by Lyle J. Goldstein
The many naysayers on the China-Russia partnership may want to take another look at this. For decades, it has been modish to suggest that this bilateral linkage is either negligible or highly problematic. So the logic goes: the two Asian giants put up a rather good show, but “the emperor has no clothes.” The trading relationship is not too stellar, transport links are limited, military cooperation seems mostly symbolic, and the cultures could not be further apart, seemingly. Then, there is that nasty history from the late 1960s that neither country wants to raise, but deep down still impacts the psychology of both powers, preventing them from developing genuine “fraternal affection.” There is a grain of truth in each of these common tropes, but it would be a major mistake to overlook the impressive growth trajectory that is apparent in the Russia-China bilateral relationship.
A catalogue of recent achievements and upcoming attractions appears in an early 2018 edition of Northeast Asia Forum [东北亚论坛] that focuses primarily on new and developing linkages between the Russian Far East (RFE) and Northeast China. Drawing to a large extent on Russian-language sources, the two Chinese authors from Jilin University in Changchun are evidently conducting research on an area of national importance, since the research was funded as a “social science key project [社会科学重大项目].” They are not romanticizing the RFE, since they duly note that the expansive region is plagued by “harsh winters, backward facilities, constrained economic development, difficult living conditions, and the problem of population outflow.” Likewise, they observe that China’s northeast has had some major challenges as well, including “the low level of marketization and a decaying industrial base.” According to this rendering, 2012 seems to have represented a kind of inflection point in both countries. For Russia, that was the year that President Vladimir Putin showcased Vladivostok to the world by hosting the APEC Forum, promoting the RFE as the most efficient gateway for trade between Europe and the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, China’s National Reform Commission was undertaking the program of “Vigorous Promotion of the Northeast [东北振兴]” within the 12th Five Year Plan, which meant taking steps to increase openness and reform in the formerly sleepy region.
Now, some of the investments in the two neighboring regions are coming on line. Taken together, these efforts to open up a number of crisscrossing trade corridors connecting Northeast China and the RFE have the potential to yield up a transformative impact for the whole region. To begin with, a couple of critically needed new bridges are nearing completion. The railroad bridge connecting the Chinese city of Tongjiang with the Russian city of Nizhneleninskoye (near Khabarovsk) links the rail networks of the two regions for the first time. The span is 2215 meters long. In addition to connecting the RFE more closely with China, there seems to be a hope that this effort will also assist in developing the old Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM) as a major compliment to the Trans-Siberian. According to this article, both Russian lines have been getting upgrades since 2013. Shipping along these lines, freight bound from Chinese cities like Changchun have been reaching Europe in as little as fourteen days. With some evident pride in the achievement of this trans-Eurasian rail-shipping route, the article mentions several “three character” shipping routes, including for example “沈满欧,” which stands for Shenyang-Manzhouli (border crossing)-Europe, and the claim is this line alone has moved ten thousand shipping containers in the last two years. Another high-profile connection that will be finished in the near term is a bridge that connects the Chinese city of Heihe and the Russian city of Blagochevensk. That 1,284 meter cable-stayed spanrepresents the first highway connection between the two countries and is expected to provide a major boost to bilateral trade.
Several additional significant trade routes connecting the two regions are at various stages of planning, moreover. For example , the “China-Mongolia-Russia International Transport Corridor [中蒙俄国际交通走廊]” that was demonstrated by the mid-2016 truck convoy runs from the Chinese port of Tianjin to Ulan Ude, a Russian city near Lake Baikal. The president of Mongolia in September 2017 endorsed a plan to eventually build five thousand kilometers of rail with the cooperation of both Russia and China. However, perhaps the most significant of the all plans discussed are the reference to two new corridors, dubbed “Coastal 1” [滨海-1/Приморье-1] and “Coastal 2” that will form direct links from different key parts of China’s northeast into the area of the RFE’s central trading metropolis of Vladivostok. Neither Jilin Province, nor Heilongjiang Province have outlets to the sea, so that they may use these two lines to develop their links to international trade routes. For Russia, it is assessed in this Chinese analysis, that these economic developments would “have great strategic significance [有重大战略意义].” The “Coastal 1” corridor stretches from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province, and travels southeast (along the historical Far Eastern Railroad route) through Mudanjiang and Suifenhe to the Russian city of Ussuriysk before entering Vladivostok from the north. This northern vector is to be complemented by a western vector “Coastal 2” that runs from Jilin Province’s capital of Changchun through Jilin and Hunchun to the border crossing at Kraskino and arrives to the RFE port of Zarubino, just fifty miles southwest of Vladivostok across Amur Bay. Chinese analysis shows that the two corridors will encompass the modernization of systems of “highways, railways, ports, airports, border crossing points, and communications,” along with simplified procedures and lower customs duties. As a recent visitor this area (Dec 2017), my impression is that these plans are quite realistic for the intermediate time-frame. Still another trade corridor discussed in this analysis and set to increase linkages between the RFE and Northeast China still further, of course, is the Northern Sea Route (NSR) as part of the “Polar Silk Road [冰上丝绸之路].” To be sure, it’s quite an interesting moment in world history when an LNG tanker traverses the Bering Strait for the first time ever, as one did in August 2017. The NSR topic in the context of China-Russia relations deserves its own column, to be sure, but here we may relate that the Chinese analysis explains that the new route requires everything from suitable wharves to reliable communications systems and everything in between. Indeed, the NSR will form another main “pillar” of RFE-Northeast China cooperation in the coming decades.
As the LNG tanker transiting the Bering Strait demonstrates, energy has and will remain a core point that brings together Russia and China. That tanker was carrying LNG from Russia’s new giant Yamal field in the Russian Arctic. However, Russian gas will flow into China by pipeline as well. The “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline is scheduled to be completed in 2019 and this gas will then flow into China’s three northeast provinces. Also, it will supply Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Tianjin, Jiangsu, and Shanghai as well. Chinese analysis shows that Russian and Chinese engineers started working on the cross-border gas pipeline section at Heihe-Blagochevensk back in June 2015. Powering China’s northeast with natural gas is preferable from an environmental point of view to dirty coal burning obviously. Moreover, Chinese capital has played a key role in building this energy-related infrastructure in the RFE, such as the giant, new Amur Gas Processing Facility , which began construction in 2017. Also, the two Asian giants have augmented oil exports by adding a second oil pipeline in early 2018 to the original pipeline that had been completed back in 2011. Not surprisingly, Russia has been China’s top supplier of oil for the last several years.
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