Introduction: The present past in China–Russia relations
In 2025, China and Russia each hosted major commemorations marking the eightieth anniversary of Victory Day in the Second World War, with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping attending both the May celebrations in Moscow and the September events in Beijing. These events featured large-scale military parades, joint exhibitions and seminars, and coordinated calls to protect and honour the ‘lessons’ of the war. A joint statement signed by the two leaders in May highlighted their shared responsibility for and mission to maintain ‘a correct historical perspective’ on the Second World War and oppose ‘any attempt to tamper with or distort the history of the war’, underscoring the symbolic importance of historical memory in their contemporary bilateral relations.Footnote 1 Yet, beyond these highly visible displays of unity, questions emerge about the depth and limits of shared historical narratives between the two states.
This article addresses a gap at the intersection of memory studies and international relations. While existing scholarship has focused on how historical narratives circulate and fuel conflict, far less attention has been paid to ‘friendly’ memory politics: how states strategically cultivate mnemonic friendship to advance political and strategic goals. Drawing on multilingual datasets of over 14,000 Chinese and Russian state-sponsored news articles published between 2002 and 2023, supplemented by additional primary sources and fieldwork in China, the article examines official narratives of the Second World War to assess the extent of convergence and the structural factors shaping mnemonic alliances. It finds that alignment on historical events remains largely superficial, sustained through selective silences rather than substantive convergence. These patterns reflect domestic legitimation imperatives, ethnonationalist impulses, enduring mutual distrust, and divergent visions for regional and global order.
The article first reviews the literature, critically linking memory studies and international relations while identifying gaps in the study of ‘friendly’ memory politics. It then turns to China–Russia relations, contextualizing the role of historical memory in shaping bilateral interactions and the pursuit of a shared usable past. The first analytical section surveys their wartime relations during the Second World War, focusing on four key themes: the Second KMT–CCP United Front, early Soviet aid, tensions in Xinjiang, and the Soviet offensive in Manchuria. The subsequent empirical section examines how these episodes are represented in present-day official narratives, assessing patterns of selective remembering and strategic forgetting in these contexts. This is followed by a discussion that juxtaposes historical events with contemporary narratives, evaluating the structural factors that enable or constrain mnemonic alignment. The article concludes by synthesizing these insights and highlighting their implications for the relation between memory and strategic statecraft.
Transnational memory and global statecraft: Constructing mnemonic friendship
Following successive ‘memory booms’ since the early twentieth century, the study of historical memory has flourished, producing a vast, multidisciplinary body of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. The so-called ‘third phase’ of memory studies, shaped by Astrid Erll’s concept of the ‘transcultural turn’, emphasizes the transnational and multidirectional circulation of memory across cultural and geographic boundaries.Footnote 2 Rather than treating the nation‑state as the natural receptacle of collective memory, this scholarship conceptualizes memory as fundamentally ‘unbound’, continually ‘travelling’ through global media environments and public spheres, and examines how different local and global memory ‘scales’ intersect.Footnote 3 Although this transnational shift initially drew attention away from state agency and mnemonic governance, recent work has sought to redress this imbalance, calling for the state to be ‘brought back in’ to the analytical frame.Footnote 4 In addition, global trends of rising illiberalism and democratic backsliding, including in Europe, have expanded the scope of inquiry to encompass cases of ‘illiberal’ memory and authoritarian mnemonics.Footnote 5
The transnational turn in memory studies (and history) has coincided with growing interest in international relations, foreign policy analysis, and diplomatic studies in historical memory and memory politics.Footnote 6 One strand of this emerging research, drawing on constructivist and neoclassical realist approaches, examines how historically shaped ideas and collective memory influence the ‘national interest’ and, in turn, foreign policy behaviour and outcomes.Footnote 7 Another strand, broadly aligned with critical and poststructuralist approaches, emphasizes the agency of national elites and foreign policy actors as memory entrepreneurs who selectively cultivate, mobilize, and securitize memory to advance political objectives and reinforce or reshape power relations.Footnote 8
Particularly this latter strand, with its presentist and instrumental orientation towards memory, builds on foundational work on selective narrativization and strategic forgetting as deliberate efforts to craft ‘usable pasts’ for political legitimation, while also extending these insights into transnational contexts.Footnote 9 Duncan Bell has argued that analysing how memories circulate across national and regional contexts—and shape international relations—requires attention to the interplay between remembering and forgetting in processes of legitimation and delegitimation, including the shifts and silences that accompany them.Footnote 10Precious Chatterje‑Doody and Vera Tolz have shown that in neo‑authoritarian regimes such as contemporary Russia, state‑affiliated actors selectively co‑opt globally circulating interpretations of historical events not primarily for nation‑building, as is often assumed, but to secure regime legitimacy, producing markedly different media narratives for domestic and international audiences.Footnote 11Anastasiya Pshenychnykh similarly demonstrates that, because recalling any former brotherhood with Russia has become deeply painful in the context of the ongoing war, Ukrainian authorities have pursued historical ‘forgetting’ by removing symbols and staging highly visible commemorations that sever shared values, thereby legitimizing a new political agenda and delegitimizing that of their opponents.Footnote 12
However, whether memory is understood as a structural constraint in global politics or as an agentic tool of diplomatic statecraft—as an independent or dependent variable—and whether the focus is on remembering or forgetting, much of the emerging literature has concentrated on contexts marked by enduring transnational trauma, renewed international tensions, and ongoing ‘memory wars’.Footnote 13 In Europe and much of the Western world, this dynamic is exemplified most prominently by the memory of the Holocaust, alongside other mass atrocities associated with Nazism, fascism, and communism. Despite repeated efforts at reconciliation, these memories remain contested and have become increasingly politicized since the end of the Cold War, among others in Easten Europe following the Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.Footnote 14 In Asia, particularly Northeast Asia, memories of atrocities committed by the Japanese empire before and during the Second World War—and their mobilization by both state and non-state actors—continue to strain regional politics. A growing body of scholarship demonstrates how antagonistic historical memory can reignite, sustain, and escalate latent conflicts, many decades or even more than a century after the events in question.
By contrast, ‘friendly’ memory politics has received far less attention in both memory studies and international relations. Jennifer Lind has shown how collective memory can foster trust, reconciliation, and peaceful interstate relations, though her analysis focuses primarily on formerly aggressive states expressing contrition for past wrongdoing.Footnote 15 A similar logic of seeking escape from the ‘negative telos’ of Second World War memory underpins the European Union’s founding myth, which was retroactively constructed to support the institutional and normative aspirations of the European project.Footnote 16 The role of ‘friendly’ memory politics in shaping partnerships between emerging or former allies, however, remains understudied. A notable exception is the Anglo-American relationship, which has attracted interest from diplomatic historians and international relations scholars examining how state representatives work to sustain and continually renew the myth of a ‘special relationship’ despite ongoing changes and challenges.Footnote 17 Other recent examples include Russia’s alignment of war memory with Israel and Serbia, the latter contributing to the growing literature on transnational memory through the concept of memory alliances.Footnote 18 While this emerging work offers important insight into how state-affiliated actors seek to shape transnational memory with specific aims and instruments, the structural constraints and limitations of these state-directed memory processes remain underexplored.
This article seeks to address that gap. Recent research shows that state actors and national elites are increasingly moving beyond grievance‑based narratives and victimhood tropes by simultaneously embracing memory as a constructive and empowering tool of global statecraft.Footnote 19 Building on these insights, this article treats memory as a potential resource that regimes may use to cultivate amicable ‘others’ and forms of mnemonic friendship, advancing self-legitimization and geopolitical strategies. Such creative practices are not confined to authoritarian contexts, although the literature suggests that in these systems legitimatory constructs are continually adapted to changing internal and external conditions, and that narratives tend to be particularly flexible and modular.Footnote 20 Beyond the United States–United Kingdom example noted earlier, a striking recent case of mnemonic revisionism in democratic contexts is the commemoration by American officials of Japan’s ‘warrior ethos’ during the Second World War, once the very embodiment of the United States’ wartime enemy.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, it seems particularly instructive to analyse these practices in authoritarian contexts, both because of the directive role of state actors in mnemonic processes and because state‑promoted memory may offer important insights into information strategies, ideological commitments, and strategic priorities that often remain ambiguous or deliberately obscured.Footnote 22 Exploring the possibilities and limitations of mnemonic friendship is therefore especially revealing in such contexts, where the scope and constraints of state‑directed memory work are most starkly exposed.
Constructing a shared ‘usable past’: China, Russia, and Second World War memory
This article examines state‑directed efforts in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation to sanitize, align, and jointly mobilize historical memory of the Second World War in order to construct mnemonic friendship and advance shared geopolitical goals. It does so by comparing the history of Sino‑Soviet relations during the Second World War with contemporary official memory in China and Russia of their wartime partnership. Two main reasons motivate this case selection. First, public memory in both states is shaped and controlled predominantly from the top down by authoritarian regimes, giving it clear strategic intent and function. While extensive scholarship documents such ‘mythmaking’ processes within their respective domestic contexts,Footnote 23 few efforts have placed these dynamics in a transnational or comparative frame. Second, there are clear indications that both governments have intensified efforts to align and jointly promote their official memories of the Second World War and its ‘lessons’ as a means of signalling unity and shared geopolitical resolve. Yet, despite the rise of these joint commemorative initiatives—and despite growing attention to one of the most consequential bilateral partnerships in contemporary global politics—the role of historical memory in China–Russia relations remains remarkably underexplored.
This gap is especially striking given the persistent uncertainties and conflicting interpretations surrounding the depth and character of this bilateral relationship in the existing literature.Footnote 24 Recent scholarship on China–Russia relations tends to focus almost exclusively on military‑strategic dynamics and economic ties, reflecting the continued dominance of rationalist frameworks and positivist methodologies in mainstream international relations.Footnote 25 While the impact of official memory on Sino‑Japanese relations, such as the ‘textbook wars’ and ‘apology diplomacy’, has been widely examined, comparable research on China–Russia’s more amicable and creative memory diplomacy remains absent. Examining the China–Russia partnership through the lens of mnemonic statecraft and strategic forgetting therefore not only contributes to emerging understandings of memory alliances and transnational memory flows, but also offers fresh insight into the nature, depth, and resilience of this important bilateral relationship.
The ensuing analysis proceeds in three stages. The first substantive section expands current understandings of wartime and early postwar diplomatic relations between China and the Soviet Union by organizing the historical record around four core themes. Drawing on both established historical scholarship and newly consulted primary sources, this section extends and moves beyond prevailing accounts to provide a contextual and comparative understanding of what distinguishes this relationship from China’s other great‑power interactions and Allied partnerships at the time. While supplementing existing historical scholarship, the primary function of this historical excursion is to document wartime encounters that Chinese and Russian state actors could choose to strategically draw upon—or omit—in contemporary discourses. It highlights how the Soviet Union’s anomalous role in China’s wartime diplomacy often mirrored that of China’s other Allies, potentially complicating contemporary efforts to ‘globalize’ this shared past. The second substantive section draws on extensive datasets from our earlier study of over 14,000 news articles published between 2002 and 2023 to examine Chinese and Russian state‑sponsored media discourse on the Second World War, assessing both the extent to which and the ways in which the four identified themes are represented today. The discussion then compares these contemporary mnemonic discourses and juxtaposes them with the established historical record, evaluating the outcomes and inherent limitations of Beijing and Moscow’s strategic efforts to construct a shared ‘usable past’.
The odd one out: Sino-Soviet relations during the Second World War
The Second World War represents a formative chapter in the nation‑building trajectories of both China and the Soviet Union. Yet, amid global upheaval, the two neighbouring Eurasian powers forged a tenuous, asymmetric, and often unstable relationship. Building on a review of the historical scholarship, this section first identifies four core themes that shaped the Sino‑Soviet relationship during the war and then, drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources, traces their evolution and related encounters across three distinct stages. The four core themes are: Soviet interference in China’s civil war and the formation of a national united front; Soviet wartime aid to China; geopolitical rivalry in Northwest China’s Xinjiang province; and the August 1945 Soviet Red Army’s offensive in northeastern China.
Core themes of wartime Sino-Soviet relations
The first theme concerns Soviet involvement in the rivalry between China’s two principal political forces in the late 1930s: Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; KMT) and Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Historical scholarship shows that Soviet foreign policy prioritized national security over ideological expansion, prompting Moscow to advocate a temporary alliance between the KMT and CCP.Footnote 26 Only a united China was seen as a sufficient buffer against Japanese aggression on the Soviet Union’s eastern flank. Stalin therefore viewed the CCP’s radical land reforms and anti-Chiang stance as counterproductive. Despite ideological affinity, he considered Chiang the more viable leader of a unified Chinese resistance, not least because Western powers were more likely to support him. When two Manchurian warlords—nominally loyal to Chiang but aligned with the CCP—kidnapped him in Xi’an in December 1936 to force a shift in strategy, Moscow intervened to secure his release. Angered by the Comintern’s interference, Mao nonetheless agreed to a peaceful resolution and a temporary alliance with Chiang.Footnote 27 Following the outbreak of hostilities in Beijing in August 1937, the KMT–CCP united front was formally announced.
The second theme centres on covert Soviet aid to China in the early war years, including credit lines, military equipment, personnel, and strategic advice. In August 1937, amid intense fighting in Shanghai, China’s foreign minister Wang Chonghui and Soviet ambassador Dmitri Bogomolov signed a mutual non-aggression pact in China’s capital Nanjing. The agreement eased Moscow’s fears of a separate peace with Japan and opened the door to substantial Soviet military assistance at this critical moment.Footnote 28 Between September 1937 and June 1941, Moscow supplied around 900 aircraft, including over 300 heavy bombers, alongside tanks, anti-aircraft systems, weapons and munitions.Footnote 29 Under the secret ‘Operation Zet’, Soviet air units were stationed near Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing, and Lanzhou, the terminus of a 3,000-kilometre ‘Red route’ from Kazakhstan used to transport war material.Footnote 30 Approximately 1,500 Soviet advisers and engineers, and 2,000 ‘volunteer’ combat pilots—serving unofficially to avoid Japanese retaliation—were deployed to support China’s war effort.Footnote 31
The third theme explores geopolitical rivalry in Xinjiang, a resource-rich province in China’s northwest. Though formally under Chinese sovereignty, Xinjiang had become part of the Soviet sphere of influence in the mid-1930s. Moscow backed local warlord Sheng Shicai through military interventions, economic investment, ideological indoctrination, and secret police operations.Footnote 32 These efforts effectively turned Xinjiang into a satellite state, somewhat akin to Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo in the northeast. In 1942, with Soviet aid to Chongqing dwindling and the Red Army suffering setbacks in Europe, Chiang’s government—now part of a powerful Allied coalition—sought to reclaim control. A two-stage plan was devised to oust Sheng and dismantle Soviet influence.Footnote 33 Nationalist forces entered Xinjiang in late 1943, and by spring 1944, all Soviet personnel had been withdrawn. Though this strained wartime Sino-Soviet relations, it helped Chiang prevent Xinjiang from following the path of Outer Mongolia.Footnote 34
The final theme focuses on Moscow’s strategic pivot to East Asia and its Manchurian offensive in August 1945. At the Yalta Conference that February, Stalin pledged to join the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat, in exchange for control of Lüshun (Dalian), access to southern Manchurian railways, and recognition of Outer Mongolia’s independence. Unaware of these negotiations, Chiang later accepted Stalin’s demands by signing a new friendship treaty on 14 August 1945, thus securing continued Soviet support. Soviet forces entered Manchukuo on 9 August, three months after Germany’s surrender and hours before the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Within days, the Red Army had seized northeast China, parts of Inner Mongolia, Korea, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril islands. Yet Chiang paid a heavy price for Moscow’s intervention: upon withdrawing in 1946, Soviet troops stripped Northeast China of its key industries and infrastructure, armed returning CCP forces, and committed widespread atrocities against civilians.Footnote 35
To meaningfully juxtapose contemporary memory practices with historical records, it is not enough to outline the core themes of Sino-Soviet wartime relations. A comparative, more contextual understanding is also required: how this relationship differed from other great-power alliances, how it evolved over time, what made it distinctive, and which aspects of wartime camaraderie contemporary state narratives may choose to emphasize or omit. With this aim, the remainder of this section explores the broader dynamics and structural contradictions of Sino‑Soviet diplomatic encounters across three distinct wartime stages, showing how they both diverged from and often mirrored China’s relations with other Allies, foreshadowing subsequent Cold War configurations. It illustrates how, in the early war years, when China stood alone, the Soviet Union emerged—covertly—as its sole brother‑in‑arms. Yet following Pearl Harbor, as China joined a formidable Allied coalition, Moscow withdrew its involvement. In the third stage, with Japan’s defeat imminent, it reappeared in China, seemingly aligned with the US‑backed Chinese Nationalists, but in reality pursuing a dual‑track—and duplicitous—strategy that included partial support for the CCP, thereby sowing long-lasting mistrust in both camps.
China at war: Soviet assistance at a critical hour (1931–1940)
Bilateral relations between the Soviet Union and the Republic of China were at a low point when Japan’s Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria in September 1931. Formal diplomatic ties had been severed following the collapse of the first KMT–CCP united front in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek launched a violent purge of Chinese Communists and expelled Soviet diplomats, accusing them of ‘persistent agitation’ and collusion with the CCP.Footnote 36 A failed Communist uprising in Guangzhou saw a Soviet vice consul and several staff officers executed.Footnote 37 Tensions escalated further in July 1929 when Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army, backed by Nanjing, seized the Chinese Eastern Railway and expelled Soviet personnel. After an ignored ultimatum, Moscow dispatched troops under Vasily Blyukher, Chiang’s former military adviser. In a swift campaign, Soviet forces routed the Chinese forces and captured the border town Manzhouli. Nanjing was forced to concede, and the Khabarovsk Protocol of December 1929 restored joint Sino-Soviet control of the railway.
Ties were restored in December 1932, following the League of Nations’ failure to halt Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. In June 1932, Nanjing proposed resuming diplomatic relations, a move welcomed in Moscow amid growing concern over Japanese expansion near Soviet borders.Footnote 38 In April 1933, Soviet ambassador Dmitry Bogomolov arrived in China with a ten-member staff. Unlike other foreign missions still based in Beiping’s old Legation Quarter, the Soviets honoured Chiang’s repeated requests to relocate the embassy to the new capital, Nanjing.Footnote 39
Their proximity to the Nationalist leadership was strategic: most senior military advisers operated under diplomatic cover as embassy staff. When Chiang relocated to Wuhan and then Chongqing, the Soviets followed, establishing a new embassy atop a mountain in an ‘imposing castle-like structure’ overlooking the Yangtze.Footnote 40 The TASS news agency set up nearby, alongside the office of the Soviet military attaché, headed successively by Kombrig N. P. Ivanov, General-major Pavel S. Rybalko, and Colonel Nikolai V. Roshchin.Footnote 41 Roshchin would later become Moscow’s final ambassador to Chiang’s Nationalist government and, in late 1949, Stalin’s first envoy to the newly established PRC, much to the dismay of the victorious Communists.
Several senior Red Army generals covertly served in influential roles as chief advisers to Chiang’s forces during the early war years. Apart from the lesser-known Mikhail I. Dratvin (1937–1938), Aleksandr I. Cherepanov (1938–1939), and Kuzma M. Kachanov (1939–1941), this included Vasilii I. Chuikov (1941–1942), who was later twice named a Hero of the Soviet Union for his role at Stalingrad and left a detailed memoir of his time in China.Footnote 42 During the early phase of the war, they advised on major battles, including the pivotal Chinese victory at Taierzhuang in spring 1938.Footnote 43 Under their guidance, 2,000 Soviet volunteer pilots undertook six-month-long tours in China, and over 90,000 Chinese soldiers received Soviet-led training at military and aviation schools across unoccupied regions. Strengthening China’s air power was vital to its defence, as Japanese bomber bases were pushed hundreds of kilometres from the front.Footnote 44 More than 200 Soviet aviators, popularly known as ‘Flying Eagles’, lost their lives in wartime service in China.Footnote 45
Chongqing endured relentless Japanese air raids during the early war years, unprecedented at the time in their scale, devastation, and human suffering. During the June 1940 raids, which levelled two-thirds of the city and left many dead, wounded, or displaced, the Soviet embassy was destroyed by a direct hit, while the offices of the Russian military attaché and TASS were also damaged.Footnote 46 Soviet personnel, sheltered in the embassy’s well-equipped bomb bunker, suspected that Chiang’s secret police had deliberately guided Japanese bombers towards Soviet targets in an effort to provoke Moscow into joining the war against Japan.Footnote 47 Chuikov later recalled that during his year in Chongqing, he was forced to relocate five times as each residence was destroyed ‘down to the very foundations’.Footnote 48
In summer 1939, Soviet and Japanese forces clashed at Nomonhan near the Mongolian-Manchukuo border. Although the Red Army and its Mongolian allies prevailed, Stalin was displeased by Chiang’s lack of support. Chiang, in turn, feared a Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact.Footnote 49 In September, Moscow appointed Alexandr S. Paniushkin, a former Red Army divisional commander, as ambassador to Chongqing.Footnote 50 His first task was to explain the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and reassure Chiang that no Soviet-Japanese plan to partition China was underway.Footnote 51 Paniushkin pursued a more active public diplomacy, opening the embassy to foreign missions gradually relocating to Chongqing and hosting receptions for the October Revolution, Red Army Day, and Stalin’s sixtieth birthday.Footnote 52 In February 1941, Chiang personally attended one such event in a rare show of goodwill,Footnote 53 though by then Sino-Soviet relations were already in decline, giving way to closer ties between China, the United States, and Britain.
World at war: The Soviet retreat from China (1941–1944)
The year 1941 marked a turning point in Sino-Soviet relations, as a series of developments contributed to their steady decline. In January, violent clashes between Nationalist forces and the Communist New Fourth Army in eastern China raised doubts in Moscow about Chongqing’s commitment to the war effort and the proper use of Soviet-supplied weaponry.Footnote 54 Despite repeated assurances from Paniushkin and Chuikov that military aid would continue and Soviet forces would reinforce the Manchurian border, the signing of the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact in April triggered widespread Chinese distrust of Soviet intentions.Footnote 55
Two months later, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union—predicted in intelligence shared by Chinese operatives with Chuikov—prompted Stalin to shift focus to the European theatre and terminate all aid to China. In response, Chiang intensified efforts to draw Moscow into the war with Japan. Chongqing’s declaration of war on Germany and Italy following the attack on Pearl Harbor was interpreted as a strategic move to pressure Stalin, now allied with Britain and the United States in Europe, into reciprocating against Japan.Footnote 56 Chiang publicly positioned the Soviet Union as a wartime ally, declaring in a national address in December 1941: ‘henceforth we shall be fighting shoulder to shoulder with Great Britain, the United States, Soviet Russia and other friendly nations in a united endeavour to suppress the enemies of civilization and establish a lasting peace in the world’.Footnote 57
Yet these efforts proved fruitless. Japan’s decision to launch its Southern Offensive rather than join Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union meant that Stalin no longer feared a two-front war or required China to tie down Japanese forces. With Britain and the United States now firmly allied with China and heavily represented in Chongqing, Stalin was free to pursue a ‘Europe first’ strategy. As Allied diplomats, military officers, intelligence agents, and journalists poured into China’s wartime capital, Soviet advisers quietly withdrew.Footnote 58 In February 1942, as Japanese forces overran British Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies, Chuikov was recalled to command the 62nd Army in the defence of Stalingrad. Although a few Soviet experts initially remained in China, his role as Chiang’s chief foreign adviser was assumed by General Joseph Stilwell of the US Army.
The expulsion of Soviet agents from Xinjiang in 1943 further strained relations. It undermined Chongqing’s efforts to secure Soviet backing for its postwar ambitions and its claim to great-power status. That autumn, Moscow opposed an American-sponsored proposal for a four-power declaration of security and cooperation. Only through American pressure was China’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Fu Bingchang, ultimately able to sign the Four-Power Declaration.Footnote 59 Yet China’s brief elevation to one of the ‘Big Four’ was undercut by Moscow’s lack of support. In November, Stalin declined to attend the Cairo Summit with Chiang, opting instead for separate talks with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran to avoid antagonizing Japan. For the same reason, negotiations on the formation of a United Nations organization in Washington in late 1944 were split into two distinct sessions.
In May 1944, amid heightened tensions over Xinjiang and growing anti-Soviet sentiment among senior Chinese officials, Paniushkin was recalled, officially to ‘recuperate his health after several months of illness’.Footnote 60 Over the summer, relations continued to deteriorate, and the remaining Soviet military advisers were withdrawn from their posts in Chengdu, Xi’an, and Lanzhou. Meanwhile, the Soviet press, previously sympathetic to the Nationalists since 1937, adopted a more critical tone towards Chongqing.Footnote 61 That same month, TASS representative N. E. Proshenko joined an international press delegation visiting Mao’s wartime headquarters in Yan’an, a move that embarrassed the Nationalist government and Chiang personally. By the summer of 1944, as US Army observers were welcomed in Yan’an, the Sino-Soviet axis that had once served as a vital lifeline for China had effectively collapsed.
War’s end and postwar: Moscow’s repivot to China (1945–1950)
In the final months of the war, the geopolitical landscape shifted again. As Allied representatives withdrew from China, allowing ‘the dust to settle’, the Soviets returned to claim their reward for helping defeat Japan. In April 1945, with Germany’s collapse imminent, Stalin annulled the neutrality pact with Japan and appointed a new ambassador to China. The following month, Ambassador Apollon A. Petrov accompanied a Chinese delegation led by Foreign Minister Song Ziwen to Moscow for treaty negotiations with Stalin and Foreign Commissar Molotov. On the evening of 14 August, Song’s successor and Molotov signed the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty.
Controversy soon followed. Chiang’s plan to deploy Nationalist troops to Manchuria via the port of Dalian sparked tensions, while the treaty itself provoked public outrage in China, where it was widely condemned as a new ‘unequal’ treaty on the eve of national victory.Footnote 62 Although the Chinese Communists refrained from public criticism, they were privately dismayed by Stalin’s decision to strike a separate deal with Chiang, which left the CCP sidelined in negotiations over China’s postwar future.Footnote 63
In Chongqing, Petrov nevertheless had an opportunity to meet with Mao Zedong, who had travelled to the capital in autumn 1945 for US-mediated talks on extending KMT–CCP cooperation into the postwar period. Mao visited Petrov at the Soviet embassy, attended a cocktail reception at the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association, and encountered the ambassador again at a tea party hosted by Chiang. The following day, Mao visited Petrov to discuss the peace talks, accompanied by senior CCP foreign affairs officials Zhou Enlai and Wang Ruofei. After the signing of the ‘Double Tenth’ agreement between the two rival parties, Petrov hosted a dinner for the trio to evaluate its outcome.Footnote 64 Mao then returned to Yan’an, maintaining contact with Moscow via Comintern radio and Soviet liaison agents, including TASS correspondent Pyotr P. Vlasov (alias Peter Vladimirov).Footnote 65 But despite these regular exchanges, Mao was deeply dissatisfied with Soviet postwar policy and continued to harbour profound distrust towards Stalin.
In May 1946, after nearly eight years in Chongqing, the Soviets relocated with the Nationalist government to Nanjing, maintaining a sizeable staff. By early 1948, as Communist forces gained the upper hand in the resumed civil war, Roshchin, the former military attaché, was appointed ambassador to Chiang.Footnote 66 While the Soviet press celebrated the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) victories, rumours circulated that Moscow actually sought to slow its advance, possibly to avoid American intervention or to delay the emergence of a new Communist state that might challenge Soviet influence in Asia. Stalin’s proposal for foreign-mediated peace talks was met with suspicion among the CCP leadership and ultimately ignored. Both Mao and Zhou Enlai would later accuse Stalin of having attempted to divide China and create ‘two China’s’.Footnote 67
As the PLA advanced south, Moscow maintained exclusive diplomatic relations with the Nationalist government and ostensibly avoided contact with the CCP, unlike Western diplomats, who openly courted the Communists.Footnote 68 The Soviet Union was the only country to close its consulates in newly Communist-held areas, except in the northeast, which it considered its legitimate sphere of influence under the 1945 treaty.Footnote 69 When the Nationalists were forced to relocate to Guangzhou in February 1949, Roshchin was the only foreign ambassador to follow.Footnote 70 Other envoys remained in Nanjing, ignoring Chiang’s repeated requests and instead anticipating the establishment of a Communist government. The Soviets’ decision to move its embassy and continue negotiations with the KMT over an air agreement concerning Xinjiang deepened CCP mistrust. Stalin’s explanation—that these talks were intended to monitor KMT activities—failed to dispel concerns about divide-and-rule tactics.Footnote 71
In June 1949, Mao dispatched a secret delegation to Moscow led by Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s second-in-command, to discuss diplomatic recognition.Footnote 72 When the People’s Republic was proclaimed on 1 October, Moscow promptly recognized the new government and severed ties with the Nationalists. Stalin’s abrupt reversal stunned KMT officials in Guangzhou, who denounced it as an act of aggression against China and a threat to regional peace and security.Footnote 73 Mao, equally wary of Stalin’s duplicity, maintained frosty relations with Roshchin and unsuccessfully sought his removal.Footnote 74
In December, Mao travelled to Moscow for Stalin’s seventieth birthday and to negotiate a new bilateral treaty. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was signed on 14 February 1950. Just as the new regime had succeeded in expelling lingering Western influences in China, Moscow secured its foothold through what was effectively another unequal treaty. Mao’s distrust of Stalin persisted throughout the following decade, and after a brief period of consolidation, Sino-Soviet relations began to deteriorate once more.
The limits of strategic friendship: Present-day Chinese–Russian narratives
Since its establishment in 1991, the Russian Federation—self-styled as the successor to the Soviet Union—has laid claim to its predecessor’s legacy in the Second World War. Over the past two decades, President Vladimir Putin has intensified efforts to reinforce this claim, reviving and reshaping Victory Day commemorations and enacting legislation to enshrine the Soviet Union’s pivotal role in defeating Nazism.Footnote 75 By contrast, the PRC, founded just four years after the war’s end, was a relative latecomer in invoking the Second World War as a moral cornerstone of national identity and regime legitimacy. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, however, the CCP has reinvigorated official commemoration of the war, framing the conflict as a defining moment in the nation’s ongoing ‘rejuvenation’.Footnote 76 This recent surge in official Second World War memory has been enabled by a departure from the divisive class-struggle rhetoric of the Mao era and the historiographical rehabilitation of the Second KMT–CCP United Front, allowing the central authorities to co-opt the achievements of the KMT into a national narrative of the Chinese people under the CCP’s unifying, moral leadership.Footnote 77
Reflecting their converging geopolitical interest in opposing what they denounce as American unilateralism, bullying, and aggression, China and Russia have, since 2010, and especially since 2015, sought to align their official narratives of the Second World War and its contemporary ‘lessons’. This sustained effort has included harmonizing the dates and names of national remembrance days, coordinating joint commemorations, and promoting a shared discourse that condemns perceived Western attempts to ‘distort’ the war’s legacy.Footnote 78
This growing political salience of Second World War memory in their bilateral interactions invites closer scrutiny of how Beijing and Moscow currently narrate and remember the complex and often fraught Sino-Soviet wartime relationship. Our earlier study of over 14,000 news articles published between 2002 and 2023 reveals that, despite efforts to harmonize their narratives, Chinese and Russian state-controlled media present subtly distinct—and at times conflicting—accounts of this shared past. Moreover, there is a marked asymmetry in representation: Chinese media refer to the Soviet Union far more frequently than Russian outlets mention China. What remains lacking, however, is a deeper understanding of which essentialized narratives converge or diverge, which aspects are strategically forgotten, how these state-sponsored memories correspond to the historical record, and what this reveals about the potential for constructing mnemonic friendship.
Drawing on the extensive datasets from the aforementioned earlier study, supplemented by additional primary sources and fieldwork observations, this section examines how the four core themes previously identified, which define the wartime Sino-Soviet relationship, are represented in contemporary official discourse. Given the limited prominence of Sino-Soviet memory within Russian narratives, detailed in the following four subsections, the analysis that follows necessarily foregrounds Chinese official memory.
Theme 1: The KMT–CCP United Front
Although the recent surge in official war memory in China has drawn heavily on the historiographical rehabilitation of the Second KMT–CCP United Front, this pivotal event is conspicuously absent from contemporary narratives of wartime Sino-Soviet relations. Erased from public memory during the Maoist era, the Second United Front now features prominently in Chinese textbooks and history museums as a major achievement, led by the CCP, that enabled the Chinese people to secure ultimate victory in the war. This framing has allowed Beijing to claim moral and spiritual leadership of China’s national resistance, despite the CCP’s relatively limited military and diplomatic contributions.Footnote 79 Accordingly, CCP-centred narratives in Chinese textbooks and museums routinely omit the crucial role played by the Soviet Union—and more specifically the Comintern—in pressuring the CCP to cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek. The same pattern is evident in official media coverage of the Second World War: whether published in English or Chinese, references to the Second United Front are framed exclusively from a domestic CCP perspective, with no mention of Soviet involvement.
A 2005 article in the English-language dataset, for example, quotes then-president Hu Jintao’s assertion that the national united front, initiated by the CCP, made an ‘indelible historic contribution’ to wartime victory, and that the resulting ‘great unity’ of the Chinese people remains a source of strength in overcoming adversity.Footnote 80 Similar claims appear in more recent articles, including a 2021 piece that credits the CCP with charting ‘the correct path’ to success through its campaign for a national united front, while glossing over the fact that Mao had sought a KMT–CCP alliance that excluded Chiang.Footnote 81 The KMT leader is mentioned several times, neither vilified nor glorified, but portrayed as a reluctant participant following the Xi’an incident and repeated CCP calls for national unity.Footnote 82
The Chinese-language discourse mirrors this approach. In a corpus of 3,279 Chinese-language articles on the Second World War, only one item hints at Soviet involvement in preserving Chinese unity. Even then, the emphasis lies on the KMT threat to the united front in January 1941, which prompted Soviet Ambassador Paniushkin and General Chuikov to warn Chiang’s government that Moscow would terminate its aid if civil conflict persisted.Footnote 83 Another article cryptically notes that, under the nationwide united front against Japanese aggression, the CCP had to ‘correctly manage its relationship not only with the KMT and all democratic Parties, but also with the Comintern and the Soviet Union’.Footnote 84
Moscow’s role in helping secure the Second United Front was once acknowledged in Soviet historiography. A 1981 publication by the Novosti state press on Sino-Soviet relations emphatically declared: ‘It is absolutely clear that the Soviet Union played an extremely important role not only in the establishment but also in the preservation of the united front [in China], especially during the first four years of the war against Japan.’Footnote 85 Yet in contemporary Russia, there appears to be no incentive for revisiting the political dimensions of the Far Eastern theatre of the Great Patriotic War. In the English-language corpus, comprising 2,784 articles on the Second World War published by RT, TASS, and Sputnik between 2005 and 2022, there is not a single mention of the KMT–CCP United Front, Soviet dealings with the Nationalist government, or wartime relations between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek and their respective envoys in Chongqing. The same holds true for the 5,581 Russian-language articles published by TASS during the same period.Footnote 86 These findings indicate that both Beijing and Moscow are unwilling to highlight the Soviet Union’s decisive role in uniting China at a critical juncture in its recent history.
Theme 2: Soviet aviators, advisers, and aid
One might expect the military aid provided by the Soviet Union to China during the early years of the war to be prominently remembered. Indeed, on his first visit to Moscow as China’s top leader in March 2013, President Xi Jinping invoked this history to affirm that China and Russia would ‘forever be good neighbours, good friends and good partners’.Footnote 87 Emphasizing the enduring ‘friendship between the two peoples’, Xi recounted the story of Hryhorij Kulishenko, a (Ukrainian) Soviet air force pilot who ‘fought side by side with the Chinese people’ during the Second World War and ‘died heroically on Chinese soil’.Footnote 88
During the 1950s, memorials and martyrs’ graves were established in Wuhan and Chongqing to honour Soviet aviators who lost their lives in air battles against Japanese forces.Footnote 89 The Aviation Martyrs’ Memorial Hall in Nanjing, inaugurated in 2009, houses headstones for four Soviet volunteer pilots, while a commemorative sculpture in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park pays tribute to their sacrifice.Footnote 90 These Soviet service members are also remembered in war museums throughout China.
Yet despite these acknowledgments, recent Chinese media coverage of the Second World War pays surprisingly little attention to the thousands of Soviet aviators who aided China during its most difficult early war years.Footnote 91 A 2019 English-language article recounts how Kulishenko—celebrated by Xi in his 2013 speech—became a ‘household name’ in Chongqing for his sacrifice and efforts to train Chinese pilots.Footnote 92 Among the 3,279 articles in the Chinese-language corpus, however, only six mention Kulishenko’s heroism. A 2005 piece recalls his ‘deep feelings’ for the Chinese people and Zhou Enlai’s 1958 promise to his descendants that China would ‘never forget’ him.Footnote 93 A 2015 article references a 1937 meeting between Chiang Kai-shek and Soviet envoy Bogomolov, during which Chiang requested Soviet volunteer pilots to assist and train the Chinese Air Force.Footnote 94 No other Soviet pilots or their stories are mentioned.
Equally striking is the near-total absence of accounts concerning Soviet military attachés and high-level advisers who supported China at this critical juncture. A handful of articles quote General Chuikov’s memoirs, noting merely that ‘during our most difficult war years, Japan did not attack the Soviet Union, but drowned China in a pool of blood’. Such selective quotations serve to shift the focus to China’s wartime contribution and suggest a partnership on equal terms, highlighting how China helped the Soviet Union by tying down the ‘hands and feet of the Japanese aggressors’ and allowing Stalin to avoid a two-front war.Footnote 95 A 2015 Global Times editorial titled ‘A Great Friendship that Cannot be Forgotten’ offers a rare tribute to Soviet support, while balancing it with an equally strong emphasis on China’s own contribution:
We must not forget our Soviet friends who contributed tremendously to China’s Anti-Japanese War. We must not forget the international arteries that provided blood transfusions to China’s Anti-Japanese War. We must not forget the bloody battles of the Soviet Air Force to aid China. We must not forget the Soviet military advisers who quietly planned strategies for the Chinese army. At the same time, we should not forget that China, as a strong ally of the Soviet Union, constantly fought against the Japanese army with huge national sacrifices, making it unable to invade the Soviet Union from the north. This provided strong strategic support to the Soviet Union’s Patriotic War.Footnote 96
In sharp contrast to the limited recognition of Soviet aid, Chinese media devote extensive attention to the American volunteer group known as the ‘Flying Tigers’, who are described as having ‘helped China fight Japan’ and as ‘the most familiar and respected names among the Chinese’.Footnote 97 Some 30 articles highlight General Stilwell’s contribution to China’s war effort and Sino-American relations, while others mention the Lend-Lease aid extended by Roosevelt in 1941, which is portrayed as having ‘spiritual, political, military and economic’ significance following the withdrawal of Soviet support.Footnote 98 Evidently, Chinese state media narratives place far greater emphasis on Sino-American wartime friendship than on relations with their northern neighbour, despite the Soviet Union’s supposed role in fighting ‘side by side’ with China.
This remarkable discrepancy is mirrored in heritage preservation and commemorative practices across China. Since 1991, Chongqing, the former wartime capital, has housed a memorial museum dedicated to General Stilwell, the only museum in China honouring a high-ranking American military figure.Footnote 99 The exhibition includes a section on the Flying Tigers, despite their commander, Claire L. Chennault, having a notoriously strained relationship with Stilwell and close ties to the Chiang family. Directly across the street stands a private museum dedicated to the Flying Tigers. Additional commemorative sites in China include the Flying Tigers Hall in a large private museum in Chengdu, a Flying Tigers Memorial Hall in Kunming, and a Flying Tigers Heritage Park in Guilin. While state-owned museums across the country underwent significant updates to mark the eightieth anniversary of Victory Day, the only known memorial hall dedicated to the Soviet ‘Red Eagles’, located in Wuhan, was officially closed for renovation throughout the second half of 2025 and remained closed as of July 2026.Footnote 100 No efforts have been made to commemorate or restore any of Chuikov’s wartime residences in Chongqing. Whereas the former American embassy in Chongqing has housed a small exhibition hall since 2019, the ‘imposing castle-like’ former Soviet embassy continues to serve as a state-owned hospital for local cadres and has remained inaccessible to the public for decades.Footnote 101 For all the stories and exhibitions depicting the dramatic Chongqing bombings and the camaraderie between Chinese and American soldiers who fought ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Chinese in resisting the Japanese, there are no attempts to recount the long-obscured history of Soviet support or to depict (or imagine) the shared Sino-Soviet friendship and wartime plight.
Remarkably, contemporary Russian media are even more reticent on the subject of Soviet wartime aid to China. Neither the English-language corpus of the Russian state media nor the Russian-language dataset contains a single mention of Soviet pilots who sacrificed their lives in China. TASS has shown no interest in revisiting its wartime history in China or recounting the experiences of its staff in the bomb-ravaged wartime capital. There is no reference to Soviet aid or the dispatch of prominent advisers such as General (later Marshal) Vasily Chuikov, the future hero of Stalingrad. In stark contrast, one extensive English-language article in the Russian corpus reports on a surviving Flying Tigers aircraft and its wartime missions.Footnote 102 Apparently, neither Beijing nor Moscow has felt compelled to mobilize this shared past and stories of wartime solidarity in support of their present-day strategic narratives. When examples and personal stories of wartime friendship are publicized, they overwhelmingly emphasize relations with the United States.
Theme 3: Tensions over Xinjiang and the expulsion of Soviet agents
As might be expected, there is even less appetite for revisiting past conflicts in their bilateral ties. Chinese state media entirely avoid mention of Sino-Soviet tensions in Xinjiang during the Second World War. None of the 2,455 English-language news articles reviewed contains a single reference to Xinjiang, Urumqi (formerly Dihua), or the local warlord Sheng Shicai. The Chinese-language dataset contains only one reference to Sheng, but the story is unrelated to Sino-Soviet relations. Of the 25 articles in the Chinese-language corpus that reference Xinjiang, only three mention the Soviet Union. These include a piece about a CCP martyr who, as an active member of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association in the provincial capital Urumqi, sought to propagate the merits of Soviet socialist construction to ‘the people of all ethnic groups’ in Xinjiang.Footnote 103 Another article claims that 90 per cent of wartime Soviet aid—accounting for 80 per cent of all international assistance during the early war years—passed through the northwestern transport corridor in Xinjiang.Footnote 104 While the Soviet Union is mentioned in passing, these articles primarily use Second World War history to underscore the inalienable bond between the restive province and the Chinese nation.
Unsurprisingly, a similar blind spot exists in Russia’s official media discourse. The few articles that mention wartime China, whether in English or Russian, focus on contemporary Sino-Russian relations, with only sparse historical references and none concerning Xinjiang or Sheng Shicai, the former Soviet ‘puppet’. It is evident that neither Beijing nor Moscow is inclined to recall the fact that, while the Soviet Union supported China’s resistance during the early and final stages of the war, it was also the only Allied power to actively continue encroachments on Chinese territory during the war. As China’s continental neighbour, the Soviet Union had a strategic interest in securing its rear and building buffers in China’s border regions—an interest Beijing remains as reluctant to acknowledge today as Chongqing was at the time. In the current context of heightened goodwill in bilateral relations, any instances of wartime Soviet interference in China and the resulting tensions are strategically ‘forgotten’ by both partners.
Theme 4: The Manchurian offensive and the war’s end
China’s state media notably make little mention of the Red Army’s invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 or the Soviet Union’s role in liberating Northeast Asia from Japanese occupation. The English-language dataset does not contain a single reference to the ‘Manchurian offensive’, Operation ‘August Storm’, or the presence of the Soviet 25th Army. Only one article refers to the Yalta agreement and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, stating that it ‘accelerated’ Japan’s defeat.Footnote 105 Neither the controversial secret arrangements of the Yalta Pact nor the resultant Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty are referenced.
The Chinese-language dataset contains around a dozen articles on the Manchurian offensive and the Soviet role in the end of the Second World War in East Asia, but these avoid specifics on Sino-Soviet relations or events on the ground. A few articles published between 2010 and 2015 briefly acknowledge the Soviet Union’s ‘very important role’ and ‘important contribution’ to China’s final victory through the dispatch of troops to Northeast China in August 1945, but they do so in generic terms, providing conspicuously little context or detail.Footnote 106
The minimization of the Soviet Union’s contribution to Japan’s defeat reflects the deeply Sinocentric narrative found in Chinese museums and history textbooks. Across five lessons covering the Second World War in the recently updated, standardized middle school curriculum, spanning 24 pages, there is only a single factual mention of the Soviet Union, near the end of the final chapter: ‘On 8 August, the Soviet government declared war on Japan. The next day, the Soviet Red Army sent troops to Northeast China and launched an attack on the Japanese Kwantung Army.’Footnote 107 Immediately thereafter, the focus shifts back to Mao Zedong and the Chinese people and their ‘nationwide counterattack to completely defeat the Japanese aggressors’.
In contrast, Russian media and Russian leaders do show interest in China insofar as the Soviet contribution to victory over Japan is concerned. In a 2015 interview published by TASS, President Putin is quoted as stating:
It’s common knowledge that the USSR extended help to China back in the early 1930’s when the neighboring country came to grips with the Japanese aggression … It helped [the Chinese people] consistently as of 1931 … the USSR kept up brotherly assistance to the Chinese people even in 1942 at the peak of fighting against the Nazi aggressors on the European swathes of Russia … It put period to World War II hostilities by joining a war (with the Japanese forces) in line with the Yalta accords.Footnote 108
A 2021 article quotes Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recalling how ‘in late August 1945, the last battle of the Second World War in China ended when the soldiers of the [Soviet Union’s] 1st Far Eastern Front’s 25th Army eliminated the centres of resistance of Japan’s invading forces’.Footnote 109 Lavrov went on to claim that wartime cooperation between the peoples of the Soviet Union and China laid the groundwork for bilateral ties and global stability.
Nevertheless, reflecting the deeply Eurocentric orientation of Russian war memory, coverage of the Manchurian offensive in Russia’s domestic and international media remains sparse and superficial. Only three articles in the English-language dataset and six in the Russian-language dataset touch on this ostensibly positive Soviet legacy. Despite Moscow’s efforts to project its Second World War narrative internationally, and despite China’s growing significance in Russian global politics and security, these initiatives have not led to broader recognition of the East Asian theatre or a globalization of official memory of what continues to be called the Great Patriotic War. Nor is there any apparent acknowledgment of the Chinese claim that, by keeping Japanese forces tied down in China for years, it helped protect the Soviet Union from having to fight a two-front war.
Analysis and assessment: Distinct frames, common gaps
A complex pattern of selective remembering and strategic forgetting emerges across the four main themes in Sino-Soviet wartime historiography: the Second United Front, early Soviet aid, the conflict in Xinjiang, and the Soviet offensive in Manchuria in 1945. The Soviet role in establishing the Second United Front is erased from Chinese discourse, as acknowledging it would challenge the CCP’s political legitimacy, while post-Soviet Russian historiography largely ceases to mention it—a silencing that appears to reflect strategic forgetting in the service of mnemonic friendship. Early Soviet aid is remembered in China as part of a broader story of mutual support, including China’s long-term effort to keep Japanese forces tied down to protect the Soviet Union, whereas Russian accounts largely omit these contributions, bypassing a significant opportunity to highlight the Soviet Union’s role in China’s early war effort. The conflict in Xinjiang is similarly ‘forgotten’ by both sides, as it is neither central to national historiography nor conducive to fostering contemporary friendship. Recognition of the Soviet offensive in Manchuria in 1945 is limited in China, constrained by the overarching narrative of nation-building and CCP legitimacy, while Russian sources treat it only incidentally. Since top Russian leaders do reference it selectively, this reticence appears to reflect marginal interest rather than a strategic effort to appease China.
Analysis of official discourse on the Second World War in contemporary China and Russia thus reveals notable asymmetries and divergences in how Beijing and Moscow narrate their shared wartime past, complicating efforts to construct mnemonic friendship through joint commemorations. In Chinese official memory, the Soviet Union appears primarily in accounts of the early war years, when it is portrayed as a rare supporter of China’s righteous struggle against imperial aggression. Moscow, by contrast, remains largely silent about the substantial Soviet aid extended to China during this period. Beyond Russia’s Eurocentric focus on the Great Patriotic War, this silence may also be partially strategic, as recalling Stalin’s early activism in East Asia could complicate Moscow’s long-standing justification of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a necessary measure to buy time for Soviet rearmament.Footnote 110 Moreover, with at least one of the prominently featured martyred Soviet airmen being Ukrainian, this legacy may have become increasingly difficult to feature in Sino-Russian official memory, particularly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Instead, contemporary Russian narratives foreground the Red Army’s decisive role in defeating Japan during the final stages of the war, while downplaying China’s less visible role in containing Japanese forces that might otherwise have turned against the Soviet Union or Western colonies in the region. Beijing, for its part, does not endorse Moscow’s interpretation of the war’s end, as this contradicts China’s official narrative: that the Chinese people, unified under the CCP’s moral leadership, not only made the largest sacrifice among the Allies but also played a decisive role in prolonging Japan’s entanglement in China and securing its ultimate defeat.
Yet despite these narrative divergences, which remain tacit and easily overlooked, Chinese and Russian discourses also converge in ways that may facilitate mnemonic friendship and reinforce their shared geopolitical agendas. First, despite their differing accounts of who defeated Japan, both sides reject the idea that the atomic bombings prompted Japan’s surrender, a perspective long entrenched in Western memory but increasingly challenged in Japanese and Western scholarship.Footnote 111 Second, and more relevant for the study of mnemonic statecraft, both sides engage in shared silence and strategic ‘forgetting’ regarding key aspects of their wartime relationship.
For example, both sides avoid addressing the Red Army’s unlawful conduct in Northeast China, the sensitive dynamics of the Second KMT–CCP United Front, and Stalin’s role—via the Comintern—in brokering the tenuous yet consequential alliance between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Neither acknowledges Moscow’s continued support for Chiang’s government during and after the war, up to 1949, nor the CCP’s enduring distrust of Moscow. Discussing these topics would undermine efforts to construct a mnemonic friendship while offering little domestic benefit. Similarly, both remain silent on Soviet political interference in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria, as well as on the expulsion of Soviet advisers and military representatives from China’s northwest during the nadir of Sino-Soviet wartime relations. This shared amnesia—or active forgetting—of wartime Soviet expansionism and imperialism confirms earlier indications that both governments are subtly sanitizing their complex bilateral history, promoting narratives that emphasize friendship while avoiding contentious episodes with potentially disruptive implications for the present.Footnote 112
Overall, China more actively recalls episodes of Sino-Soviet cooperation, framed on a roughly equal basis, while Russia is less inclined to remember the partnership and does so asymmetrically. Both nevertheless remain attentive to each other’s sensitivities, contributing to mnemonic friendship primarily by preserving shared gaps and blind spots in their respective historical narratives. Perhaps most striking, given the strategic importance both sides attach to their bilateral friendship, is that the obvious ‘low-hanging fruit’ of personal wartime stories—soldiers fighting side by side, as claimed by Xi—remains largely untapped, even though the historical record provides ample material to reimagine, reproduce, and mobilize ‘friendly’ memories, and similar episodes are in fact widely commemorated in their relations with the United States.
Particularly notable in this context is the apparent lack of interest in recalling the contributions and experiences of prominent Soviet figures in wartime China, such as General Vasily Chuikov, or of the once-famous Soviet ‘Eagles’. In contrast, Chinese official accounts are replete with references to Sino-American wartime cooperation, the legendary Flying Tigers, and the celebrated American generals Stilwell and Chennault. These figures feature prominently in Xi Jinping’s ‘people-to-people’ diplomacy as symbols of ‘enduring China-U.S. friendship’—and even appear in Russian media coverage.Footnote 113 Yet Soviet heroes remain largely absent from Chinese state-sponsored historical narratives. Reflecting its westward preoccupation, Russian discourse similarly emphasizes the wartime spirit of Soviet–American cooperation, including the iconic Elbe meetings of April 1945, rather than celebrating Sino-Soviet wartime camaraderie.Footnote 114 This suggests that both Beijing and Moscow currently employ historical statecraft mainly to influence key audiences in the United States, their shared strategic adversary, rather than to foster deeper discursive or ideological alignment between themselves.
What factors explain this limited convergence of historical narratives? While it is impossible to establish these factors—or their relative weight—with certainty, at least three broad influences can be theorized based on the discourses examined and the available secondary literature. First, and arguably most important, are the differing motives of domestic legitimation and nation-building impulses. Contrary to Chatterje-Doody and Tolz’s findings in the context of commemorations of the 1917 Revolution in Russia, these motives are not separate in the case of Second World War memory but deeply entwined.Footnote 115 In official Chinese discourses, the unprecedented national victory against foreign aggression in 1945, ending a ‘century of national humiliation’, cannot be separated from the ‘indispensable’ role of the CCP in unifying and inspiring the Chinese people.Footnote 116 This forms the core of the future-oriented messaging under Xi: as long as the Chinese people remain united under CCP leadership, the nation’s fate will be secure.Footnote 117 Contemporary Russian mnemonics of the Great Patriotic War are even more personalized, with Putin’s family history, participation in Immortal Regiment marches, and engagement with historical archives reinforcing his image as dutiful guardian of Victory Day and custodian of national memory.Footnote 118 As a result, neither side can acknowledge a leading role for the other in the Second World War or in Japan’s defeat without undermining its own foundational narratives of national heroism, sacrifice, and victory. This dynamic is further shaped by diverging war experiences and shifting power balances between the two partners: during the Second World War the Soviet Union was clearly the stronger power, whereas today China occupies the role of ‘big brother’. Reluctance to recognize the other’s past or present preponderance thus obstructs the formation of an explicit, shared narrative of their wartime relationship.
Second, and deeply entwined with domestic legitimation, are ethnonationalist grassroots discourses in both countries concerning national suffering and trauma sustained during China’s ‘War of Resistance against Japan’ and Russia’s ‘Great Patriotic War’, as well as the long history of enmity and atrocities between China and Tsarist Russia, and later between China and the Soviet Union following the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. In China, lived experiences of wartime conflict and bottom-up memory, combined with state-promoted narratives circulating between 1960 and 1990, produced deep-seated distrust of its northern neighbour.Footnote 119 In Russia, long-standing perceptions of European cultural and religious superiority, combined with concerns over potential Chinese ambitions in Siberia and the Far East, shaped a world view in which elites and the broader public tend to prioritize the West while viewing the East with suspicion.Footnote 120 This enduring legacy of mutual distrust, grounded in historical rivalries and regional tensions, circumscribes and constrains state efforts to construct mnemonic friendship between the two countries, contributing to limited and superficial narrative convergence.
Third, from an international perspective, narrative divergences reflect fundamental differences in Beijing and Moscow’s visions for shaping the regional and global order. Beijing’s Second World War discourse is forward-looking and opportunistic. Relatively unencumbered by a long-standing tradition of state commemoration, it is strategically employed to recall relations with all wartime Allies and friends, including the 23, mostly Western, states that maintained diplomatic missions in Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital, Chongqing.Footnote 121 Rather than targeting any specific adversary (with some exceptions), this discourse is mobilized pragmatically to forestall new geopolitical or ideological fissures that could hinder China’s expanding global engagements.Footnote 122 By contrast, Moscow’s contemporary discourse, much like its historical wartime strategy, is geared towards safeguarding state borders, regional buffers, and transregional influence.Footnote 123 Its narrative of wartime cooperation—rooted in Soviet-era traditions—serves a reactive, backward-looking, and increasingly ideological purpose: invoking wartime glory to pursue restored regional leadership, particularly among former Soviet states in Central Asia.
What brings them together on the global stage, at least for the present moment, is shared opposition to what they perceive as American-led Western arrogance, aggression, and unilateralism. This helps explain why their narratives emphasize wartime cooperation with the United States rather than with each other: their principal objective is to convince Washington to recognize them as equal global actors and acknowledge their national interests—as it did during the Second World War—while also fostering goodwill in relevant populations to support such institutional realignment. Commemorating wartime cooperation is thus a means of achieving this shared aim, rather than the end goal of their memory alliance. This underscores that theirs is a mnemonic partnership of convenience, rather than a long-term ‘marriage’ or perpetual friendship in its own right, as official discourse suggests.
Conclusion: The limits of mnemonic friendship
This article has found that, despite a state‑promoted surge in joint commemorations of the Second World War and its lessons, convergence in official discourses has been largely limited to strategic and moral narratives—focused on what the war teaches for the present—and remains superficial and ambivalent regarding historical accounts of actual wartime relations. Where mnemonic convergence does occur, it primarily takes the form of strategic forgetting, sustaining deliberate blind spots and convenient gaps in the narrative, rather than producing explicit, substantive alignment between Chinese and Russian accounts. Particularly striking is that the obvious low‑cost, low‑hanging fruit of personal wartime stories—soldiers fighting side by side, as celebrated in official commemorations—remains largely untapped, even though the historical record offers abundant material to reconstruct and evoke such ‘friendly’ memories, and comparable episodes are routinely highlighted in Sino‑American commemorative practices. This limited, superficial convergence has been explained by a combination of factors: domestic legitimation imperatives, historical rivalry, lingering distrust at the grassroots level, and diverging global outlooks, all of which constrain the emergence of explicit, substantive alignment in Chinese and Russian remembering.
These findings have important implications for ongoing work and emerging research agendas at the intersection of memory studies and international relations. At one level, they suggest that narrative construction in authoritarian or ‘neo-authoritarian’ states is not always as flexible or malleable as often assumed.Footnote 124 As in other contexts, legitimacy concerns, ethnonationalist impulses, sensitivity to prevailing public sentiments, and strategic rivalry significantly constrain the discursive space available to state actors, particularly for narratives central to the regime’s foundational myth. For the same reason, contrasts between outputs aimed at domestic versus international audiences are not as stark as existing scholarship suggests.Footnote 125 Moreover, several examples exist of democratic states and institutions opportunistically revising their historical narratives,Footnote 126 further complicating any simple binary between authoritarian and democratic memory practices. In this light, ongoing work on illiberal memory politics that conceptualizes memory along a spectrum rather than as a binary seems more promising.Footnote 127
At another level, by identifying and assessing the structural impediments that hinder deeper convergence of historical narratives and discursive constructions of mutual friendship, this article also offers fresh insights into the inherent limits and contradictions of ‘memory alliances’ and the viability of mnemonic security, which have so far received relatively little attention.Footnote 128 For such alliances to emerge and function, superficial narrative alignment may not be sufficient. Efforts by states to strategically shape transnational memory flows in order to define ‘self’ and ‘other’ across time and space and secure the ‘self’ amid rising global tensions appear to require at least a minimal degree of bottom-up engagement and active participation by non-state actors, even in authoritarian contexts. In this sense, mnemonic security cannot be sustained through top-down narrative engineering alone, but depends on the broader social resonance and transnational circulation of historical narratives. And even when viable, such alliances remain inherently fragile, as the pursuit of historical alignment can provoke a security dilemma, trigger counter-alliances, and spark memory wars, potentially undermining the very stability and mutual understanding they are meant to secure.Footnote 129
Lastly, this article contributes to the study of China–Russia relations in novel ways. Complementing materialist analyses of this important relationship, it adds a distinct ideational dimension—one that may provide deeper insight into the nature, depth, and durability of strategic partnerships than conventional metrics of military or economic cooperation. The finding that only strategic silences are shared, rather than deeper substantive convergence, suggests that these mnemonic tactics are highly reversible if external conditions change. One can envision a scenario in which these silences are strategically broken. Should bilateral tensions arise, both sides could easily reactivate or re-remember the ‘forgotten’ aspects of their wartime relationship and broader ties: Beijing could condemn Soviet intrusions, aggression, and atrocities in Xinjiang or Manchuria, just as it has condemned Japanese actions in the Second World War, while Moscow could portray China as an ungrateful recipient of Soviet aid, unwilling to acknowledge the enormous sacrifices made to support China’s resistance and liberate Northeast China. Although such developments may not occur in the foreseeable future—and efforts to construct mnemonic friendship may intensify so long as structural conditions call for it—the limited degree of narrative convergence serves as a salient reminder of both the fragility of mutual trust and the long-term vulnerability of their bilateral relationship.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments and suggestions, which helped strengthen the analysis, sharpen the argument, and clarify the manuscript’s contribution.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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