The Ambassador of Democracy: Gorbachev’s New Thinking and the Sino-Soviet Summit of 1989

This study is an attempt to revisit the Sino-Soviet Summit of 1989 with an emphasis on relevant diplomatic activities, leadership views and intelligence assessments. More specifically, it focuses on the challenges and twists in the Sino-Soviet diplomatic course to this achievement. In doing so, the study puts the 1989 summit in the context of regional rivalries and Cold War multilateralism and discusses with examples how Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign policy doctrine and his visit to China affected these dynamics. The study argues that this climactic event and its aftermath played a significant role in shaping Soviet–Chinese and then Russian–Chinese relations and can be considered the most significant achievement in Gorbachev’s Asian policy in the late 1980s. In this regard, the article concludes that the diplomatic course to the 1989 summit can display the ‘de-ideologisation of interstate relations’ to the benefit of more tangible bilateral issues such as peacebuilding, border security and economy. It also concludes that some aspects of this peacemaking were problematic to the USA and the Asian allies of China and the Soviet Union.