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POD must be no earlier than January 1990.

In OTL, Moscow-Beijing relations have been on the upswing since
Gorbachev's visit in May 1989. Russia and China do joint military
exercises and are members of the Shanghai Pact, a regional security
organization with Central Asian states. I would still find it hard to
believe they would actually go to war on each other's behalf, so that
aspect of the 1950s relationship isn't back, but in many respects,
the relations have never been better.

The nearly thirty years of harshness from the 60s through the 80s, was perceived as a permanent
fixture of the international scene at the time & the natural state of Russo-Chinese
relations, but has totally receded into the background since 1990.

Meanwhile, more often than not the Chinese and Russians find common interests on the international stage and both have harsher rhetoric towards the United States and have more geopolitical antagonism towards the United States than towards each other. So how could we change this to make Sino-Russian mutual relations with each other at least as bad as those of each with the USA (which was really the prevailing situation in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, China and the USA generally got on *better* with each other than each did with the USSR)

So, the challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to plausibly get
crappy Chinese-Russian relations by 2005. They can be anything from
Greece-Turkey crappy, all the way to war crappy.

More points the closer you get to war though.
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