Since China’s border issues are a hot topic of late, I wanted to post an article by myself, that was previously published at Brooks Review
Background
From BBC
The Chinese government declared 2006, The “Year of Russia”; and in turn, Russia celebrated 2007 as “The Year of China.” These mutual pronouncements were part of a decade long rapprochement between the two states. After many years of mutual acrimony and suspicion the barriers that divide the two nations have abated, replaced by a bridge of pragmatism. This new relationship, based on mutual resentment of global Western dominance and a shared interest in Central Asian security; has an unintended consequence: both nations are seeing increased economic interaction on their border. Conversely, this contact has fed lingering paranoia and insecurity in Russia, a former great power that is seeing itself eclipsed economically and politically by China, a state it once considered a wayward“little brother.” Less then a decade ago, this was reflected in an ominous warning given by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, ”If we don’t make concrete efforts…the future local population will speak Japanese, Chinese or Korean” (Wines 2001). Currently, the Russian political elite are not publicly expressing fear of territorial encroachment and potential colonization, but these attitudes are increasing in the general population. This xenophobic sentiment is an outgrowth of reawakened Russian nationalism, which has served as a swathe for the disillusionment that came from loss of empire. However, to have a truly constructive engagement with China, Russia must move beyond its historic tendency to loath any nation along its periphery it cannot dominate.
Eastward Russian expansion at the expense of China began hundreds of years of suspicion and animosity between the two nations. In August of 1689, Imperial Russia and the Chinese Qing Dynasty signed their first treaty over land disputes in the modern Russian Far East, which was formerly part of China. Almost three-hundred years later, under the new political incarnations of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, conflict along the 4,300km (2,700 mile) border renewed due to ideological clashes between the two communist states. At the height of tensions, the Soviet Union had as many as 700,000 troops on the border, adjacent to a million Chinese soldiers (Blagov 2005). A few years before, during the reign of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets repatriated many Chinese still living in the border area or deported them to Central Asia Republics. Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, openly bemoaned the amount of territory China had lost to Russia historically; land the Chinese believe was unfairly stolen. Nonetheless, in 1989 the Soviet Union and China normalized relations and reduced the militarization on the border by 1991.
In July of 2008, Beijing and Moscow resolved their last long-standing territorial dispute near the Amur and Ussuri rivers in the Russian Far East. The two nations finalized the transfer of 337 square kilometers (~130 square miles), 2% of land on the border area of the Russian Far East, from Russian to Chinese control. The Far East is about 37% of Russia’s territory, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean, bordering China, North Korea, and Japan. This concession was highly unpopular in Russia. Ekho Moskvy Radio conducted an opinion poll that found 82% of the listeners opposed the border agreement (Blagov 2005). This is in spite of Russian official’s attempts to assure the public that the land deal would not hurt Russian interests in the region.
Mutual Benefit
The cessation of border tensions has been lucrative for both sides. Over the last decade, there has been an eight-fold increase in trade between the two nations, from $5.7 billion in 1999 to $48 billion in 2007; almost 1/3 of that trade was along the borders (Mitchell 2007), (World Tribune 2009). Russia’s goods are primarily commodities and primary manufactured products, whereas the Chinese traded in textile; light manufactured goods; and low-end electronic. In 2005, China was Russia’s fourth largest trading partner and Russia was China’s eighth, still this was not even 10% of either countries total trade (Mitchell 2007). In 2006, Russian foreign direct investment in China was $1.4 billion, while China had $1 billion invested in Russia (Mitchell 2007). This was about 5% of China’s total outbound FDI for that year (Wang etc al. 2008).
Increased trade has not just resulted in the movement in goods, but also population. Chinese nationals began crossing the Russian border when it opened to tourism in 1991. About 90% of Chinese tourist overstayed their visas; they entered the labor market, migrated to third countries, or became traders (World Tribune 2009). Today, up to 400,000 Chinese live on the Russian side of the border, but because many of them are illegal aliens, this is only an estimate (Karlin 2009). The majority of these immigrants are from Heilongjiang and the surrounding northeast China rust-belt (Dongbei). Few of them are fluent in Russian and most live in-country less than 5 years, typically in socially segregated communities (Chinatowns). Currently, Chinese make up about 20% of all temporary Russian labor (Karlin 2009). The average salary of a Chinese worker is roughly $100 a month or half the typical Russian salary, but still higher than what they could earn at home (World Tribune 2009).
Due to the fall in subsidies from Moscow and the closing of Soviet era factories, many Russian border areas are heavily dependent on clothes, electronics, and food sales from China (Feifer 2008). Russians buy these goods in open-air markets from the Chinese, because store prices, especially in big cities, are some of the world’s most expensive, despite the fact the average Russian earns only $16,000 a year (Purchasing Power Parity). Because Far Eastern Russians are so dependent on these markets, there are routine intimate relations between the two groups. Frequent interaction is likely the reason for Russians in the region having more favorable attitudes toward Chinese immigrants than those that live in the European part of the country. There is also a significantly lower amount of physical violence and verbal threats directed toward the Chinese in the Far East than in Western Russia (Karilin 2009). Still, contact is not a panacea. Chen Gopin, the Chinese consul general in Khabarovsk remarked, “When things don’t work, they all scream, ‘The wolves are coming, the wolves are coming’ — and the wolves are Chinese…this isn’t even hidden anymore. They all talk about the Chinese expansion” (Feifer 2008).
