Last week, Chinese President Hu Jintao (???) and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a "China-Russia Joint Statement on the 21st Century World Order." With this, China is returning to a strategy of depending on a single ally. But the deeper significance of this statement is that it contributes to China's emerging strategy of unilateral threats, a bilateral defense and multilateral solutions to problems it sees in the international situation.
The single-ally strategy was chosen by Mao Zedong (???) after the Korean war, when China joined hands with the Soviet Union to counter the US threat by making all of China's defenses and development dependent on the Soviet Union. After the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, Mao drew a line between China and the Soviet Union. In the late 1960s and 1970s China turned toward a "one line of defense" and a "one great defense area" strategy.
Mao felt that to stop Soviet hegemony from spreading across the globe, China should help build a global "front line" alliance with Japan, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the US, and also unite the surrounding countries in one "defense area."
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/07/14/2003263477