Authors

Discussion

The proposed paper is part of a larger research project dealing with China-Russia rapprochement in the 1990s. This is an important area of enquiry, because the development of China-Russia relations during the first decade of the post-Soviet era remains relatively understudied. Notably, this decade built the foundations of what is today described as the ‘highest level in history’ of relations between two states. A solid understanding of how relations developed in the 1990s is thus important for an informed assessment of the state and trajectory of contemporary China-Russia relations. Analytically, this paper chooses ideology as one perspective to examine the development of China-Russia relations in the 1990s.  Although earlier scholars have observed Russian foreign policy’s emphasis on the West based on its liberal values during the early 1990s, China at the same time also emphasised ideological factors, which is rarely studied before. Accordingly, how ideologies in Russian and Chinese foreign policy were presented during the early 1990s? How the ideological divergences influenced China-Russia relations? And how both states reached understanding of multipolarity as their shared narrative by the end of the decade? This research would like to bring the latest 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, with the process-tracing methods and document analysis.