selves made it possible to transcend the negative images and stake out common ground. Sulian lao dage, Soviet elder brother, was not an ironic form of address in China in the mid-1950s; it symbolized the role of the northern neighbor within a Chinese cultural scheme in which the elder brother should be treated with reverence as long as he fulfills his obligations to the family.
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A better understanding of ideology and culture is not sufficient to explain the breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations. In order to understand what happened, we also need to look more closely at the directions of Soviet and Chinese domestic politics and even more important at how their leaders viewed the interaction between the two countries on a whole range of specific issues. The main issues in economy (loans, technology transfers, border areas), military affairs (bases, weapons, intelligence), and foreign policy (Taiwan, Korea, Indochina, India, the U.S. threat) define the progress, stagnation, and breakdown of the alliance, particularly if we can show how these issues influenced the overall perceptions of the main leaders. In analyzing policies, however, we need to watch out for the sometimes spurious connection between different issues: Some policies are strongly interconnected, while others are deliberately or accidentally kept separate. This imbalanced relationship between issues, which political scientists often refer to as issue escalation, is no less true for the Sino-Soviet alliance than for other alliance formations. 9
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The chapters in this volume have no common background in terms of schools of interpretation. The authors are all somewhere near the center of the scale between hard-core realism and discourse-bound, antistructural approaches; there is more awareness of the subjective parts of international affairs ideologies, perceptions, and personalities and less emphasis on interests, borders, and grand strategies than in previous accounts. Undoubtedly this implies a move away from the realist dominance in the study of the Sino-Soviet alliance, although the authors exploit many insights from the realist school. 10
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Social realism in art and realism as a school of thought in the study of international relations have something in common. Their best practitioners can show a structure or a situation with perfect clarity and provide an image that convinces and, in some cases, inspires. But neither of them can penetrate the surface of the image and make us wonder about the complex ideas that uphold it. This is why we, at least at this stage, should emphasize multidimensional interpretation in history as well as in art.
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This volume is a very early attempt to make use of the newly available Russian and Chinese documentary sources to enrich our picture of the Sino-Soviet
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