When Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met for the fifth time last year—at the October APEC summit in Bali, Indonesia—the Chinese leader spoke about “the uniqueness of China-Russia relations.” Indeed, the ties between the two countries, as both Beijing and Moscow now perceive them, are truly one-of-a-kind. They view themselves in the same terms and see their interests as converging. Closer than they have been at any time since the early 1950s, China and Russia have embarked on a grand project—challenging the American-led international system.
As many have feared, these two large states, one bent on changing the world and the other perhaps simply obstructionist, are a formidable pair and can alter the international system, if not exactly as they please, then at least in ways that can shake its foundations. Yet despite appearances, China and Russia are weak states, and today’s narrative of resurgence could soon be replaced by the story line of decline. It is in decline, in fact, that they may find the alliance that has long eluded them.
A decade ago, when Beijing and Moscow started flexing their muscles, the “strategic partnership” both nations often talked about was mostly a mirage. True, they had signed a comprehensive “friendship and cooperation” treaty in 2001, yet their bond was weak. Then, both China and Russia saw their relations with the West—principally the United States—as more important than their ties with each other. In both capitals, there were thinkers who perceived the other to be the “ultimate strategic threat in the long-term,” as a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute termed it.
New members on the Artic Council like China, India, and other Asian countries underscore the rush to secure energy and mineral resources and shorter trade routes.
Moscow had settled its border with China not so much to improve relations with Beijing as to allow it to concentrate on historic foreign policy objectives along its western and southern frontiers. And its first moves in this regard were largely successful. The “energy superpower,” as it now identified itself, was able to use abundant oil and gas reserves to reassert dominion over the “near abroad” and regain influence in Western Europe.
On his way to establishing the Russian Federation as a major power, Putin made it clear there was little room for the Chinese at the heart of the global order as he conceived it. As late as 2011, he proposed the “Eurasian Union,” a grouping of nations once comprising the Soviet Union. He may have spoken of it as only “one of the poles of the modern world,” but in reality he saw it as closer to the center of the international system, “serving as an efficient link between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.” As Putin imagined it, China would in effect merely be one of the parts of this system at one end of the world.
High prices for Russia’s hydrocarbons allowed its willful leader to pursue his great ambitions, and the resulting geopolitical competition with China essentially ensured that relations with Beijing remained troubled. Not only did the two nations intensify their rivalry in Central Asia and the Middle East, they faced off on Russian territory, in the country’s Far East, which became the most fundamental irritant in Sino-Russian relations.
This continent-sized area, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean, was then home to fewer than seven million Russian citizens, and it was depopulating faster than other parts of the shrinking nation. At the end of last decade, demographers had projected that by 2015 the number of Russians would fall to perhaps as few as four and a half million.
The story was different on the Chinese side of the boundary. East of Mongolia and abutting Russia are three Chinese provinces that contain almost a hundred million residents. Ambitious and restless Chinese left overcrowded villages and headed to the wide-open Russian plains. The migrants, legal and not, benefited their new homeland, driving the economy there by trading goods, farming the soil, marrying Russians, and working hard.
Xenophobic Russians, who often spoke of the “yellow peril,” always believed Beijing was using the migrants to promote a “Sinification” that would ultimately result in the annexation of the Russian Far East. Moscow’s concerns were stoked by irredentist Chinese officials, who from time to time grumbled about the “lost territory” in reference to portions of Russia’s Far East, including Vladivostok, once ruled by the Manchus, whom the Chinese of today consider to be their own kin. The tottering Manchu Qing dynasty ceded the area to czarist Russia in two “unequal treaties”—as the Chinese define the agreements—in 1858 and 1860.
In a series of deals, the last signed in July 2008, the two sides finally delineated their border, the fifth-longest in the world at almost two thousand seven hundred miles. Yet both the Russians and the Chinese know that no line separating rivals is ever really final.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. He blogs weekly for World Affairs on China and Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment