【編按：本月堅離地報聯盟挑選的《The Diplomat》收費文章，關於蘇聯遺產如何影響今日亞洲的中國、日本、兩韓、越南、印度，分別邀請了五國專家撰寫。當中國聲言要做得比蘇聯更「成功」，如何理解蘇聯遺產，也是檢視未來的重要參考。】

By Kawashima Shin, Swapna Kona Nayudu, James D.J. Brown, Se Young Jang and Khang Vu

Although the writing had been on the (literal) wall since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union was only made official in December 1991 though the Belavezha Accords, which announced that “the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.” With that, the Soviet Union was no more and the Cold War was over, removing the single largest impetus driving foreign policy decisions around the world.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Diplomat has gathered five experts to explore the legacy of the USSR and the impact of its collapse on China, India, Japan, the Koreas, and Vietnam. Whether allies or enemies of the Soviet Union, each of these states underwent their own major economic, political, and diplomatic transformations in the years after the USSR was dissolved. In ways both obvious and subtle, the Soviet legacy remains relevant across Asia.

China — Kawashima Shin

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 had a profound impact on China’s internal and foreign policies, forcing a shift in its national strategy. From the standpoint of China, however, the formal end of the Soviet Union was not the only event in this period that created an opportunity to shift its strategy. The Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989 and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the West, as well as the end of the Cold War in the same year, must also be understood to have played a part. In the course of these events, it became clear that China’s approach toward nation-building aimed to achieve economic development without Western democratization.

First, China was confronted with international isolation not only because the Cold War had ended, but also because of the collapse of the socialist bloc. The impending sense of crisis was strong, given that the Tiananmen Square incident had resulted in the imposition of economic sanctions on China by Western countries. It was in the face of this crisis that the guiding principle of foreign policy that would later become known as “keep a low profile, accomplish something” is said to have been formed. This guiding principle advocated that in the midst of a crisis, China should avoid engaging in coercion and conflict with the West, while at the same time striving to achieve results. The expression “keep a low profile, accomplish something” was used under Jiang Zemin and at least the first half of the Hu Jintao administration. It became the principle underpinning a foreign policy that pursued economic development as its main goal.

China’s conflict with the Soviet Union had been brought to an end with the visit of President Mikhail Gorbachev in May 1989. Even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, China continued to attach great importance to its relationship with Russia, not only because relations with Russia and the newly independent Central Asian countries adjoining its long borders were critical for national security, but also because China needed Russia in order to take a stand against the West.

Second, China succeeded in realizing the second half of the “keep a low profile, accomplish something” guiding principle of foreign policy by immediately establishing diplomatic relations with the countries that emerged in Central Asia following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This was accomplished through the formation of the Shanghai Five, including Russia, continuing with the Central Asian countries the diplomatic negotiations that had already been underway with the Soviet Union.

China also normalized diplomatic relations with neighboring countries such as Singapore and South Korea. These policies became the basis for the peripheral diplomacy that would follow, including the Belt and Road Initiative. In terms of its relationships with developed countries, China prioritized the improvement of relations with Japan, hosting a visit by the Japanese emperor in 1992. At the same time, China improved relations with other developed countries by accepting investment from them in order to grow the country into “the world’s factory.”

Third, the disintegration of the Soviet Union altered the balance of military security in the area around China, putting pressure on Beijing to respond. The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union had drastically reduced the military capability of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet (Red Banner Pacific Fleet), which had been based in Vladivostok. This shifted the military balance in the Far East, leading China to engage in its own military confrontation with the United States. China’s national defense strategy and strengthened military force were manifested in the enactment of the Law on the Territorial Sea in 1992 and its missile tests conducted in the area around Taiwan in 1996.

Fourth, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist bloc, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to rebuild its legitimacy in terms of domestic governance. Up to that point, the foundation of the CCP’s domestic legitimacy had been revolution. The CCP is a revolutionary party that gained legitimacy through successful leadership of the Chinese revolution and the creation of a socialist society. Despite the rejection of class struggle following the Cultural Revolution, revolution was nonetheless an important resource to maintain legitimacy. With the end of the Cold War and the virtual collapse of the socialist faction, however, the CCP government needed a new source of legitimacy.

The new sources of legitimacy envisaged were nationalism and the realization of wealth. Following the Tiananmen Square incident, the Chinese government took measures to curb economic activity, such as implementing a tight monetary policy, but after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour talks in early 1992 a policy shift occurred and the reform and opening up process started up again. At the same time, the Jiang Zemin administration promoted Patriotic Education to inspire nationalism, promote national unity, and legitimize CCP rule.

The fifth aspect concerns the lessons that the disintegration of the Soviet Union has offered China. In general, China blamesthe disintegration of the Soviet Union on the weakening of the regime, corruption, and the sluggish economy. Some also argue that the main reason for the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the simultaneous promotion of economic and political reforms, which is why China has promoted economic reform but not political reform. However, speaking at the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on February 27, 2013, Xi Jinping is said to have cited “negative and corrupt phenomenaand injustice” as the reason behind the fall of the Soviet Communist Party. While this is little more than anti-corruption campaign rhetoric by Xi, it nevertheless indicates an awareness on the part of the CCP of the need to learn the “Lessons from the Soviet Union.”

India — Swapna Kona Nayudu

Was India ever an ally of the Soviet Union? Which way one tackles that question holds key insights into what Soviet socialism meant for India before and after 1991.

There is a wide sense of what Soviet socialist diplomacy meant for the Indian economy – military cooperation, food aid, steel plants, trade delegations, and agricultural expertise made their way from Moscow to India from the mid-1950s right up to the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991.

There is also some understanding of the influence of Soviet socialist ideas on the Indian mixed economy model, often blamed for the Hindu rate of growth – a term referring to the pre-1991 low annual growth rate of the Indian economy. In that sense, India and Russia share the memorialization of 1991 as a year of radical change. India went through its own glasnost when a balance of payments crisis forced the Narasimha Rao government to undertake liberalization of the economy. Taking stock of the effect on India of the fall of the Soviet Union and with it, its socialist credo, a piece in the New York Times in 2009 claimed that in less than two decades, India had turned into “one of the world’s most unabashedly capitalist places.”

What does this say about Indian politics? It is uncontroversial that 1991 matters to India, mostly due to the collapse of its own economic scenery. But that historical moment in the Indian story acquired a further global dimension when it coincided with the end of the Cold War, an event so monumental that no sphere remained untouched by its force. This new era inaugurated the idea that India, famously non-aligned during the Cold War, would rid itself of this stale approach to world politics – no blocs meant no positions to not align with.

Yet, the myth and burnish of the relentless march of Soviet socialist thought in India was very much a Western Cold War construct; hence the idea that this was taken care of in 1991 was also a Western, primarily American, assessment. There is an attempt to eulogize 1991 as the defining moment when India became estranged from its socialist past, which was supposedly buried along with the ruins of the Soviet Union.

If 1991 offered, in the philosopher Raymond Aron’s phrase “the end of the ideological age,” that legacy acquired starkly different dimensions in India. Indeed, exactly a year later with the fall of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992, a deeply conservative ideological politics began a long march that culminated with the election of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2014, now in its second term, and the definitive rejection of and triumph over socialist policies, most remarkably visible in the dissolution of the Planning Commission and the end of the Soviet-style five-year plans.

If in the post-Cold War era, India has turned away from the welfare state and market socialism, then what has the fragmentation of international socialism meant for India’s external affairs? This year also marks 50 years since the 1971 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between India and the Soviet Union, at the time considered an apostasy by New Delhi – a decisive farewell on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s part to her father and first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned policy. It was the popular understanding that India had courted the Soviets over two decades – Khrushchev’s post-Stalinist socialism had brought Nehru close to him, founding a bilateral relationship that found full form in the Indira-Brezhnev era. Moreover, in the aftermath of the 1962 India-China War, the road from New Delhi to Beijing often ran through Moscow, cementing the notion that India was loyal to the Soviet Union. In fact, these accounts obscure India’s own early anti-communism, particularly among government officials. The West burdened India with an image that Nehru sought to overthrow but that has persisted.

Successive Indian governments have cultivated closer ties with the United States since 1991. In the age of Hindutva right-wing nationalism, this perceived Soviet-era closeness with Moscow has steered New Delhi even more firmly toward the U.S., not least due to the overlapping period when Modi and Trump were both in power, espousing similar political ideas. This shift is rooted in an endemic belief significant to Indian conservative politics – the belief that socialism in all its forms is anti-national because it weakens the nation-state. The conservative assessment of Indian socialism is even more critical of its perceived inefficacy because of Indian socialism’s Gandhian allegiances, especially in the politics of early socialist leaders such as Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, who along with Gandhi, are simultaneously appropriated and criticized by the ruling BJP.

This narrative of Indian socialism is held against the landscape of socialist internationalism, of which the Soviet Union was seen as the highest, most idealized form. It follows that the dissolution of that ideal is now seen as evidence that the socialist system simply cannot be successful in advancing national interests, or even nationalism of the kind that India needs.

The collapse of the Soviet Union irrevocably impaired the socialist idea in India. The effects came to the economy first, and Indian politics soon after, and have altered Indian public life ever since. Socialists, whether organized within political parties or as solidarity movements, have struggled to undo the effects of 1991 even as Indian socialism remains a palimpsest of Soviet influences. The consequences are most evident in the devolution of the idea of nationalism in India today. Without a socialist contender, the democratic debate has been reduced to one winning argument: the notion that the market will save the nation.

Japan — James D. Brown

The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was a moment of great optimism for Japan. The glowering threat on Japan’s northern frontier had lifted, and there were rays of hope that the countries’ territorial dispute would soon be resolved. Yet, 30 years on, surprisingly little has changed between Tokyo and Moscow.

For a Japanese audience in 1991, perhaps even more memorable than the lowering of the Soviet flag above the Kremlin on December 25 was the visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to Tokyo in April. This was the first ever visit by a Soviet leader to Japan, and, as Gorbachev and his wife smiled in the spring sunshine, there was a strong feeling that the Cold War was truly over. This sense of historical transition was reinforced by the fact that it literally was a new era in Japan. Emperor Hirohito had died in 1989 and, with the enthronement of his son, Akihito, the Heisei era had been proclaimed, meaning “peace everywhere.”

This positive mood continued following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When Boris Yeltsin, as president of the new Russian Federation, visited Tokyo in October 1993, the joint declaration spoke of “a new world political and economic order” and trumpeted that “Japan and the Russian Federation share the universal values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and the respect for fundamental human rights.”

The sides also conducted “serious negotiations on the issue of where Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai Islands belong.” This was a reference to the islands off the coast of Hokkaido – known as the South Kurils in Russia and the ...