Ray Parkin and effectively implemented a people's war, but the KMT became increasingly isolated and only belatedly attempted to stem corruption and to introduce popular reforms. On October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Zedong, and by May 1950, the civil war was brought to an end by the Battle of Kuningtou, which saw the KMT expelled from Mainland China but remaining in control of Taiwan. With the creation of the People's Republic of China, the supreme political authority in the two countries became centered in two communist parties, which both espoused revolutionary Marxist	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080882	-Leninist ideology: the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1951, Chinese Muslim General Bai Chongxi made a speech in Taiwan to the entire Muslim world that called for a war against the Soviets and the avoiding of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was accused of being blind to Soviet imperialism. From camaraderie to the Sino–Soviet Split. After the PRC was proclaimed, the Soviet Union became its closest ally for several years. Soviet design, equipment, and skilled labour were sent out to help the Industrialization and the modernization of the PRC. In 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080883	the 1960s, relations became deeply strained by the Sino–Soviet Split. In military terms, there was the low-level Sino–Soviet border conflict. The split was ideological and forced communist parties around the world to take sides. Many of them split, and the pro-Soviet communists were battling the pro-Chinese communists for local control of global communis. The split quickly made a dead letter of the 1950 alliance between Moscow and Beijing, destroyed the socialist camp's unity, and affected the world balance of power. Internally, it encouraged Mao to plunge China into the Cultural Revolution to expunge traces 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080884	of Soviet ways of thinking. The quarrel began in 1958, after several years of close relations. Mao was always loyal to Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev felt insulted. However, when the Warsaw Pact crushed the dissident movements in Eastern Europe in 1956, Beijing was pleased that Moscow had apparently realized the dangers of de-Stalinization and would no longer tolerate independence or encourage revisionism. Beijing was also pleased that the success of the Soviet Union in the space race (the original Sputniks) demonstrated that the international communist movement had caught up in high technology with the West. Mao argued that as 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080885	far as all-out nuclear war was concerned, the human race would not be destroyed, but a brave new communist world would arise from the ashes of imperialism. That attitude troubled Moscow, which had a more realistic view of the utter disasters that would accompany a nuclear war. Three major issues suddenly became critical in dividing the two nations: Taiwan, India, and China's Great Leap Forward. Although Moscow supported Beijing's position of Taiwan entirely belonging to China, it demanded to be forewarned of any invasion or serious threat that would bring an American intervention. Beijing refused, and the 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080886	Chinese bombardment of the island of Quemoy in August 1958 escalated the tensions. Moscow was cultivating India, both as a major purchaser of munitions and as a strategically-critical ally. However China escalated its threats to the northern fringes of India, especially from Tibet, and was building a militarily significant road system that would reach disputed areas along the border. Moscow clearly favored India, and Beijing felt betrayed as a result. By far, the major ideological issue was the Great Leap Forward, which represented the Chinese rejection of the Soviet form of economic development. The Soviets were deeply resentful, especially 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080887	since they had spent heavily to supply China with cutting-edge technology, even including some nuclear tech. The Soviets withdrew their vital technicians and economic and military aid. Khrushchev was increasingly crude and intemperate in ridiculing China and Mao to both communist and noncommunist audiences. China responded through its official propaganda network of rejecting Moscow's claim to Lenin's heritage. Beijing insisted that it was the true inheritor of the great Leninist tradition. At one major meeting of communist parties, Khrushchev personally attacked Mao as an ultraleftist and a left revisionist and compared him to Stalin for dangerous egotism	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080888	. The conflict was now out of control and was increasingly fought out in 81 communist parties around the world. The final split came in July 1963, after 50,000 refugees escaped from Sinkiang, in Western China, to Soviet territory to escape persecution. China ridiculed the Soviet incompetence in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as adventurism and capitulationism that ended up in defeat. Moscow was increasingly prioritizing friendly relationships and test ban treaties with the United States and the United Kingdom. Increasingly, China began to consider the Soviet Union, which it viewed as social imperialist, as the greatest threat it faced	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080889	, more so than even the leading capitalist power, the United States. In turn, overtures were made between the PRC and the US, such as in the Ping Pong Diplomacy and the 1972 Nixon visit to China. From 1965 to 1988, the Sino–Soviet border, including the Tumen River area, became highly militarized and fortified. That included a large concentration of tactical nuclear-armed missile sites on both sides of the zone. Until 1991, foreigners, consulates and nonresidents had not been permitted in Vladivostok since 1948 or in Yanbian or the border areas of Heilongjiang Province since 1965. Political, social, and 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080890	economic conditions deteriorated further, as the Cultural Revolution disrupted Chinese life and institutions from 1966 to 1972. Periods of extreme tension in 1968 to 1970 along the eastern Sino–Soviet border (with Primorsky) resulted in border skirmishes on the Ussuri River in 1969 and again from 1979 to 1980, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and China retaliated by launching a border war with Vietnam. The skirmishes led to the intensification of border fortifications and the mobilization of the civilian populations on both sides. Post-Mao era and stabilizing relations. In September 1976, Mao died. A month later, the Gang of Four 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080891	were overthrown by his successor, Chairman Hua Guofeng, with the support of Deng Xiaoping, who was to soon implement pro-market economic reform. With the PRC no longer espousing the anti-revisionist notion of the antagonistic contradiction between classes, relations between the two countries became gradually normalized. In 1979, however, the PRC launched the Sino–Vietnamese War. The invasion of Vietnam, a Soviet ally, was in response to Vietnam's invasion and subsequent occupation of Cambodia, which overthrew the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge from power. Even though Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev went on to criticize the post-Maoist CCP for 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080892	allowing PRC millionaires to have lost the socialist path, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Russia itself turned to privatization. Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unlike in the PRC, a much more extreme, highly -unregulated form of privatization occurred during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, which resulted in asset grabs by Russians in a highly unregulated fashion and in deep socio-economic inequalities in Russia and the collapse of the economy as well as various Russian institutions. Thus, after the Cold War, the PRC emerged in a far more favourable and 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080893	stable financial position. The PRC is currently seeing the fastest rate of economic growth of any large economy, several percentage points higher than Russia, which has been growing at an annualized rate of some 5–6%. The economy of Russia in the early 2000s was largely driven by demand for export of natural resources to Europe and Asia, with a gradual move up the value-added chain as Russian aluminum and steel mills upgrade to international standards. China is the growth market, and with the ESPO pipeline, Russia will continue to diversify energy exports away from Europe and towards Asia. China 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080894	and the Russian Federation. China and Russia have generally had good relations since 1991. History of Sino-Russian relations Prior to the 17th century China and Russia were on opposite ends of Siberia, which was populated by independent nomads. By about 1640 Russian settlers had traversed most of Siberia and founded settlements in the Amur River basin. From 1652 to 1689, China's armies drove the Russian settlers out, but after 1689, China and Russia made peace and established trade agreements. By the mid-19th century, China's economy and military lagged far behind the colonial powers. It signed unequal treaties 	History of Sino-Russian relations
24080895	Ray Parkin Ray Parkin Raymond Edward Parkin (6 November 191019 June 2005) was an Australian naval seaman, writer, draftsman, artist and historian. He is noted for his memoirs of World War II (including his time as a prisoner-of-war), and for a major work on James Cook's Endeavour" voyage. Early life. Parkin was born in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood on 6 November 1910, the youngest of three children. An early interest in ships saw him join the sea scouts. He also became interested in art and drawing (especially the drawing of ships), and after leaving school at age 14 , he took a job at an engraving firm. In 1928, aged 18, he joined the Royal Australian Navy. He rose through the ranks of the navy to become a chief petty officer and, in 1939, he was drafted onto the newly commissioned light cruiser HMAS "Perth". Its first peace-time mission was a voyage to New York to represent Australia at the World's Fair, after which the vessel saw service in World War II. World War II. Parkin began writing during his war service. He started a novel, which was lost when "Perth" was sunk by Japanese action in  the Sunda Strait in the early hours of 1 March 1942. After about 11 hours in the water, Parkin and nine other survivors washed up on a small island. They found a steel lifeboat and rigged a sail and tried to get back to Australia. Over 16 days, covering 500 miles, they managed to slip past enemy shipping and endured tropical storms before reaching occupied Tjilatjap where they were greeted by Dutch Officers, who handed them over to Japanese troops. In June 1942, Parkin was imprisoned in Bandoeng camp. There he met Dutch soldier and author Laurens van der Post  and they became friends. Among other prisoners with an interest in art was Dutch artist Keis von Willigen, and together they would source paper from wherever they could. Van der Post managed to get Parkin a set of watercolour paints from a Chinese contact and with these he would create portraits of fellow prisoners. In November 1942, Parkin was among the "Dunlop 1,000", a group of prisoners under the authority of Australian army surgeon Lieutenant Colonel "Weary" Dunlop who were sent to work on the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway. Despite the hardship, Parkin continued to draw, focusing on the beauty  that could be found: plants, butterflies, nature generally. Others, like English-born artist Jack Chalker, recorded the horrors of the camps. In March 1944, Parkin was among a group of prisoners selected to be shipped to Japan. He couldn't keep his collection of drawings and diary notes concealed on that trip, so Dunlop offered to look after them for him. Dunlop had a false bottom in his operating table, where he could hide things like Chalker's medical drawings and Parkin's collection of artworks & papers. Parkin ended up working in an underground coal mine near the Japanese village  of Ohama and remained there until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Post war experience. Back in Melbourne and reunited with his wife and children, he went to work as a tally clerk on the wharves. Weary Dunlop had kept his drawings, and Parkin made them into a little volume dedicated to Dunlop. Some of the sketches were printed in Dunlop's published diaries about the camps. Parkin too wrote about his experiences as a prisoner-of-war. His memoirs he wrote in novel form; the character of John (or Jack) is Parkin in all but name. Sir Laurens van  der Post recommended them to the Hogarth Press in London, and these were published as "Out of the Smoke" (1960) "Into the Smother" (1963), and "The Sword and the Blossom" (1968). The books were praised for the simple and direct quality of the writing. He continued to work on the Melbourne waterfront till retirement in 1975. Section::::"H. M. Bark Endeavour". In 1967, Parkin started researching James Cook's voyage to Australia aboard HM Bark "Endeavour". He was first inspired by an inaccurate picture of the ship when searching for a representation on which to base a Christmas card. Over the  years he discovered and dispelled several misconceptions built up about Cook, his crew, and the ship, including rehabilitating the reputation of Sydney Parkinson's drawings of the ship. Parkinson was a draftsman on the voyage and his sketches are the only surviving contemporaneous drawings of the ship, but the received wisdom among historians was that Parkinson had taken artistic license, since the drawings seemed inexact and differed from Admiralty plans. Parkin's detailed knowledge of the ship and seafaring showed that what had been thought just squiggles were actual equipment on the ship, and where the sketches and the plans  differed it was almost certainly from variations during building (it being fairly common at the time for shipwrights to have some freedom in how plans were executed). Some of Parkins research was done in London. Parkin's neighbour, history professor Max Crawford, encouraged him to continue the research and publish the results. The research took 13 years, and it then took a further 17 years to find a publisher. In the end John Clarke (best known as a satirist) showed it to publisher Mark Kelly, who in turn recommended it to the speciality academic imprint The Miegunyah Press at the  Melbourne University Press. The result was "H. M. Bark Endeavour" published in two volumes in 1997. It won the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction and the NSW Book of the Year in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for 1999. Parkin thought himself a little out of place at the awards ceremony, as he put it, "It was funny, though, this doddering old bloke who used to work on the wharves–what did I have in common with the intellectual literary crowd?". Parkin died in Melbourne on 19 June 2005. He was survived by his three children , six grand-children and eight great-grandchildren. In 2005, Parkin's three wartime memoirs were republished in a single paperback volume by Melbourne University Publishing. The volume was reviewed by critic Max Harris who described it as, “probably the finest POW writing in English.” A biography of Parkin, "Ray Parkin's Odyssey", by Pattie Wright, was published in 2012. Ray Parkin Raymond Edward Parkin (6 November 191019 June 2005) was an Australian naval seaman, writer, draftsman, artist and historian. He is noted for his memoirs of World War II (including his time as a prisoner-of-war), and for a