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China's Response to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Abstract
The Sino-Soviet rift constitutes one of the great schisms of Cold War politics and it is fraught with great strategic and diplomatic implications that have had a considerable impact on the external policies of both China and the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet Cold War began over greater influence and power in Afro-Asian countries. China had accused the Soviet Union of working overtime to fill up the vacuum caused by the US withdrawal and the Soviets had charged China with being the chief warmonger and with creating tensions in collusion with the USA. Thus, the Cold War between the two major communist countries had exposed the myth of an international communism. The two communist giants 'were circling and being circled by each other like two heavyweight wrestlers, trying hammerlocks, footholds and feints'.1 This geopolitical grappling became more acute and tense in South Asia after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 under the Brezhnev doctrine (1968) which had proclaimed that Moscow had the right to intervene in maintaining in power Communist governments threatened by domestic upheavals-which would have been improbable for the Chinese government.2 The main theme of this article is to focus on China's efforts to foster 'an Asian and international environment antagonistic to Soviet "expansion"'. China opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by providing moral and military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen and Pakistan to counter the Soviet encirclement around China and avoid direct military confrontation with the vastly superior Soviet forces along the contested Sino-Soviet border. For this purpose, China carried on a vigorous campaign against the Soviet Union and never missed any opportunity to expose Soviet expansionist or hegemonic designs. China also stepped up its diplomatic and political offensives against the hegemony of the Soviet social imperialism by cultivating better relations with the USA.
... Such views regarded the incident as a serious security threat to the United States and its allies. According to this analysis there was a reasonable fear that the next Soviet targets would be Pakistan and Iran (Hilali 2001). Vietnam, which at the time acted as a Soviet proxy, was threatening to bring Southeast Asia under Soviet domination. ...
... After the invasion, the Soviet forces were positioned, although through enemy airspace, approximately 250 miles from the Indian Ocean shoreline (Cheema 1983), with Baluchistan-a large region covering southwest Pakistan, southwest Afghanistan, and southeast Iran-perhaps the next target of the Soviet drive toward the Indian Ocean. The invasion also brought the Soviets closer to the shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz (Hilali 2001), located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, the world's chief oil-producing center (Israeli 2009). ...
... Initially, Soviet attempts to expand its sphere of influence to South and Southwest Asia pushed China, Pakistan, and the United States into closer strategic cooperation (Yetiv 1990) and prompted the emergence of the Sino-US-Pakistan anti-Soviet triple alliance. This strategic triangle intervened on the side of the Mujahedeen, aiming to contain the Soviet expansion (Hilali 2001). Additionally, during the 1980s, Pakistan was a major player in the US proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (Ahmed 2001(Ahmed -2002. ...
... Pakistan and Iran were widely said to have been targeted specifically by the Soviet Union at the time. China was profoundly anxious about its "main ally" (Pakistan) and was afraid that Baluchistan would be used for warm water by the Soviets (Hilali, 2001). ...
... The erosion of the centralized Soviet state during the twilight of perestroika was followed closely in Beijing. The 1980s had been transformative, when Beijing concluded the first decade of reform and opening up internally, and externally saw de-escalation in border tensions with Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Mongolia, neighboring states where the regimes had enjoyed alliances with Beijing's Cold War rival, Moscow (Hilali, 2001;Young, 1988). 5 The crumbling of a once-centralized Soviet state and simmering regional nationalism across the Soviet Union also posed a unique set of challenges for Beijing: What type of new regimes might be expected in Central Asia, and what foreign policy would the newly independent successor states adopt? ...
This paper is about how Asian public opinion assesses China's Rise and Role in the context of the BRI since 2013.
... The erosion of the centralized Soviet state during the twilight of perestroika was followed closely in Beijing. The 1980s had been transformative, when Beijing concluded the first decade of reform and opening up internally, and externally saw de-escalation in border tensions with Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Mongolia, neighboring states where the regimes had enjoyed alliances with Beijing's Cold War rival, Moscow (Hilali, 2001;Young, 1988). 5 The crumbling of a once-centralized Soviet state and simmering regional nationalism across the Soviet Union also posed a unique set of challenges for Beijing: What type of new regimes might be expected in Central Asia, and what foreign policy would the newly independent successor states adopt? ...
China has been pursuing a harmonious neighborhood but it has to face various volatile and even hostile social-political attitudes of its neighbors that have geopolitical tensions with China. Facing China’s rising, some of Asian countries have found that they were trapped in so-called security dilemma with China and a “hedging” strategy has been adopted by quite a few countries in the Asian-Pacific region to cope with the Sino-US Competition in the region. Against this background, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) since 2013 has been trying to improve relations between China and its neighbors by providing various projects of infrastructural investments and free trade, some of these projects being international public goods that can benefit people across countries. To some extent, the tension of “security dilemma” has been reducing alongside the development of the BRI and more and more Asian people recognize that a rising China can bring more public goods and benefits to this region.
... Following China's invasion of Vietnam and Soviet deployment along the Chinese border in February 1979, the Soviet Union proposed a high-level meeting with China to arrest the dangerous trend between the two countries, only to be rejected once again (Medvedev 1986:61). China also confronted the Soviet Union in Angola (1975), Ethiopia (1978), South Yemen (1978), Afghanistan (1979), and Vietnam (1979; Hilali 2001:329). China's perceived Soviet identity exhibited powerful inertia to changes in the material environment, and Beijing remained reactive to Moscow's compromises during the 1980s. ...
The ideational definition of culture has hindered a meaningful debate of the role that culture plays in the discipline of International Relations. Focusing on the behavior side of culture instead, this paper proposes the Cultural Constructivist approach that takes account of both the cultural and the social in interstate relations. Academic puzzles in contemporary China's relations with Japan, the former Soviet Union, and the United States are better explained by taking into account China's cultural behavior pattern and its role in the country's identity construction of these other states. Cultural Constructivism is a falsifiable theory that enables us to see under what circumstances culture intervenes (or does not intervene) in a country's foreign policy making. Cultural behavior pattern has complicated the PRC's relations with Japan and the former Soviet Union, but material constraints and cultural differences prevented its ascendance to the main stage of Sino–US relations.
Le 27 février 2014, des troupes non identifiées envahissent la péninsule de Crimée au sud de l'Ukraine, puis l'Est de l'Ukraine. À la suite d'un référendum contesté, la Crimée est annexée à la Fédération de Russie, alors que la guerre civile fait rage dans les territoires de l'Est du pays. Rapidement, les États-Unis et l'Union européenne prennent des mesures diplomatiques envers la Russie. Après plus de cinq mois de conflit et plusieurs incidents, les Occidentaux optent finalement pour des mesures économiques devant avoir un impact considérable sur l'économie russe. L'objectif poursuivi est ainsi d'amener la Russie à négocier une situation viable pour l'Ukraine. Comme dans tout autre régime de sanctions, la question de l'efficacité se pose. Est-ce que les mesures économiques prises par l'Union européenne sont suffisantes pour initier un changement de politique étrangère en Russie? Après plus de trois ans sous sanctions, l'économie russe a subi d'importants dommages. Ce n'est toutefois pas la première fois que la Russie se retrouve sous sanctions. En 1979, alors que l'URSS – son prédécesseur – envahi l'Afghanistan dans le contexte de la Guerre froide, les États-Unis et plusieurs États de l'Europe de l'Ouest imposent de sévères sanctions à l'URSS. Dès lors, que peut-on tirer de l'analyse de ce régime de sanctions afin de mieux comprendre la réaction actuelle de la Russie ?
Afghanistan lies within the second and third of four-concentric security circles of China and is very important as the region for stability in the western part of China. The post 9/11 periods marked by the shifts in policies generally by the world and particularly by neighboring countries of Afghanistan: China, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, India, and Tajikistan. By reviewing China’s non-interventionist policy, the question arises here: what is China’s engagement policy towards Afghanistan?The research intends to address the question by analyzing Sion-Afghanistan’s economic, diplomatic and security relations. The research finds that China’s policy evolves very slowly from calculated indifference to aggressive engagement in Afghanistan.
The objective of this article is to explain how the United States took advantage of the Sino-Soviet divergences to approach Beijing not only within order to contain Moscow in Central Asia, but also to incorporate China into an international norm to open it to free trade and democratize it in an order that favored it. However, although in the international normativity that the United States guided, it was successful in the Soviet containment and the Chinese opening to trade, it failed to democratize in Beijing. Also, while the current US international order has benefited China in the economic field, now Washington faces the risk that the magnitude of Beijing’s interests will be aimed to promote a new international norm. The analysis is carried out based on the Constructivism of International Relations, focused on the norms and identities that emphasize the values of the dominant countries.
During a landmark speech in September 2013 in Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Silk Road Economic Belt; soon afterwards, Xi unveiled the Maritime Silk Road in Indonesia. Together, these came to be known as One Belt One Road (OBOR), or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI was an expansive vision of connectivity predicated on Chinese investments and technology flows, and bulwarked by over a trillion dollars. In this chapter, I argue that the BRI model of global connectivity rested on two regional efforts undertaken by Beijing in the 1990s: (1) China’s multilateral and multidimensional diplomacy with the post-Soviet Central Asian republics—as early as 1994, Beijing’s outreach in Central Asia had been described by Premier Li Peng as a new Silk Road—which resulted, initially, in the Shanghai Five forum in 1996. After 2001, this multilateral diplomacy was famously institutionalized in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Although initially focused on security cooperation, in later years, the SCO became a venue for identifying new economic cooperation, many of which would reappear under BRI. (2) Sustained infrastructure building in the western regions of China. This effort, that began in 1991, and acquired momentum at the end of that decade, was in no small part a result of growing ties between China and Central Asia; now, China’s successful regional diplomacy engendered a more expansive, Eurasia-wide connectivity. Hence, inasmuch as BRI seeks to build a conducive investment climate in Afro-Eurasia along multiple corridors since Xi took power, it builds on China’s regional initiatives since the Cold War.
This chapter aims to demonstrate empirically the challenges posed by Chinese cyber-nationalism in the practice of e-diplomacy on Weibo.
Pakistan-China strategic relationship is an epitome of enduring friendship, regardless of different belief systems and cultures. Both countries have taken thousands of steps to further their relationship into a strategic partnership based on shared values and interests as there is a famous Chinese saying, " the journey of thousand miles begins with a single step ". The very first step to develop this friendship was taken way back in 1950, when Pakistan recognized China as an independent state; and the first step towards strategic partnership has been taken in April 2005 while both countries signed a treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good-neighbourly Relations. The two countries have travelled over 55 years of long journey of smooth relations. This study attempts to provide a detailed account of historical developments of Pakistan-China intimacy through the lens of Cold War and post-Cold War politics in South Asia from 1950 to 2005.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 and the subsequent 10-year involvement of Soviet troops in that country was one of the great crises of the Cold War. The Persian Gulf area, India and Pakistan, Soviet Central Asia and even China were affected by, became involved in, feared the consequences of or changed their policies with regard to Afghanistan. Yet one would strain to come up with an overall thesis for the war’s effects on Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the case of China, for example, the intervention only catalyzed existing trends. The Sino-Soviet split dated back to the 1950s, and Sino-American cooperation had its start earlier in the decade. The main effect of the Soviet intervention was to give Washington and Beijing something else to agree on, and to give Beijing and Islamabad something else to cooperate on. Iran, while not at all pleased with the intervention, largely watched from the sidelines, providing only lukewarm support to rebel groups. Like Pakistan, it also had to deal with a large influx of Afghan refugees. Soviet Central Asia was a separate case; on the one hand, partially mobilized to help the war effort, and on the other, sealed, to the extent possible, from events south of the Amu Darya. Yet while the war had little effect on Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the Soviet period, its legacies would become important as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was collapsing and the independent successor states were taking shape, often violently.
The resumption of trade across the Sino–Central Asian border in 1983 accompanied a gradual thaw in relations between China and the Soviet Union. This paper argues that: (1) Economic liberalization in China (alongside the Soviet Union) created a climate encouraging cross-border exchange. (2) Starting in 1983, improving relations between China and the Soviet Union permitted cross-border exchange in Central Asia; over the subsequent decade, trade volume served as a marker of bilateral relations. (3) Beginning in 1990, efforts by the Chinese leadership to accelerate reform in North-West China, coupled with the independence of Central Asian republics, led to a rapid increase in trade. Hence, the resumption of Sino–Central Asian trade was not grounded in meta-geographical projections – Silk Road, New Silk Road, Silk Road Economic Belt, Eurasian Continental Bridge – but determined by political and economic transitions in the two countries, accompanied by normalizing bilateral relations.
Of all the issues in international relations, disputes over territory are the most salient and most likely to lead to armed conflict. Understanding their endurance is of paramount importance. Although many states have settled their disagreements over territory, seventy-one disputes involving nearly 40 percent of all sovereign states remain unresolved. In this study, Krista E. Wiegand examines why some states are willing and able to settle territorial disputes while others are not. She argues that states may purposely maintain disputes over territory in order to use them as bargaining leverage in negotiations over other important unresolved issues. This dual strategy of issue linkage and coercive diplomacy allows the challenger state to benefit from its territorial claim. Under such conditions, it has strong incentive to pursue diplomatic and militarized threats and very little incentive to settle the dispute over territory. Wiegand tests her theory in four case studies, three representing the major types of territorial disputes: uninhabited islands and territorial waters, as seen in tensions between China and Japan over the Senkaku and Diaoyu Islands; inhabited tracts of territory, such as the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla affecting Morocco and Spain; and border areas, like the Shebaa Farms dispute between Lebanon and Israel. A fourth case study of a dispute between China and Russia represents a combination of all three types; settled in 2008, it serves as a negative example. All these disputes involve areas that have key strategic and economic importance both regionally and globally.
Most cultural and legal codes agree that the intentional killing of civilians, whether in peacetime or war, is prohibited. This is the norm of civilian immunity, widely considered to be a fundamental moral and legal principle. Yet despite this fact, the deliberate killing of large numbers of civilians remains a persistent feature of global political life. What is more, the perpetrators have often avoided criticism and punishment. This book attempts to explain the paradox by examining dozens of episodes of genocide and mass killing since the French Revolution, including those associated with colonialism, totalitarianism, the Second World War, and the Cold War as well as more recent episodes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It studies the role that civilian immunity has played in shaping the behaviour of perpetrators and how international society has responded to mass atrocities. The book argues that although the world has made impressive progress in legislating against the intentional killing of civilians and in constructing institutions to give meaning to that prohibition, the norm's history in practice suggests that the ascendancy of civilian immunity is both more recent and more fragile than might otherwise be thought. In practice, decisions to violate a norm are shaped by factors relating to the norm and the situation at hand, so too is the manner in which international society and individual states respond to norm violations. Responses to norm violations are not simply matters of normative obligation or calculations of self-interest but are instead guided by a combination of these logics as well as perceptions about the situation at hand, existing relations with the actors involved, and power relations between actors holding different accounts of the situation. Thus, whilst civilian immunity has for the time being prevailed over 'anti-civilian ideologies' which seek to justify mass killing, it remains challenged by these ideologies and its implementation shaped by individual circumstances. As a result, whilst it has become much more difficult for states to get away with mass murder, it is still not entirely impossible for them to do so.
Clausewitz states that "The defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offense" and to defeat 'the stronger form of warfare' "an army's best weapon is superior numbers." Given these two facts, how do special operations forces defeat numerically superior forces fighting in the defense? William H. McRaven's book, Spec Ops, lays out a theory of special operations and six principles that are "applicable across the spectrum of special operations" (McRaven, 1995, p. 3). McRaven's thesis postulates that numerically inferior forces can obtain Relative Superiority for short duration through the use of the six principles of special operations. McRaven's thesis is focused on the direct component of special operations. The theory, arguably, does not cover the full range of special operations; specifically it fails to address the indirect component of special operations, Unconventional Warfare. Given that the defense is the superior form of warfare and numbers count, the question emerges, how can a sponsored insurgent organization or resistance movement defeat the state, which begins with an opening advantage of vastly superior numbers and already in the defense posture? The answer may be found in the flip side of McRaven's Theory of Relative Superiority, or more accurately, the Indirect Theory of Relative Superiority. Indirect Relative Superiority is achieved when a counter state gains and maintains a decisive advantage over a state in an armed political struggle. We hypothesize that numerically inferior forces can obtain Relative Superiority over time through the use of six principles of Indirect Offensive Operations: Security, Networking, Purpose, Indoctrination, Influence, and Agility.
The traditionally close relationship between China and Pakistan cooled off somewhat with the end of the Cold War, mainly due to China's efforts to improve its relations with India and the disappearance of the Soviet threat. While China has continued to pursue its rapprochement with India after 9/11, developments since 9/11 have reinforced the security foundations of Sino-Pak relations and have consequently reversed the downward trend in the relationship leading to enhanced cooperation in a number of areas. US involvement in Central Asia and deepening Indo-US collaboration have further increased Pakistan's strategic importance for China. Islamabad also occupies a prominent position in Beijing's energy security and its efforts to stabilize Xinjiang.
Although Russian relations with Japan experienced notable progress from 2000-2010, recent claims by the Russian government of advancement toward a "full-blown partnership" are premature and imprecise. To be certain, many aspects of the Russian-Japanese relationship remained problematic and competitive during this period. A number of factors intimate that Russian assertions regarding the scope, promise and genuine friendliness of relations were exaggerated, not least an unresolved territorial dispute over the Southern Kurile Islands, the continued absence of a World War II peace treaty and historically entrenched mutual distrust. These and other important considerations undermined the substantial expansion and diversification of Russian political, economic and military cooperation with Japan over the last decade. Interestingly though, they did not preclude entirely the development of cooperation in these three spheres. Indeed, Russian-Japanese relations flourished in a number of areas - albeit in areas of lesser significance than the territorial or peace treaty issues that did not have much bearing on the development of a "full-blown partnership". This case-study explores the complex nature of Russia's relationship with Japan as it evolved and existed from 2000-2010 by assessing the extensiveness of bilateral cooperation that developed in political, economic and military spheres during the last decade. This work also identifies and discusses the theoretical bases of this relationship in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding as to why it did not expand more substantively during the Putin-Medvedev era. Specifically, this study demonstrates how three major areas of international relations theory help explain the nature of Russia's cooperative and conflictive interactions with Japan since the turn of the millennium. These three areas include the neorealist-neoliberal debate, perception and misperception in international politics, and the prisoner's dilemma game-theoretical approach to international relations analysis.
The article analyses the current situation in Xinjiang and the growing unrest and alienation of the Uighur population. Therefore, the three axes of Chinese policy towards Xinjiang and its consequences are considered. In recent years, Beijing has combined systematic repression of any Uighur activity (resulting in massive violations of human rights), with the promotion of forced assimilation and the implementation of great development projects. Beijing has reasserted its position on Xinjiang, although resulting in a growing unease and alienation among most of Uighur population. Despite the calm of the past few years, the conflict is far enough from being resolved and a new cycle of turmoil and violence, as those that shook Xinjiang in the 1990s, is not fully dischargeable yet.
Nearly ten years of bloodshed and political turmoil have followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Soviet occupation not only proved a major trauma for the people of Afghanistan; invasion ended the growth in superpower dentents that had characterised the late 1970s; and in the Soviet Union the effects of escalating military costs and over 13,000 young military casualties have been felt at every level of society. The decision to withdraw combat forces under the provisions of the Geneva Accords of April 1988 is one of the most dramatic developments in the international system since the end of the Second World War. The effects of this decision will be felt not only in Afghanistan, but in the Soviet Union, in Southwest Asia, and in the wider world. The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan has been designed to explore the background to the decision to withdraw and its broader implications. The authors, all established specialists, examine the Geneva Accords; the future for post-withdrawal Afghanistan; and the impact of withdrawal on regional states, Soviet foreign and domestic policies, the Soviet armed forces, Sino-Soviet relations and world politics. They write from diverse disciplinary traditions, while bringing together a shared sensitivity to the issues which complicate the Afghan question.
A group of expressions which contains some definite integrals with weight function has been given for estimating the error due to non-transient impulses of the electromotive force caused by measured change of the magnetic flux in the ballistic method. These expressions can be adopted for arbitary wave form of impulse. An example of an application of the expressions is given.
The single largest territorial issue explicitly in dispute between China and the Soviet Union is in the region of the Pamir Mountains-just north of Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor. The nature of this dispute is important because it impinges on the ease with which major sources of tension between the two countries may be eliminated. Moreover, the potential resolutions of this issue have important geo-political implications for the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
12SLondon: Macmillan. In fact, this area was at one time a stronghold of two Afghan mujahideen groups, the Shu'la-i-Jawed (Eternal Flame) and the Setem-i-Melli (Against Oppression of Nation)
- Anthony Hyman
London: S t ought on. More details about the geographic and demographic background are available in a number of sources
- T R Tregear
- Mukherjee Dilip
New York: Simon and Schuster. For views an the evolving dispute between Vance and Brzezinski, see Brzezinski, op cit, Ref 75, chs 6 and 11. For further description and analysis and an account heavily weighted toward the Vance position, see Garthoff
- Cyrus Vance