| Summary/Abstract |
AS THE WORLD was moving toward World War II, Soviet leaders and the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) were paying as much attention to China as to the situation in Europe. By the early 1930s, Moscow no longer had diplomatic relations with China (they had been severed by the Chiang Kai-shek government in 1927, when the Kuomintang dissolved the [first] united front with the Communist Party of China). In 1929, in the wake of armed conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), the Soviet Union closed its consulates in Manchuria (they reopened in 1930 after the Khabarovsk Protocol was signed that ended the conflict). Soviet consulates continued functioning in Xinjiang, which at that time was not controlled by the central Chinese government. A Soviet Embassy and five consulates functioned in the Mongolian People's Republic, which Moscow treated as an independent state while formally recognizing Chinese sovereignty over it.
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