Abstract
The 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Soviet Alliance went unnoticed in most Asian capitals. This included Tokyo, where ironically the Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, was concluding an official visit. In February 1950, however, all eyes had focused upon Moscow, where Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were concluding a 30-year pact to unite the strategic ‘heartland of Eurasia’.1 A ‘Communist bloc’ now stretched from Berlin to Beijing. Little more than a decade later, however, as the outside world watched in astonishment, this ‘eternal and indestructible’ alliance slowly crumbled under the weight of its internal contradictions.2
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Notes
The treaty was actually signed by Foreign Ministers Zhou Enlai and A. Ia. Vyshinskii. A. Doak Barnett, Communist China and Asia (1960) New York: 375.
The phrase is from Mao Zedong’s speech on 17 February 1950, as he was about to depart from Moscow. Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (1966) Harmondsworth: 256.
John Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997) Oxford: 288.
Sino-Soviet Treaty, 14 February 1950, Article 1 in Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners (1993) Stanford: 260.
Other landmark bilateral agreements included the Treaty of Friendship, 31 May 1924, the Non-Aggression Pact, 31 August 1937, and the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, 14 August 1945.
Allen Whiting, Siberian Development and East Asia (1981) Stanford: 3.
Joseph Frankel, The Making of Foreign Policy (1962) Oxford.
James Rosenau (ed.), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (1967) New York.
Robert Jervis was one of the first scholars to recognise the importance of images in International Relations, both those of other actors as well as self-images. Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (1970) New York.
Anthony Smith, National Identity (1991) London.
The classic studies are John Gittings, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1963–67 (1968) Oxford; William Griffith, The Sino-Soviet Rift (1964) London; and Donald Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956–61 (1962) Princeton. The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project has been very actively promoting such scholarship in recent years.
The most comprehensive to date is Odd Ame Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms (1998) Stanford, CA.
The best known studies are William Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift (1963) Cambridge, MA; Chin O. Chung, Pyongyang Between Peking and Moscow (1978) AL.
Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies (1990) Stanford; John Gaddis, The Long Peace (1987) New York; David Mayers, Cracking the Monolith (1986) Baton Rouge; Herbert Ellison, The Sino-Soviet Conflict (1982) Washington; Lowell Dittmer, Sino-Soviet Normalization and its International Implications, 1945–90 (1992) Washington; Rosemary Foot, ‘New Light on the Sino-Soviet Alliance’ Journal of North East Asian Studies (fall 1991): 16–29.
Sei Young Rhee, ‘The Impact of the Sino-Soviet Conflict on the Japan Communist Party, 1961–68’ (1973), Ph.D. thesis, University of Missouri; Kim Young Bae, ‘The Japan Communist Party and the Soviet Union: Pattern of Coalition and Conflict, 1945–69’ (1974) Ph.D. thesis, University of Kansas. Both draw heavily on the pioneering study by Robert Scalapino, The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–66 (1967) Berkeley.
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© 2004 C. W. Braddick
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Braddick, C.W. (2004). Japan in a bipolar world: an introduction. In: Japan and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1950–1964. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005693_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005693_1
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