Cary Huang’s column (“Watch out free world, the China-Russia threat just went over your head”, August 11) might have benefited had the title mentioned a bald head, because the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges likened the Falklands War between his country and the United Kingdom in 1982 to two bald men fighting over a comb.

So when Russian and Chinese military planes fly by a group of islands claimed by South Korea and Japan, does that equate to four bald men arguing over a comb? Perhaps the sole aim of the joint aircraft exercise was triggering a Western media flurry over nothing. Unsurprisingly, they reported that South Korea said its fighters fired more than 300 warning shots at one of the Russian planes, although I have seen no video evidence of this.

Regardless, the stars are really aligning now for Sino-Russian relations as they had during World War II. Then, Soviet Russia offered refuge to foreign Communist leaders’ children. One of Chairman Mao Zedong’s sons, who was studying in Moscow during the war, even fought in the Red Army during the war. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Russian soldiers liberated China from the Japanese occupiers.