Francisco Lobo
This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.
In 2011, Stephen Spielberg produced another sci-fi narrative with a prehistoric flavor – Terra Nova, a tv production that despite its promise got canceled after only one season. It follows the exploits of a time-traveling family forced to escape an overpopulated and polluted planet Earth in 2149, making their way to a colony established 85 million years in the past. Their world is not only in the throes of combating climate disaster and demographic collapse; as expected, war is also part of this dystopian tale. More importantly, the leader of the colony, Commander Taylor, is a veteran of the 2138 Somalia War where he fought against such fictional foes as the ‘Axis’ and the ‘Russo- Chinese’. For a show that fell under most people’s radars, Terra Nova’s script does seem to capture some of the main struggles of our time – not least climate change, overpopulation, war, and great power competition. This ‘Russo-Chinese’ plotline, in particular, might have been made in a Hollywood basement, but it may yet become a reality in our present.
Russian-Chinese official relations date all the way back to the seventeenth century, when the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed in 1689 (Becker Lorca 2015, 114). It was an agreement between two imperial powers, those of Tsarist Russia and Qing Dynasty China (Stent 2023, 255). Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century and the picture does not change much. ‘The Soviet Union of today is the China of tomorrow’. This was the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official slogan for 1953, the same year Xi Jinping was born (Torigian 2024, para. 4). It was an aspirational slogan, adopted at a time when Chinese admiration for the Soviet model was at an all-time high.
Admittedly, following down the path chartered by the USSR meant not only boosting productivity and growth; it also entailed administering violence, lots of violence at home and abroad, by cracking down on domestic dissent and seeking territorial expansion of its sphere of influence, for the Soviet Union was a land empire in everything but name (Stent 2023, 31). Likewise, the People’s Republic of China aimed to regain its lost imperial grandeur following in the footsteps of its Russian ‘elder brothers’ (Ibid, 262), not only by furthering the communist ideology common to both, but also by displaying an unwavering commitment to the ‘One China’ policy (Maçães 2019, 141) whereby the territorial integrity of this modern-day land empire can only be accomplished if it engulfs Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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