Zhang, Feng

Abstract
In December 1949, Mao Zedong, paramount leader of the newly founded People’s Republic of China, travelled to Moscow to negotiate a military alliance with the Soviet Union. Within barely two decades, however, not only had the alliance collapsed, but the two former allies had become bitter ideological and military adversaries. Strategic exigencies compelled the Chinese leadership to seek rapprochement with the United States, producing a quasi-alliance between the two erstwhile enemies after 1972. In January 1979, during his visit to Washington, Deng Xiaoping sought to nudge the United States toward developing a de facto, if informal, alliance with China in order to secure American support for China’s impending invasion of Vietnam. During the last decade of the Cold War, China and the United States also maintained a degree of strategic cooperation against the Soviet Union.
China’s record in alliance politics during the Cold War was thus impressive enough. By the early 1980s, however, although the quasi-alliance with the United States was still operating in a circumscribed manner, the language about military alliance had disappeared from the official discourse. In fact, the alliance rhetoric had begun to diminish with the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations after the late 1950s, to be finally delegitimised in 1982, when the 12th Party Congress established an ‘independent and self-reliant foreign policy of peace’. Beijing avowed to follow the principle of non-alignment in the conduct of China’s relations with the United States and the Soviet Union in order to exercise independent diplomatic initiatives. This has proved to be a watershed in Chinese foreign-policy discourse: from the last years of the Cold War, when China implemented economic reforms, via the changing 1990s, when its economic rise took off, through the present day, as the country begins to make its presence known on the global stage, Beijing has consistently rejected alliance as a foreign-policy principle, denigrating it as a relic of the Cold War unpalatable to Chinese morals.
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