CHAPTER FIVE
THE FAR EAST FLASH POINT
In July 2000, newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin made an official trek out to the country’s distant Far East. He went there to deliver a stark warning. “If you do not take practical steps to advance the Far East soon,” Putin told an audience in Blagoveshchensk, a wind-swept city of two hundred thousand souls situated on the banks of the Amur River, opposite China, “after a few decades the Russian population [here] will be speaking Japanese, Chinese and Korean.” 1
The new president was encouraging his countrymen to come to terms with a sobering reality: in the country’s resource-rich east, which serves as its economic engine and the repository of its prodigious energy wealth, the Russian state is receding. The People’s Republic of China, meanwhile, is advancing, both economically and demographically.
At the time Putin issued his candid assessment, the number of Russians living in Siberia and the Far East (a territory of more than four million square miles) 2stood at twenty-eight million—merely 19 percent of the country’s overall population. 3But the latest Russian census, carried out in 2010, pegs the number of citizens in Siberia and the Russian Far East at just 25.4 million—or fewer than six inhabitants per square mile. 4By contrast, the population density in China’s Heilongjiang province, opposite the Russian regions of Amur, Khabarovsk, Primorskii Krai, and the Jewish Autonomous Region, is approximately thirty-five times that: between 210 and 220 citizens per square mile. 5
And the disparity is growing. The negative population trends evident elsewhere in Russia—high mortality, low birth rates, and massive emigration—are also affecting its Far East. Although the area accounts for more than a third of Russia’s territory, the Far East remains an economic and political backwater—one that until very recently garnered little attention from the Kremlin. 6
But if Moscow has neglected the Far East until now, the same cannot be said of Beijing. China’s political, economic, and demographic footprint in Russia’s east is large and expanding.
UNEASY NEIGHBORS
There is historical precedent for China’s interest, and for Russia’s concerns. In fact, the two countries have contested much of the area for centuries. Its status as a Russian holding is relatively new—and increasingly fragile.
Until the seventeenth century, the territory of today’s Far East remained largely unpopulated, claimed at times by the Russian Empire and at others by warring Chinese clans. In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk—signed to end fighting between the Qing Dynasty and Russian settlers in the Amur Valley—granted control of much of the area to China. But successive centuries saw Russia begin to populate the region in earnest, solidifying its claims through a series of treaties (specifically the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking two years later). China never fully accepted Russian claims to the Far East, but the barrenness of the territory and its distance from the seat of Chinese power in Peking conspired to keep the conflict muted. The two countries would continue to contest the territory, however, even engaging in an isolated military skirmish along the Amur River in 1969. 7
It was not until the 1980s, when Soviet Russia and Red China began a process of political reconciliation, that real progress began to be made on resolving the status of the Far East. By the late 1990s, nearly all of the outstanding territorial disputes between the two countries had been resolved (largely in Moscow’s favor). The remainder was formally ended in 2001, when Moscow and Beijing inked the Treaty on Friendship and Good Neighborliness.
That twenty-five-point agreement, signed with great fanfare in Moscow in July 2001 by Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, was intended as a codification of a new era of Sino-Russian cooperation—and a manifestation of their shared desire for “multi-polarity” and a diminution of America’s global influence. 8But the treaty, like Russian-Chinese cooperation itself, is temporary. Despite Russian requests for an agreement of indefinite duration during the negotiating process, the Chinese insisted on a time limit for the deal. That demand was incorporated into the final text of the agreement that was signed by Jiang and Putin, and said treaty now formally “sunsets” in 2021.
The implication is clear. Looking two decades ahead in 2001, Beijing believed that the demographic balance between itself and Russia, and the larger bilateral strategic relationship, would be quite different. By 2021, with population trends working in its favor, China might well want to revisit its presence in the Far East with an eye toward reclaiming lost lands.
A CREEPING CHINESE ADVANCE
But the Chinese government may not be content to wait that long. In recent years, China has attempted to speed the process of Russia’s decline, and its own advance, in the Far East.
For years, Russian experts have warned that Russia’s eastern regions are being overrun by Chinese migrants. 9While exact numbers are difficult to determine, estimates range from as many as 1.5 to 2 million Chinese nationals in Russia’s Far East. 10
The actual number is almost certainly much lower. A 2003 study by the American Foreign Policy Council estimated that there were fewer than 150,000 Chinese nationals throughout Russia’s entire Far East. 11A survey by China’s state-controlled People’ s Dailythe following year put the number of permanent, legal Chinese residents in Russia’s East at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. 12Today, that number is considerably larger—about four hundred thousand by Western estimates—making clear that China’s presence in the Russian Far East is increasing.
Some of that growth is a result of the thirty thousand Chinese tourists who visit the region daily. Tellingly, anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these visits are driven by more than simple curiosity; rather, many Chinese say they are returning to the region as absentee landlords looking after lost ancestral lands. 13Not surprisingly, some of these tourists do not return home. 14
Chinese also make up a major part of the Far East’s labor force. The economies of the Far East’s regions are oriented overwhelmingly toward China. 15It only stands to reason, then, that they would rely heavily on Chinese workers to fuel that trade. And they do: in 2006, some 210,000 Chinese were legally registered to work in Russia—ten times the number registered in 1994. 16Most reside in the Russian Far East. (The number of illegal Chinese migrant workers, which is not regularly tallied by Russian authorities, makes the actual size of the Chinese labor force in Russia larger, perhaps substantially so.)
This growth of Chinese migration to Russia is at least partly a product of China’s expanding economy (which has averaged a stunning pace of 10.5 percent annually since 2007). 17Beijing must now create twenty-five million jobs annually to keep its unemployment rate static. 18This requirement has led the Chinese government to encourage labor migration abroad, to Latin America, elsewhere in Asia, in Africa—and to neighboring Russia. China’s local governments have also encouraged labor migration to the Far East. 19
Meanwhile, the Far East’s desolation and its distance from European Russia generally (and Moscow specifically) have reduced Russia’s indigenous workforce. During Soviet times, Communist Party restrictions on citizen mobility kept the Far East’s population in place. But a post-Soviet relaxation of travel regulations has prompted an exodus from Russia’s desolate east. Since the Soviet collapse, an estimated two million Russians have departed the region, most for economic or social reasons, taking much of the area’s labor with them. 20By some estimates, the region has lost as much as one-fifth of its total population over the past two decades. 21