time and space than they necessarily have been. Empires to which people across Eurasia, who generally spoke neither Russian nor any Chinese language, have exhibited various levels of attachment, have both expanded and contracted over the past 400 years. “Strayness,” or lack of unequivocal allegiance to one or other polity – has therefore surely as often been the rule as the exception. The relative cohesiveness or fragmentation of each polity has varied substantially over time. Hence, one might ask precisely who or what “Russia” or “China” were in many of the contexts in which they are discussed as such here. The same brisk style which makes this book an engrossing read at times edges into a somewhat blustery tone which undermines the analytical utility of the language used. As entire collective entities, Russia and China are described as possessing “vigour” or “energy” (2; 6). We learn of a Qing empire showing “haughty disdain” and interacting with “a phlegmatic Russia” (75; 105). During interactions in the eighteenth century, “China and Russia…opted for a solid compromise” (59). Throughout the period of the USSR’s existence the Soviet government is glossed as “the Russians,” while the Qing is often simply “China.” Such characterizations may have significant historiographical implications. For example, the 1713 arrival of a Qing delegation across the Urals is described as the “first Chinese embassy to set foot in Europe” (46). Yet given the heterogeneity of the Manchu-ruled empire, one might wonder whether the Qing were a lot more “Chinese” than, for example, the Mongol Empire, whose territory included “Chinese” lands such as the Yuan and extended far into Europe (46).
Further, where heterogeneity is concerned, Snow’s discussion of issues pertaining to Taiwan is a real strength of the book, including its attention to Soviet engagement with the Guomindang government during the Sino-Soviet split (462). Yet elsewhere, when covering Moscow-Taipei relations during the 1950s, Snow refers to Taiwan, without much contextualization, as a “renegade province” (358). In such cases, similar to his characterization of the Manchu-Qing leadership as “effete,” it is not always clear where the book’s authorial voice is located (131). This is not to deny the existence of people who see Taiwan as a “rebel,” or critics, including for example the author Lao She, who at the time felt that the late-Qing leadership lacked archetypal masculine traits (487). These questions are of course a matter of perspective, and in places it would have been helpful had the historian delineated his own views from those of his subjects more clearly.
Of course, authoring an ambitious work such as this inevitably involves complex negotiations around readability versus fidelity, or politics versus people. Indeed, my focus on questions of language in part reflects this book’s relatively modest number of shortcomings. Nevertheless, narratives which too straightforwardly foreground single large political entities do risk privileging the “interests” and agency of those states and risk enshrining their at-times-oppressive historical narratives. The sheer scale of this tome may at times also have caused Snow to overlook some of the finer points of historical scholarship. In November 2023, historian of Sino-Soviet affairs Sergey Radchenko highlighted a number of possibly “shoddy” aspects of the book’s coverage of more recent events, including, for example, claims regarding Chinese missiles being pointed at Russia (495).[18] But such issues do not detract substantially from what is overall an important work, offering a basis for understanding Eurasian affairs to interested parties within and beyond academia.
Review by Xiao Sun, Princeton University
In the 1950s, the making and the breaking of the Sino-Soviet alliance drastically changed the trajectory of the Cold War. More than half a century later, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, the world once again has its eyes on China and Russia. The relationship between the two massive Eurasian powers, both of whom are outliers to the set of ideologies and institutions that define the “West,” may again have an enormous impact on shaping the course of world affairs. At this historical moment, Philip Snow’s latest book offers a comprehensive and germane account of the history of China-Russian relations from the seventeenth century to the present. It provides a useful overview to the two countries’ past entanglements and, in doing so, gives the essential context for understanding current events.
What sets Snow’s book apart from the plethora of other works on China-Russian relations is its ambitious scope. While the literature offers many excellent analyses set within a specific historical context,[19] as Snow points out, there are no more than a handful of systematic surveys of the history of this important relationship (xxi).[20] Moreover, for the obvious reason that they were invariably published before the mid-1980s, these earlier works do not cover the significant changes in the bilateral relationship after the fall of the Soviet Union. Snow’s book, as its title indicates, is set to take the readers onto a full journey of China-Russian relations. It begins with their rather unassuming first encounters in the mid-seventeenth century (Chapter 1), continues to the 150 years of stability that both sides enjoyed (Chapters 2-3), covers the collapse of this stability in the mid-nineteenth century, and discusses the domineering patronage that Moscow subsequently imposed on China (Chapters 4-7), before turning to the nebulous “new partnership” forged by presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping over the course of the past decade (Chapter 8). The narrative is sufficiently substantiated by meticulously researched details and a thorough synthesis of a large body of secondary scholarship. Vividly embellished by an impressive range of quotations and anecdotes, Snow’s book is an engaging read.
The book is at its best when Snow synthesizes the details of even the most minor actors in his narration of the initial phase of the interaction between Qing China and Russia in a way that inspires a big-picture understanding of the encounter. According to Snow, the contributors to the eventual signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 were not limited to the Manchu and Russian officials alongside their French, Portuguese, and Polish translators. The Mongols, despite their ineptitude as interpreters, were important companions on both sides of the delegation (36). Moreover, there were also groups that had frequently trotted across the frontiers between Russia and the Qing Empire decades before the negotiation began. Among them were Siberian merchants eyeing the Chinese market (41),[21] and the Tungus tribes in the Amur region were the Qing court’s target to be absorbed into its tribute-paying network (10). Such enumeration of detail makes it clear that multiple parties held a stake in the Nerchinsk Treaty, making it, in Peter Perdue’s words, “a global agreement.”[22] What this detailed narrative further suggests is that the absence of a similar array of centripetal forces in the Qing-British encounter may at least partially explain the difference in the fate between the Russian missions and the Macartney Embassy, which arrived in China a hundred years later and received only blessings from the Qianlong Emperor, but no trade treaty with the celestial empire.
Similarly, Snow’s depiction of the China-Russian power shift in the late nineteenth century consists of multiple layers, with one recounting the global power dynamics in which the entanglement of the two empires unfolded. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia’s military and economic capacity had been drastically enhanced, while Qing’s power was on the wane. Snow importantly reminds the readers that it was not just the Western Europeans who were actively involved in China’s modernization at this vulnerable moment in Qing history.[23] The Russians also set up a military aid program and served as mentors to assist the Qing in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion (120-121). At the same time, the author effectively shows that Russia’s China policy was intricately linked to a complex set of calculations vis-à-vis the Western European powers. On the one hand, Russia held a great stake in having privileged access to the market of an integrated Qing Empire. Yefim Putyatin, the Russian envoy to China, is even said to have promised to help the Chinese “destroy the British and the French” (121), who waged the two Opium Wars against China, if the Qing court were to grant Russia favorable trade conditions. On the other hand, the overall approach of Saint Petersburg was more constrained, as it also did not want to estrange itself from other European powers (116, 121). After all, by the end of the century, Britain and France were among the major investors in Russia, a role that the crumbling Qing Empire could hardly fulfill.[24]Portions of the capital that flowed from Paris ended up financing parts of Russia’s China strategy, as epitomized by the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (151). But almost ironically, the railway system did little to facilitate Russia’s trade with China, because Russian consumer goods were not nearly competitive enough with products from Western Europe, including France.[25]
In his discussion of China-Russian relations in the twentieth century, Snow stresses the power imbalance between the two sides, which lent Russia an enduring upper hand in its dealing with its Chinese counterparts. While this depiction is overall accurate, it at times mars some of the nuances of the two sides’ maneuverings, which are also essential for a full understanding of the relationship. For example, in the early 1950s, Beijing had a great deal of agency in forming the China-Soviet natural resources joint-stock companies in Xinjiang, despite Moscow’s extractive approach to the endeavor. As early as January 1950, the Chinese top leadership emphasized that Beijing had to be proactive in asking Moscow to enter joint ventures so that China could use Soviet capital to develop Xinjiang’s rich resources.[26] As the existing scholarship demonstrates, the Chinese central government has historically had trouble with governing the Uyghur-populated region.[27] Given Tsarist Russia’s long presence in Xinjiang, Beijing also aimed to turn the Soviet Union’s experiences in the region into assets for better administering the northwestern frontier.[28] In many aspects, the Soviet Union was the hegemon over the socialist bloc in the years immediately after the Second World War. But such agency on the Chinese part makes the important distinction between Moscow’s relationship with China and the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Warsaw Pact countries. In the latter case, the Eastern European states often had little stake in the economic programs imposed by the Kremlin.
In addition to offering this detailed narrative of state-to-state relations, Snow also covers the social, intellectual, and personal dimensions of China-Russian interactions. The book highlights, for example, instances of linguistic fusion between Chinese and Russian words (380-381) and multiple occasions of cultural exchanges throughout the history of the centuries-long contact. Many eccentric figures and groups emerged out of the encounter, including a Qing official named Wang Zhichun who was moved by Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (137), and a group of Soviet artists who were impressed by Chinese traditional paintings, an art form that was not at all associated with socialism (378). The frequent exchange had generated a great level of mutual affection between the two populations. Russian literature was the favorite of many Chinese (379). And the bond between Soviet experts and their trainees endured, despite the souring of China-Soviet relations at the state level in the late 1950s (377-378). Throughout the book, Snow maintains a propensity for telling the stories of non-state actors: the “grass-roots” of society. However, at times, the notion of “grass-roots” is ill-defined. Chinese readers of Russian literature and trainees of Soviet experts were still rather privileged groups in Chinese society, most of whose members were just beginning to gain access to basic education in the 1950s. Many ordinary Chinese tended to be indifferent or even hostile toward Soviet involvement in China.[29] Nonetheless, Snow’s overarching point is well-taken: that is, there is no monolithic view of China-Russian relations.
To tell this extensive, multi-faceted story, Snow’s narrative arc traces the rise and fall—and the potential restoration—of the power “equilibrium” between China and Russia. It suggests that when the power and the interests between the two sides were balanced, as was the case until the mid-nineteenth century, the bilateral relationship flourished. When the equilibrium was overturned, China-Russian relations plummeted into a turbulent state fraught with conflicts and even near-Armageddon situations, including the border skirmish on Damansky/Zhenbao Island in 1969. After reading the book, I was left wondering what the essential ingredients are in the mix that can make or break the equilibrium. The balance of power is not always a convincing explanation for the stability of a relationship. The US alliance system in East Asia is built on a highly asymmetrical power structure and yet is quite stable. The power shift in itself is more of a symptom than cause of the underlying circumstances within and beyond the bilateral interaction. In this sense, the book’s narrative framework, which is centered on an equilibrium shift, is somewhat lacking in its explanatory power and not entirely conducive to pinning down the fundamental patterns in the historical evolution of China-Russian relations.
Perhaps another way of reading the book suggests that there is in fact nothing intrinsic in China-Russian relations, that the evolving state of the relationship over time is derived from geopolitical contingencies and strategic calculations. In today’s world, then, the West may after all have many more options than passively watching Xi and Putin choreograph an intricate dance. If they understand the core interests of either China or Russia correctly, the US and the European Union, among other powers, may also have tremendous agency in shaping where this important relationship is heading.
Response by Philip Snow, Independent Scholar
To begin with, I should like to thank Liliane Stadler for organizing this roundtable and for editing my contribution to it; Diane Labrosse for her further editorial advice; and Kelly Hammond for kindly providing an introduction. Most important of all, I should like to say how very grateful I am to Loretta Kim, Ed Pulford, and Xiao Sun for their painstaking reviews of my book. As the author of a history that covers four hundred years and that primarily—though not exclusively—addresses a general readership, I have naturally awaited the judgement of specialist scholars with some apprehension. It is a real encouragement to find that these reviewers consider my book to be a useful contribution to the field of Sino-Russian studies, and that the various criticisms they raise have been fair-minded and thoughtful. In the following paragraphs I will discuss some of the major issues they bring up, working down through the centuries in a roughly chronological direction.
One question implicit in some of their comments has been whether my bird’s-eye view of four centuries of Sino-Russian relations fully reflects the realities on the ground at any given time. Thus, for example, Ed Pulford wonders whether my depiction of a long period of equilibrium between the conclusion of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 and the beginning of Tsarist territorial expansion in the 1850s pays sufficient attention to “nuance.” I take this to mean that my perceived equilibrium might not have felt much like an equilibrium to a Russian or Chinese observer who was alive in those years. Certainly, an observer who witnessed the tensions of the mid- to late-eighteenth century would have been unlikely to feel a sense of stability. The two powers came close to war on the Mongolian-Siberian frontier and the Qing government ordered repeated suspensions of the border trade at Kyakhta.
I believe nonetheless that my approach does bear out the dictum of the late Professor Mark Elvin “that width is as crucial a part of historical understanding as depth, and that many patterns only reveal themselves at a distance.”[30] If we contrast my equilibrium period with the border clashes that punctuated the dealings between the two powers before the conclusion of the Nerchinsk treaty, and the mixture of patronage and violence which characterized the Russian treatment of China following the 1850s Tsarist switch to a “forward” policy (106), a picture of balance and restraint does begin to emerge. Xiao Sun broadly accepts my designation of the next hundred years, from the mid-1850s through to the mid-1950s, as a period of consistent Russian or Soviet dominance, though she too sees a need for more a discussion of the “nuances,” meaning in effect more attention to the efforts made by successive Chinese regimes and political groupings to keep their own end up. I thought I had gone some way to conveying these efforts through my accounts of the Chinese attempts to claw back control of the borderlands during the phases of Russian weakness following the 1917 revolutions and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. I agree, however, that I could have said more.
Another prominent issue is whether I have paid due attention to the multi-ethnic character of the empires which both Russia and China were building as they advanced into the huge border regions of Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria, as well as whether my strong focus on the imperial rulers risks giving an unrealistically tidy impression. The reviewers seem divided on this question. Xiao Sun commends the way I have “synthesized the details of even the most minor actors” in the opening chapter of the book, while Ed Pulford would have liked to see more coverage of the indigenous Tungusic peoples such as the Nanai and Orochen, who inhabited the Manchurian frontier, and also of the Ukrainian, Jewish, Georgian, and other non-Russian settlers who migrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to take advantage of the new business opportunities that seemed to be presenting themselves in the Russian Far East. Loretta Kim sums up my intentions most clearly when she stresses that my book is a narrative history designed to tease out the specific patterns of Sino-Russian interaction. It was consequently hard for me to wander far from this central theme without losing the thread of my argument, and I found myself regretfully having to limit my exploration of these ethnic minority groups except in one or two cases where they made a significant impact on the Sino-Russian encounter.
I nonetheless made every effort to highlight the role played by one group whose presence had a truly transformative effect on the first century of diplomatic relations between the two powers. I mean, of course, the Manchus, who controlled China’s policies from 1644 onwards, and whose “barbarian pragmatism”[31]and quest for strategic security impelled them to cut through the constraints of traditional Chinese protocol, concluding treaties with the Russians on approximately equal terms and even sending emissaries to pay their respects to the Tsarist rulers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This Manchu factor continued to influence China’s dealings with Russia right up to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing court no longer needed to secure Russian neutrality in their wars against the now-exterminated Dzungar Mongols, and the growing Sinicization of the Qing elite was reflected in a return to the old Chinese inward-looking rigidity. Over the following centuries I give reasonable space to the Mongolians, Uighurs, and Kazakhs, though there may be a case for expanding this in any future edition of the book, in particular if Sino-Russian rivalry in Central Asia becomes more acute.
My reviewers seem also to have diverged somewhat over my handling of sociocultural themes. Loretta Kim sees my coverage of “the experiences and opinions of ordinary people” as a whole second layer of the book that is distinct from my chronicle of political and military matters, and this is certainly what I tried to achieve. Xiao Sun similarly notes the “multiple examples” of cultural exchange I provide throughout my narrative, such as the Chinese passion for Russian literature, the admiration of Soviet artists for traditional Chinese painting, and the affectionate personal ties which developed in the 1950s between Soviet scientists, engineers, and their Chinese trainees. She faults with some reason my use of the term “grass roots” to refer to educated Chinese and Russians who were well equipped to engage with the other side at a high intellectual level, as well as the truly ordinary folk who may well have regarded their neighbors from over the border with indifference or even hostility.
Ed Pulford, on the other hand, detects a tendency on my part to sideline sociocultural issues. Of the examples he mentions, I plead not guilty to the charge of downplaying the deep-seated Russian dread of a “Yellow Peril.” I think my narrative deals pretty thoroughly with the alarm generated in the Russian Far East by the influx of Chinese migrant traders and laborers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I address the fear that gripped practically the whole of Soviet society during the confrontation with Chairman Mao Zedong’s China in the 1960s and early 1970s. I discuss the renewed panic caused by the reappearance of Chinese migrants in the Russian Far East following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I also dwell on the abiding Russian tendency to conflate the Chinese with the Mongol conquerors of mediaeval times.
That being said, Pulford also quite rightly points out my omission of any reference to the hostility shown by Chinese in Shanghai to the bedraggled White Russian refugees who took shelter there during the 1920s and 1930s, and this is something I would look to amend in a second edition. The White Russian refugees in China—300,000 or even 500,000 in all according to some estimates[32]— constituted a major phenomenon which cries out for inclusion in any full Sino-Russian study. In the course of my book, I was able to trace some of the Whites’ political activities in China after the Russian revolutions of 1917. This includes their Japanese-aided conflicts with the Bolsheviks in Shanghai and Manchuria, as well as their rather startling shift in the 1930s to military collusion with the Soviet forces in Xinjiang. As in the case of the ethnic minorities, however, my need to maintain my focus on my central theme of the political relations between China and Russia made it difficult to venture far into the tempting byways of White Russian society and culture, including the interaction—or lack of it—between the White refugees and their Chinese neighbors in Harbin, Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. I can only hope that some future scholar will give this subject the book-length treatment it deserves. Full-length studies have been published in both Chinese and Russian, but so far as I am aware, English language accounts of the Russian emigration in China have been limited to articles and chapters included in more wide-ranging books.[33]
Finally, I would like to respond to a few queries which the reviewers raise about my presentation of the modern relationship between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In describing the so-called Sino-Soviet “honeymoon” of the 1950s, I settled quite deliberately for the counter-intuitive chapter heading “Rebellion.” It seemed to me that the Chinese were maneuvering to cut loose from their Soviet mentors from the very start of the decade, not merely from the time of First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of February 1956, which is usually identified as the cause of the rift. True, Xiao Sun draws attention to the new PRC’s readiness in 1950 to cooperate actively with the Russians in the establishment of controversial Sino-Soviet joint stock companies for the extraction of mineral resources in Xinjiang. Even this, however, can be seen as a necessary first step to harness Soviet knowledge and administrative experience with a view to replacing the Kremlin’s long-standing domination of the huge border region with China’s own. Thereafter, the signs of the restiveness of Chinese leaders with their subordinate status in the partnership crop up thick and fast. In 1953, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempted to promote Mao as the rightful leader of the international Communist movement after the death of CPSU General Secretary Joseph Stalin. In 1954, the staunchly pro-Soviet Gao Gang was purged from the Party leadership, and in 1955, Mao plunged into breakneck agricultural collectivization in defiance of Soviet warnings to proceed gradually.
In describing the split, it was certainly not my intention to sympathize with either the Soviet or the Chinese side. What I was trying to do was to emphasize the fundamental shift which began to take place after 1956, when the Chinese finally moved beyond latent restiveness to embark on an all-out challenge that was designed to put an end to the century-long phase of Tsarist and Soviet domination. After this, the Russians fell back on an essentially defensive posture, tackling Chinese challenges as they arose, as one Soviet diplomat put it, “on the principle of a fire brigade.” [34] Not infrequently, they tried to ignore them or douse them with various political gestures or with offers of military and economic aid. Of course there were times when the Soviet reaction was as intemperate as the Chinese challenge. Most notably in 1960, Khrushchev pulled all of his scientists and engineers out of China in the space of six weeks.
These, in my view, were, however, just “nuances” in a more significant long-term pattern, as the Chinese seized the initiative in the Sino-Russian relationship, an initiative they have never since lost. I do not blame Mao for the split in the sense of making a value judgement, but I do consider him to have been very largely responsible for it. It seems to me we can trace the Chairman’s fingerprints on every exacerbation of the Sino-Soviet quarrel. This includes his instruction to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to give Khrushchev and his colleagues a “dressing down” during Zhou’s visit to Moscow in January 1957, the humiliating reception given to Khrushchev in Beijing in July-August 1958, the 1962 stifling of the attempts made by more moderate CCP leaders to patch up the quarrel, and the 1964 sabotage of the very nearly completed agreement on the disputed sections of the Sino-Soviet border. Ed Pulford expresses doubt over my allusion to the “extreme behavior” of the Chinese in these years. But the storming by Mao’s Red Guards of the Soviet embassy in Beijing at the height of the Cultural Revolution seems to me a pretty indisputable example of this.
As regards ideology, I took my cue from the explanation given by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping to CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 that the Sino-Soviet polemics of the early 1960s were largely hot air and that the main fault of the Soviet participants had simply been their failure to treat the Chinese as equals. Given that Deng more than any other CCP leader had been in the thick of the quarrel, this seems to me an adequate justification for skimming quite lightly through the ideological bones of contention. At the same time, I do not for one moment wish to suggest that the Marxist-Leninist gospel was not sincerely embraced by large numbers of people in both Russia and China, who saw it as pointing the way to a new civilization based on social justice. On the contrary, it was precisely the fact that Marxism-Leninism was handed down in the form of a quasi-religion, creating boundless scope for the differing interpretation of details, which lent an especial venom to the underlying struggle for political dominance. President Boris Yeltsin indeed implied this in 1992, during his ice-breaking trip to Beijing as the first leader of a post-Soviet Russia, when he observed at a press conference that “the ideological barrier had been removed.”[35]
Of making many books there is no end. To close, I would like to add that no single volume, however ambitious, can hope to keep abreast of every offshoot of this vast and continually expanding subject, and Loretta Kim is justified in remarking that my bibliography “does not reflect the state of the field.” In particular, I regret that my book appeared too late to do full justice to the current surge of specialist studies that discuss the experiences and encounters of Chinese and Russian settlers in the imperial frontier zones.[36] I hope nonetheless, that the book will go some way to supplementing the work of the legion of specialists as well as to provide a helpful introduction to the Sino-Russian relationship for readers from other corners of the academic world and beyond.
[1] See, for instance, Johnathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford University Press, 2017); Max Oidtmann, Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2018); Eric Schlussel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia University Press, 2020); Peter Thilly, The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2023); Tatiana Linkhoeva, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020), Koji Hirata, “Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China,” American Historical Review 126:3 (2021): 1072-1101, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab351; Joshua Freeman, “Nation Building Across National Borders: A Uyghur Hero in Three Socialist States” Asian Ethnicity22:1 (2021): 140-154,
https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2020.1827946; Xavier Paulès, La République de Chine : Histoire générale de la Chine (1912–1949), (Les Belles Lettres, 2019). An English translation of this book was recently released: Xavier Paulès, trans. Lindsay Lightfoot, The Republic of China, 1912–1949 (Polity Press, 2024).
[2] Martin Thomas, The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press, 2024).
[3] Timothy Brook’s Great State: China and the World (Harper, 2020).
[4] The evolution of the state of the field in this subject can be most acutely observed in comprehensive works like T’ien-fang Cheng, A History of Sino-Russian Relations (Public Affairs Press, 1957); R.K.I. Quested, Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History (Allen & Unwin, 1984); and Alexei D. Voskressenski, Russia and China: A Theory of Inter-State Relations (Routledge Curzon, 2003). In the bibliography, Snow also cites several studies that cover shorter periods of time, such as Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Harvard University Press, 1971); O.B. Borisov and B.T. Koloskov, Soviet-Chinese Relations, 1945–1970 (Indiana University Press, 1975), and Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (University of Washington Press, 2014).
[5] Very little has been written in English about this incident and Borodina’s experience in China. One of the few references is in a publication that is already over fifty years old. See Dan N. Jacobs, “Recent Russian Material on Soviet Advisers in China: 1923–1927,” China Quarterly 41 (January-March 1970): 108, and as cited in the book, Dan N. Jacobs, Borodin: Stalin’s Man in Russia (Harvard University Press, 1981), 132.
[6] See David Shambaugh, China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (University of California Press, 2008), 48-65 and Jie Li, Sovietology in Post-Mao China: Aspects of Foreign Relations, Politics, and Nationality, 1980–1999 (Brill, 2023).
[7] Snow draws in evidence and ideas from a multilingual collection of scholarship spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including N.F. Demidova and V.S. Myasnikov, Pervye russkie diplomaty v Kitae [The First Russian Diplomats in China] (Nauka, 1966); A.G. Larin, Kitaitsy v Rossii [Chinese in Russia] (Institut Dal’nego Vostoka, 2000); Bobo Lo, Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics (Royal Institute of International Affairs/Chatham House, 2008); Ye Baichuan, Eguo lai Hua shituan yanjiu 1618–1807 [Research on Russian Missions to China, 1618–1807]( Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2010); and Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1970 (The Bodley Head, 2012).
[8] For example, Alexander Lukin, China and Russia: the New Rapprochement (CamPolity Press, 2018), and Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018).
[9] For example, S.C.M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (M.E. Sharpe, 1996).
[10] In History see: Gregory Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press, 2020); Sören Urbansky, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton University Press, 2020); Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (UBC Press, 2017); in Anthropology see: Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021); Ed Pulford, Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between (Hurst & Co., 2019); in Cultural Studies, see: Edward Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021).
[11] Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars.
[12] Harbin was purportedly once the only city on earth where the foreign population was larger than the native one (199).
[13] Shen Zhihua 沈志华。无奈的选择：冷战与中苏同盟的命运 [The Inevitable Choice: the Cold War and the Fate of the Sino-Soviet Alliance] (Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2013).
[14] Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution(Oxford University Press, 2017).
[15] See Ed Pulford, “Ukraine and the Limits of China-Russia Friendship,” Current History 121:839 (2022): 243-45, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2022.121.836.243.
[16] On this see, for example: Franck Billé and Sören Urbansky, eds., Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018); Viktor Larin, “‘Yellow Peril’ Again? The Chinese and the Russian Far East,” in Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff, eds., Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East (M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 290-301.
[17] See: Steven Sabol, “The Touch of Civilization”: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization(University Press of Colorado, 2017); Shellen Xiao Wu, Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2023).
[18] Sergey Radchenko, “Book review: Philip Snow, China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale UP, 2023)”, Medium (blog), 18 November 2023, https://medium.com/@prof.sergey.radchenko/book-review-philip-snow-china-and-russia-four-centuries-of-conflict-and-concord-yale-up-2023-dbf9f89d10f8.
[19] The author has included many such works in the bibliography. For example, Clifford Foust’s Muscovite and Mandarin is focused on Qing-Russian relations in the eighteenth century and gives a detailed analysis of the Kiakhta trade system; Deborah Kaple’s works are devoted to the examination of China-Soviet exchange in the 1950s. See Clifford Foust, Muscovite and Mandarin: Russia’s Trade With China and Its Settings, 1727–1805(University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Deborah Kaple, “Soviet Advisors in China in the 1950s,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford University Press, 1998): 117-140.
[20] See, as the author cites, Edmund O. Clubb, China and Russia: The“Great Game” (Columbia University Press, 1971); Rosemary Quested, Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History (G. Allen & Unwin, 1984).
[21] For more details on the Siberian merchants vis-à-vis China and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell University Press, 2016).
[22] Peter Perdue, “Boundaries and Trade in the Early Modern World: Negotiations at Nerchinsk and Beijing,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43:3 (2010): 341-356, here 342, DOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0187.
[23]Because of the abundant British sources and the dominant role of the British in China at the turn of the century, the study of British involvement in China’s modernization process has for a long time dominated the historiography of Qing China’s foreign relations. The most prominent among such studies are works by John King Fairbank and his pupils. This strand of works foregrounds an “impact-response” framework, arguing that the entry of the West to China in the nineteenth century triggered modernizing changes to the otherwise stagnant empire. The Fairbankian thesis has been effectively challenged by later historians, who propose to look at Chinese history from within. Nonetheless, the prominence of the thesis has generated a great deal of attention on the role of the West, the British in particular, in the historiography of Qing China. See John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Harvard University Press, 1953). For the historiographical debate, see Paul Cohen, China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (Routledge Curzon, 2003).
[24] For details, see Jennifer Siegel, For Peace and Money: French and British in the Service of Tsars and Commissars (Oxford University Press, 2014).
[25] For the last decade of the Qing Dynasty (1900-1911), China’s imports from Britain and France were fifteen times more than imports from Russia. See Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864–1949(Harvard University Press, 1974), 145, 149, 162-163.
[26] “Liu shaoqi guanyu zhongsu liangguo zai xinjiang sheli jinshu he shiyou gufen gongsi wenti zhi mao zedong de dianbao” (“Liu Shaoqi’s Telegraph to Mao Zedong Regarding Establishing Sino-Soviet Joint-Stock Metal and Petroleum Companies in Xinjiang,” 2 January 1950, in Zhongguo yu sulian guanxi wenxian huibian (1949 nian 10 yue – 1951 nian 12 yue) (Collection of Documents on Sino-Soviet Relations [October 1949 - December 1951]) (World Affairs Press Co., Ltd., 2009), 86.
[27] See James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (Revised and Updated) (Columbia University Press, 2022); the original edition of the work was published in 2007. Also see Justin Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (University of Washington Press, 2016); Judd Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands (The University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[28] Charles Kraus, “Creating a Soviet ‘Semi-Colony’? Sino-Soviet Cooperation and Its Demise in Xinjiang, 1949–1955,” The Chinese Historical Review 17:2 (2010): 129-165, here 130-131, DOI: 10.1179/tcr.2010.17.2.129.
[29] For example, see “Chongqing shimin dui ‘xinjiang shiyou,’ ‘Lüda’ deng wenti dou you cuowu renshi (“Locals of Chongqin Having Wrong Understandings of Issues Regarding ‘Petroleum in Xinjiang’ and ‘Lüda’”),” Neibu cankao (Internal References), 21 November 1952. Neibu cankao is an internal publication circulated within the Chinese administrative system. See also P. Wang and B. Sun, eds., Sulian hongjun zai lüda (The Soviet Red Army in Lüda)( Dongbei University of Finance and Economics Press, 1995).
[30] Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Eyre Methuen, 1973), 319.
[31] Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Harvard University Press, 1971), 34
[32] Figures cited by A.S. Ipatova, “Rossiiskaya Dukhovnaya Missiya v Kitae: vek dvatsaty,” and by the Rev. Dionisy Pozdnyaev, “Rossiiskaya Dukhovnaya Missiya v Kitae v 1920 - 1930 gg.,” in S. L. Tikhvinsky et al., eds., Istoriya Rossiiskoi Dukhovnoi Missii v Kitae, (Brotherhood of St Vladimir, 1997), 305, 328.
[33] See e.g. Wang Zhicheng, Shanghai Eqiao shi (Shanghai Sanlian, 1993); A.G. Larin, Kitaitsy v Rossii(Moscow,Institut Dal’nego Vostoka, 2000). For English language coverage see e.g. Marcia Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2001).
[34] Alexei Brezhnev, Kitai: ternisty put ' k dobrososedstvu, vospominaniya i razmyshleniya (Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya, 1998), 85; Lorenz Lűthi, The Sino-Soviet Split (Princeton University Press, 2008), 238.
[35] Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow's China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin(University of Washington Press, 2014), 123.
[36] For instance Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850 – 1930 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017); Sören Urbansky, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton University Press, 2020); Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021).
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