Realism Wins

ARTICLES OF WISDOM “To mend a rift — An era of hostility is coming to an end.” China and Russia share a 4,500-mile border, yet for three decades their relations remained strained. In 1959, after returning from a trip to the United States, former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev made a brief stop in China and met Mao Zedong. That meeting ended badly. From then on, no senior official from either country visited the other. After this long stretch of hostility, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze visited Beijing in February 1989. The declared purpose of the trip was “peace and development.” One outcome of the visit was the announcement that the Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev would soon travel to China (Time, February 13, 1989). Commenting on this surprising shift between two rivals, a Chinese official said: “The difficulties that Beijing and Moscow now confront have brought us closer to one another.” (p. 7) A Russian official expressed the same thought even more openly: “We are very close to understanding how new relations should develop. We have both made mistakes in the past.” (p. 6) When China and Russia realized that their hostility was harming them both, they decided to end their pointless