Allies apart: China, Russia, and the limits of mnemonic friendship

Addressing a gap in memory studies and international relations, this article examines the construction and limits of Sino-Russian mnemonic friendship through historical narratives of the Second World War. Drawing on extensive multilingual datasets of Chinese and Russian state-sponsored media output, supplemented by additional primary sources and fieldwork in China, it identifies a complex pattern of selective remembering and strategic forgetting across four key wartime themes: the wartime Kuomintang (KMT)–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) united front, early Soviet aid, bilateral tensions in Xinjiang, and the Soviet offensive in Manchuria. While Beijing and Moscow’s official discourses converge on the moral lessons of the war, alignment on historical events remains largely confined to strategic silences. There is little substantive narrative convergence, and personal wartime stories and Sino-Soviet cooperation remain largely untapped. This limited convergence is explained by domestic legitimation imperatives, ethnonationalist impulses, enduring mutual distrust, and divergent visions for regional and global order. The article argues that mnemonic alliances are inherently fragile, dependent on bottom-up engagement and broader social resonance, even in authoritarian contexts. Drawing attention to the mnemonic dimension of China–Russia relations illuminates the fragility of mutual trust and the long-term vulnerability of this relationship, as narrative silences can be easily undone.