Natural Enemies

I really liked Isaac Stone Fish’s Washington Post op-ed, underscoring as it does a point I have made from time to time. Russia and China are not as cozy as many Americans assume:

To begin with, Moscow has more to fear from Beijing than Washington. Like the Philippines, India and Bhutan, Russia is vulnerable to Chinese territorial encroachment. China has supplanted Russia as the most influential nation in Central Asia — Moscow’s traditional geopolitical backyard — and has uncomfortably large influence over Russia’s economy. Despite the countless irritants in the U.S.-Russia relationship, all this means that there is now space to enlist Moscow as a silent but meaningful partner in the global campaign to curb the pernicious aspects of the Chinese Communist Party’s international influence.

The biggest reason for Moscow’s fear is territorial. While there is no good polling in both countries on sensitive issues such as territorial integrity, some Russians fear the Chinese want to invade Siberia, while some Chinese feel that parts of eastern Russia actually belong to China. In 1858 and 1860, early in what the Chinese Communist Party calls the “century of humiliation,” the Chinese and the Russians signed treaties that ceded huge swaths of lands around Lake Baikal to the Russians. Some Chinese want that land back. “Hong Kong and Macau have returned,” to the motherland, the history blogger Yuan Zaiyu lamented in March 2020. “Why not Vladivostok?”

Russians in the country’s sparsely populated Far East fear and resent Chinese immigration and influence. The governor of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which borders the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, has improbably claimed that 80 percent of the land in his region is now “controlled by Chinese.” The Chinese presence in Siberia, said Svetlana Pavlova, the chief editor of a Siberian news website, is like “a red rag to a bull.” (As the pandemic spread in early 2020, Russia became the first country to shut its land border with China.)

Perceptions can create reality. Chinese frustrations with Russia — most Chinese alive today came of age in an era of frosty relations between the two nations, from the Sino-Soviet split in the mid-1950s to the 2001 Sino-Russian strategic and economic treaty — could easily push China’s foreign policy to be more aggressive toward its northern neighbor. Russian analysts watched the June 2020 border clash between India and China that killed at least 20 Indian soldiers closely — and not just because Russia is India’s most important weapons supplier.

As fate would have it there is a country with which Russia has a considerable amount in common and who is not a regional competitor as China is: the United States. Short version of what happened: we blew it.

Also don’t imagine that the Russians are naive about the prospectively tense situation between Russia and China. They’re fully aware of it and, like Americans, they tend to exaggerate threats. So, when President Putin calls President Xi his “best friend”, I generally think of this.