MovieChat Forums > Phantom (2013) Discussion > China and Russia enemies

China and Russia enemies

posted 10 years ago by pundit-1
4 replies | jump to latest

At the beginning of this film it was mentioned that the Soviets were going to sell one of their old subs to the Chinese along with some other outdated military hardware.
However by 1968 when this story takes place China and Russia are no longer on friendly terms.
Due to political differences the 2 communist nations were no longer cooperating on anything.
And the Soviets were certainly not supporting them militarily either by this time.
So why would they be giving them any military hardware? Even if it was old obsolete stuff
they no longer needed.
This doesn't quite sound right to me.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Voltaire

[–] LordRaymond 10 years ago

It does seem that way but they probably have their reasons. Most likely to recoup money from old military things to be used on newer military equipment.

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

from what I remember reading about the Sino-Soviet split it too a while to develop and the strong relationship took years to unravel.

Like Egypt when it split from the USSR China was stuck with a range of Soviet supplied equipment which they could not just stop using and replace with equipment from somewhere else or develop their own.

I don't know if it was at all realistic to suggest that the USSR would sell hardware to China as late as 1968,but then the Soviet navy was surely getting bigger not smaller at that period,in the film someone says the navy is shrinking.

[–] 9 years ago

[deleted]

[–] jeffyoung1 8 years ago

True, you know your international history well. After 1960, Sino-Soviet relations went into a downward spiral.
Things got so bad that in 1969 shooting broke out between Soviet and Chinese troops on the Sino-Soviet frontier, namely around the Ussuri and Amur river valleys.
But in 1968, I can still accept the possibility that despite cold relations, the USSR and Red China were not at the boiling point as it reached in 1969, enough for the Russians to accept the prospect of selling a totally outdated diesel sub to the Red Chinese, willing to get their hands on any effective, working foreign technology.
The astonishing classified history is that the Russians seriously contemplated a first strike on Red China and purportedly contacted US President Nixon - secretly - to invite the USA in on the preemptive attack on Red China. History says that Nixon declined and in fact dissuaded the Soviets by hinting that the US would give support to Red China. By this time in history the US was delighted that the two former communist friends were now enemies, basically checkmating each other. The US had nothing to gain now by helping to destroy Red China and possibly ending up with an even more powerful Russia, as what happened in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, creating the superpower USSR dominating all of Eastern Europe.