Revolutionary Great Game: The Sino-Soviet Split Revisited

Yao Qu, Johns Hopkins University
Ho-Fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University

Central Eurasia has often been a contested terrain among empires. Following the Qing-Russia competition in the eighteenth century and the British-Russia competition in the nineteenth century, the decolonization in South Asia and the victory of China’s communist revolutions in the late 1940s made the allegiance of the central Eurasian states, Tibet and Xinjiang, become a contentious issue between the Soviet Union and the nascent communist China. The nationalist-socialist revolutionaries in Tibet and Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan Republic) were initially attracted by the Soviet Union and aspiring to follow the footsteps of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic or Mongolian People’s Republic to become independent Soviet satellite states. But they were eventually absorbed into the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet’s unease about its losing influence in Central Eurasia and the Chinese Communist Party’s suspicion of the Soviets’ continuous meddling in the region over the 1950s contributed to the escalating tension between the two revolutionary powers, which openly split in the early 1960s. This Soviet-China rivalry over central Eurasia in the mid-twentieth century shows that, despite the revolutionary ideology of internationalism and the Cold War necessity of geopolitical alliance, the deep-seated territorialist logic of empire still dominated the disposition and action of revolutionary states.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 146. Revolution Compared I: Classical Revolutions