Constraining Unipolarity } 543
territory to be used by a third country to infringe on the sovereignty and
security interests of the other party.”^35 This was in effect a nonaggression
treaty, meaning that neither country would join with the United States, or
Moscow’s old anti-China partners Vietnam or India, in doing anything that
the other signatory deemed injurious to its security interests. The joint com-
muniqué also contained an “antihegemony clause,” stipulating the common
opposition of the two signatories to “hegemonism and power politics in any
form.” Inclusion of an antihegemony clause in the 1992 communiqué effec-
tively nullified the antihegemony clauses in Sino-US communiqués and the
1978 Sino-Japan agreement. The antihegemony provisions in those earlier
agreements had been understood to reflect convergent interests vis-à-vis the
Soviet Union. By including an antihegemony clause in the 1992 joint com-
muniqué, Beijing universalized antihegemony, thereby draining it of its anti-
Soviet essence. It pointed, in fact, toward a PRC-Russian coalition against
US unipolar domination, implicitly targeting such US moves as linkage of
China’s MFN to human rights status, acceptance of the East European states
into NATO, ballistic missile defense, and so on.
Central Asia emerged during 1993 and 1994 as an important area of
Russo-Chinese cooperation. Beijing and Moscow were both astounded by
the Islamic renaissance that blossomed across post-Soviet Central Asia.
With the lifting of Soviet repression of Islamic activity in the former Soviet
Central Asian republics, it became apparent that such activity had sur-
vived underground during seventy years of militant atheist repression.
Islamic activity now burst into the open and flourished, filling a void left
by the evaporation of the communist faith. Some of this new Islamic activ-
ism tended toward the extreme jihadism that had grown strong during the
Afghan war of resistance. Once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, some of
the extremists, believing it was they who had defeated the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, turned their attention to post-Soviet Central Asia in an effort
to replicate their Afghan victory over “infidel” regimes in Central Asia.”^36
Islamic missionaries from various Islamic countries—Iran, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, and Turkey—also became active in trying to shape the Central Asia
Islamic renaissance, each trying to tie that renaissance to their own coun-
try’s particular brand of Islam. In the case of Turkey (a NATO member),
the old ideology of pan-Turkism played a role. Neither Beijing nor Moscow
had an interest in allowing these third powers, or the United States, to muck
around in their Central Asian backyard.
Beijing and Moscow soon concluded that they had a common interest in
stabilizing the secular ex-CPSU-apparatchik states that ruled the post-Soviet
Central Asian countries. These states had had independence suddenly thrust
on them by what was in effect Russian succession from the USSR, and were
vulnerable to Islamic extremism and mafia-like crime, in addition to eco-
nomic retrogression and simple chaos. With Iranian, Pakistani, or Saudi