The two countries have quietly agreed to hold their most ambitious joint military exercises in modern times this fall. Interfax news agency reported late last month that the exercises would involve what it described as "Russian strategic aviation", a description that appeared to be a reference to the use of Russia's super-huge Antonov military transport planes, to rapidly deploy forces on Chinese territory.

"For the first time (over the entire history of Russian-Chinese military contacts), the two countries' exercise will begin on our territory, where plans for the maneuvers will be developed, while all tactical operations will take place on the territory of China," three-star Col. Gen. Alexander Belousov, Russia's first deputy defense minister, announced in Moscow Jan. 28.

The official China Daily Feb. 2 quoted Belousov as describing the maneuvers as the "first joint staff command exercises" between the two countries. It will involve "various forces to practice issues involving fighting our common enemy - international terrorism," Belousov said.

"The maneuvers would center on measures aimed at deploying Russian units in China, joint military operations and joint efforts against international terrorism, he added.

Last week a Russian military delegation was in Beijing negotiating with the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army to work out the details of the proposed exercises, currently scheduled to be held in August and September. The exercises will be on a vast scale and will also involve air force and navy units of both nations, including submarines.

The large scale of conventional forces involved suggests that international terrorism may not be the only hypothetical enemy the Russian and Chinese forces will practice deploying against.

While not a single statement about the exercises mentioned the United States, U.S. policy in recent months has increasingly alarmed both Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China and appears to be drawing them more closely together.

Putin and Hu have been equally alarmed by the spectacular success of President Viktor Yushchenko's "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine from November to January. As reported last week in these columns, Hu has authorized a revival of the study of Mao Zedong's Thought among the entire 68 million members of China's ruling Communist Party, an ideological campaign the likes of which has not been seen in the 29 years since Mao died.

Articles in the official Chinese press have explicitly explained the campaign as a response to the threat that China may be destabilized and ultimately splintered by a wave of democratic activism from Ukraine spreading across eastwards across Eurasia through the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Russia and China in fact have been military allies for almost all of the last decade, slowly but steadily increasing their ties in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, also known as the Shanghai Pact, which was expanded and formalized in its current shape, involving both giant nations and four of the five Central Asian republics between them, at a meeting in Shanghai on June 15, 2001.

At the time Chinese President Jiang Zemin insisted the SCO be referred to informally as "The Shanghai Pact," a deliberate echo of the Warsaw Pact organization that kept all the Soviet Union's Central European satellite nations in line from its foundation in 1955 to the collapse of communism in the region in the fall of 1989.

In the mid- 1990s, it was Russian Foreign Minister, and later Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, whom Putin has always held in high regard, who wanted to boost Sino-Russian ties into a close military alliance but at that time the Chinese, wary of endlessly angering the Clinton administration, flatly refused to do so.

The current upgrading of ties remains low key, at least in public, and is certainly cautious. But it is also relentless. It comes in the context of increasing fears about a wave of democratic activism radiating outwards from Ukraine that may threaten the structural integrity of both China and Russia.

And it also follows the highly activist language that President George W. Bush used in his second inaugural address and latest State of the Union message, vowing to use American power to spread democratic values and governments around the world.

Significantly, the Sino-Russian military exercises now planned for August and September do not appe ar to involve the deployment of any Chinese troops into Russian territory to help Russia against any international terrorist threat, even though Russia has suffered far more grievously than China form such attacks in recent years.

Instead, they envisage Russian forces being deployed in China to help protect it as an ally. The only conceivable military scenario that could possibly require such a deployment would be if China felt itself threatened by the United States in some future clash over Taiwan.

The coming fall exercises are certainly not conceived as any kind of aggressive scenario against the United States, or against any nations bordering China or Russia either for that matter. But they appear to be a highly significant straw in a wind that is driving Beijing and Moscow ever more closely together, and both nations ever more apart from the United States.

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