Authors

Discussion

The proposed paper is part of a larger research project dealing with developments in China-Russian relations during the 1990s. This is an important area of enquiry, because the development of relations between China and Russia during the first decade of the post-Soviet era remains distinctly understudied. Although at the end of the 1980s, the Chinese and USSR government had reached the consensus on the main concerns, the sudden collapse of the USSR still influenced the process of China-Russia rapprochement in further steps – how it was going in later? Notably, this decade built the foundations of what is today described as the ‘highest level in history’ of relations between both states. As such, arguably, a solid understanding of how relations developed during the 1990s is important for an informed assessment of the state and trajectory of contemporary China-Russia relations. Analytically, the paper focuses on the concept of ‘rapprochement’ in China-Russian relations. This concept regularly has been referred to in the analytical literature since the Cold War, but it is rarely defined or analysed systematically. How useful is the concept of ‘rapprochement’ for understanding developments in China-Russia relations? How should ‘rapprochement’ be defined and how can it be measured? Have China and Russia reached ‘rapprochement’ during the 1990s or subsequently, or is this still an ongoing process? This research would like to bring the latest new discoveries from archives and memoirs, which were mostly hidden under the Chinese and Russian government documents, the mass media news from the mainstream and the local, and the interviews and memoirs of Chinese and Russian leaders and diplomats who were playing the decision-maker or participant roles in the 1990s. It will utilise the process-tracing methods and document analysis.