The Russian towns and cities near the border with China are forlorn and dilapidated, whereas their Chinese counterparts gleam with steel, glass, and commercial energy. China’s cheap goods, especially clothing and electronics, draw Russian customers from far and near. The few shopping centers and high-rises in the Russian towns tend to be built by Chinese companies.
But it is not only Chinese laborers who cross the border into underpopulated Russia to exploit its natural resources, and not only Russian shoppers who cross in the other direction to buy goods for themselves or for resale; there is also a flow of educated professionals moving from Russia to China, where their skills are more in demand and better paid. And, to further complicate the picture, there are cross-border romances as well, usually between Russian women, known for their beauty and warmth, and Chinese men, who, compared to Russians, have the reputation of earning more and drinking less.
Different as they are, the Russians and Chinese both share a sense of being humiliated nations. The Chinese even speak of their “century of humiliation” from the middle of the nineteenth century, when foreigners, especially the British, forced unequal treaties on them, until 1949, when Mao’s victory began China’s comeback. (The Map Department of the People’s Press in Beijing has even published Maps of the Humiliation of China over One Hundred Years.)
Siberia’s richness and emptiness cannot help but stimulate China’s appetite for resources and lebensraum. Though all border differences were successfully negotiated in 2004, there remains a lingering sense on the Chinese side that much of the territory along the border was taken unfairly by Russia when China was weak. In some Chinese textbooks the areas on the Russian side of the border are shown in the same color as China itself. Though the borders have been fixed, that alone cannot provide Russia with much reassurance, having itself just recently violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Siberians, moreover, have never been too happy about their domination and exploitation by distant Moscow. Theirs is a mentality of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and distrust of the central government. In the chaos of the Russian Revolution and civil war, Siberia even briefly seceded, establishing its own republic, its flag’s green and white symbolizing forest and snow. A similar logo is used by the currently existing National Alternative of Siberia—known as the Siberian Liberation Army until the group’s leader was visited by the security police curious as to his choice of words, since private armies are frowned upon, to say the least. This fringe group has a near-zero chance of having any impact at the moment, though the Russian authorities are always mindful that, given the right set of conditions, small groups like the Bolsheviks and Nazis can dart from the margins to the center.
Russia and China are both content with the current arrangement and will remain so until some new dynamic brings the borders back into question. It would be a delicious historical irony if at some point China began aiding the Siberian equivalent of the breakaway groups that set up the phantasmagorical People’s Republic of Donetsk.
A mixture of half-real paranoia and quite real ambition caused Putin to create an enemy out of NATO, which had obliged him by expanding its borders to outflank Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Putin needed that enemy for political purposes, his rule secured by the security services, the armed forces, and the wealthy elite he has created. Funds flowed to them, which meant that they would not flow to education, nonmilitary R&D, and high-tech centers imitating Silicon Valley, where those funds could have a substantial impact on the country’s economic future. Russia produces little that the world wants; its top ten exports, with the exception of some industrial machinery, include oil, gas, iron, steel, precious stones and metals, fertilizer, aluminum, wood, and cereal. Russia does of course sell weapons, planes, warships, and other military equipment, but not enough to make the top-ten list.
In the meantime, there are buyers, especially for gas and oil. Russia may be pivoting east and Europe may be desperately weaning itself off Russian energy, but their economies are still very much bound up. Though China has surpassed Germany as Russia’s number one trade partner, the EU as a whole accounts for 41 percent of Russian trade, more than four times what China imports. The countries of Eastern Europe—especially Poland and the Baltic states, which feel the most threatened by Russia because of past experience, proximity, and, in the case of Estonia and Latvia, large number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers—are also countries that depend heavily on Russia for their energy supplies. Poland gets at least half of its gas from Russia and has a supply contract with Gazprom that runs until 2022. Some of them are scrambling for inventive solutions to their problem of dependency on Russia. Lithuania is building a floating terminal to receive liquefied natural gas from the United States. Other gambits included developing domestic shale reserves, as Estonia is doing. And it’s always possible to simply pay more for gas and oil from other sources.
Like Europe’s liberation of itself from Russian gas and oil, Russia’s search for new or enlarged markets in Asia will not be accomplished anytime soon. Alexander Ivanov, deputy head of the state-run bank VEB, put it: “Over the long term, these markets may supplant the European and American markets for us, but it won’t be quick.”[343]
Indeed, the signs have been highly mixed. Russia’s trade with China actually fell in 2015 by some 26 percent. The two countries had hoped to hit the $100 billion mark but came in $32 billion short. On the other hand, China’s import of Russian oil for May 2016 hit a record thirty-eight million barrels.
China, of course, will never allow itself to become dependent on Russia for energy any more than Russia will settle for being a “natural resources appendage”[344] for China. Putin is not about to turn rejection in the West to humiliation in the East. Russia is already attempting to protect itself in Asia by employing the same principle it failed to apply to its domestic economy—diversification. The Kremlin deals with both India and Pakistan, with which it lifted an embargo on arms sales in 2014. Russia sells submarines to Vietnam, also supplying it and India with nuclear power stations. Russia plays India off against China, selling it the first in a series of nuclear attack subs for $1 billion in 2012 under a ten-year contract. India declined to join in the sanctions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea and the incursions into eastern Ukraine. It is even possible that Russia will now be motivated to come to terms with Japan over the four southernmost Kurile Islands. The waters off those islands are rich in stocks of fish, gas, and oil, while the islands themselves contain large quantities of gold and rhenium, an exceedingly rare and costly metal used in jet engines. Seized by the USSR at the end of World War II, the islands have prevented Russia and Japan from formally concluding a peace. Wars never quite end and feelings still run high. When then president Medvedev visited one of the Kurile Islands in 2010 the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, called it an “unforgiveable outrage.”[345]
343
Sujata Rao and Michelle Chen, “Russian Firms Turn to Asia for Finance as Western Firms Demur,” Reuters, April 30, 2014.
344
Rens Lee, “The Far East Between Russia, China, and America,” FPRI (Foreign Policy Research Institute), July 2012.
345
J. Berkshire Miller, “Getting Serious: An End to the Russia-Japan Dispute?”