RW Johnson: The Russia-China conundrum

Key topics:Russia and China share a long, tense history of border disputes and rivalry.China’s economic and technological rise far outpaces Russia’s current decline.Despite cooperation, China holds stronger leverage in their uneasy alliance..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..R.W. Johnson.There are few larger questions in international affairs than the future of the relationship between Russia and China. These two huge empires – for that is what they are – grew up in isolation from one another and only came into contact with one another in the 17th century. At that point China was a far wealthier and more advanced civilisation than was Russia and the Chinese saw themselves as being at the centre of the world and regarded all the peoples beyond their boundary as barbarians. As Prince Gong put it in the mid-19th century: “All the barbarians have the nature of brute beasts. The British are the most unruly, but the Russians are the most cunning.”At first the Qing dynasty in China were expanding their power. In the mid-18th century they moved into the three great borderlands – East Turkistan (which they called Xinjiang), and Mongolia and Manchuria in the far North-East. They also moved into Kazakhstan. But Russian power soon overtook the Chinese. Russia took Kazakhstan in 1844 and then West Turkistan. Russian business, impressed by the way the Union Pacific Railway had settled the Mid West and bound together the US, began agitating for the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway, for Russia had now also annexed its Amur and Maritime provinces in the far East. Thus, the Chinese towns of Boli and Hashenwei became Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. In 1897 Russia also seized the Liaodong peninsula, giving it control of the Pacific ports of Port Arthur and Darien. All told the Tsar took 1.5 million square kilometres of Manchuria and Mongolia. This precipitated war with Japan but once that was over Russia proposed to Japan that they establish a joint “guardianship” of Manchuria – and ultimately take over the whole of China. Tsar Nicholas happily agreed, for there seemed no limit to Russia’s appetite for territory.This naturally caused Chinese resentment and even after the Russian revolution the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek insisted that Communism was just “Tsarism under another name”. Indeed, Russia rebuilt its position as the dominant power in Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia but Stalin gave generous aid to Chiang’s party, the Kuomintang, for he wanted to bolster China against Japan. By comparison, his help to Mao and the Chinese Communists was very minor.In 1945 the US and Britain were keen to encourage Stalin to enter the war against Japan. Stalin stated his terms, reviving the most extreme Tsarist claims on China. The USSR must remain the dominant power in Mongolia, Manchuria and Liaodong, take over Dalian (China’s second biggest port) and have at least 50% control of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchurian Railway. All this was conceded but kept secret from Chiang. Meanwhile Stalin encouraged a rebel group in Xinjiang, confident that if the province became independent it would be Soviet-dominated. As soon as the A-bomb fell on Nagasaki a Soviet army of 300,000 burst into Manchuria, Stalin saying that this “is what we’ve been waiting forty years to do”. But he continued to help Chiang and told Mao he must make a deal with Chiang since the Communists could never win on their own. Even when Mao won the civil war with Chiang Stalin was disbelieving and distrustful – after all Mao had never even been to the USSR... In Moscow in May 1949, on Stalin’s orders, Mikhail Borodin, the old Comintern boss in China, was hauled in to be tortured in order to make him say that he had recruited Mao for US Intelligence.The relationship between Mao and Stalin was strained and difficult. The USSR viewed itself as “China’s big brother” and extended aid to China – but then said it was a loan, to be repaid with interest. Mao, for his part, privately railed that Xinjiang and Manchuria were “Soviet colonies”. Stalin encouraged the North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea but when that war went badly Stalin pushed Mao to intervene – which he did with extreme reluctance. Stalin promised much military aid – but then told Mao that the Chinese army would have to do without air cover for the first four months, during which time the USAF exacted a terrible toll. Mao’s own son was among those killed.(South Africans might like to know what actually happened. The Malan government decided to make a contribution to the UN force in Korea by sending the Flying Cheetahs squadron. It flew P-51 Mustangs which were heavily used for ground attack purposes, strafing and rocketing ground-level targets. On just such a mission in November 1950 they shot and killed Mao’s son, Anying, among others – though the pilots may never have known what they had done. The South Africans thus ended what might have been Mao’s dynasty. The Mustangs were not competitive with MiG-15s so the Cheetahs later switched to F-86 Sabre jets. Despite the Mustangs’ problem with the MiGs, the Cheetahs lost only one plane and one pilot in air-to-air combat, though all told they lost 78 planes and 33 pilots. The Americans valued the Cheetahs highly and frequently played Die Stem in their honour.).Read more:.RW Johnson: Facing two empires - Can Europe stand up to Russia while America confronts China?.Meanwhile, the USSR forced an agreement guaranteeing Soviet control over all the contested regions of Xinjiang, Manchuria and Mongolia and also gave the Russians 600 of the 700 islands in the Ussuri and Amur rivers in China’s North East. Mao greatly resented this colonial relationship but China was too weak to argue. Once Stalin died Mao – who now saw himself as the senior Communist leader - forbade the entry of all foreigners (including Russians) into any of these contested areas, trying to claw back some Chinese control.Khruschev was far more generous with aid of all kinds, including military aid – China now got advanced MIG-19s and MIG-21s, for example, but he lacked Stalin’s authority in Mao’s eyes and the Chinese became less deferential, for they still nursed many grievances. A warning sign came in 1954 with the publication of Liu Peihua’s Short History of Modern China. Its maps of China portrayed China at the fullest extent of the Qing empire. Outer Mongolia – now the Soviet puppet Mongolian People’s Republic – was shown as Chinese, as was the USSR’s Maritime Province, the Amar-Ussuri region, Sakhalin island (which had never been Chinese) and the whole of Kazakhstan.In 1955 China had a major diplomatic success with the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung – but the USSR was not invited because it was “too European”. For similar reasons Khruschev’s invitations to China to join Comecon and the Warsaw Pact were rejected. By this time Khruschev was at his wits’ end to know how to deal with Mao and he confided to the West German leader, Konrad Adenauer that he “needed help” with China. The USSR, he said, had two enemies, the USA and China – but China was the greater threat. Next came Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin at the CPSU 20th party congress - but China continued to vaunt Stalin as a “great Communist leader”. Mao began to talk of how China had seen off the British, the Japanese and others – and it would see off the Russians too. China’s “unequal border arrangements” were now openly disputed and there were more and more border incidents. In 1962 alone the USSR counted 5,000 Chinese border violations. Meanwhile China went to war with India (a Russian ally) over a border dispute. Mao told Khruschev that China had not yet “presented its bill” for Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka and all the other territory that Russia had stolen East of Lake Baikal. Khruschev angrily retorted that this merely parroted the most extreme demands of the Qing dynasty who had been “just as predatory as any Tsar”.Once the Cultural Revolution started these border issues became violent. China claimed that there had been 4,189 Soviet “border violations” in 1964-69 and there was open fighting over Damansky island in the Ussuri river, with casualties on both sides. The Russians then attacked in force, killing 800 Chinese. Other clashes followed in Xinjiang and the Soviets moved up 800,000 troops to the Chinese border. The Soviet defence minister, Marshal Grechko, argued for a nuclear strike against China and asked Kissinger if the US would remain neutral if that occurred. After all, in 1963 the US had quietly suggested to Moscow that the US and USSR should together bomb China’s nuclear facilities “before it’s too late”: Khruschev had refused. Now Kissinger warned that China was under the US nuclear umbrella and that a Soviet nuclear strike would result in American missile attacks on 130 Soviet cities.Tension continued with over 1.5 million Soviet soldiers on the Chinese border and with China menaced by the Soviet air force and by Soviet submarines in the South China Sea. The stand-off continued until Gorbachev came to power. He was keen to make concessions and cool tensions – and so was Deng Xiaoping. A great reconciliation took place in 1988 and it was agreed that all future relations must be on the basis of strict equality: no more “big brother”. In 1989 the USSR asked China for aid, a complete reversal of the previous relationship, and the borders were adjusted in China’s favour. China, for its part, bought enormous quantities of advanced Soviet weapons.Since then there has been a period of amicable co-operation between the two regimes. But they are not united. China was extremely uncomfortable about Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014: it cannot agree to such seizures of territory and it was horrified that Putin should legitimate the seizure with a Crimean referendum. The last thing Beijing wants is for Xinjiang, Tibet or Taiwan to hold referendums over whether they belong to China. Similarly, Beijing could not approve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At the UN China merely abstained on the issue..Read more:.Finland President says China holds key to ending Ukraine conflict amidst Russia dependency.But Putin had hugely miscalculated. Not only did Ukraine resist far more strongly than he had expected but the West reacted far more strongly than it had over Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. Swingeing sanctions were levied against Russia and the EU stopped importing Russian oil and gas – an enormous economic body-blow to Moscow. The only possible alternative was for Russia to collapse into economic dependence on China, not only its supplier of last resort for everything but now its main customer for oil and gas. All of this was dressed up as the fruits of the warm and eternal friendship between Russia and China. This was, the world was told, “a friendship without limits”.This is a shade unlikely. For a start, China still has unsettled territorial claims and the whole history of Russo-Chinese relations shows that when one or other of the two countries becomes stronger than the other, it can’t resist enforcing such claims. And China has now become far stronger than Russia. By 2000 China’s economy was four times bigger than Russia’s. Today it is at least eight times bigger. China now helps Russia to build things like high speed railways – though Russia can’t really afford such luxuries, for the Ukraine war has been disastrous for the Russian economy. China has long shown no interest in buying Russian manufactures and even if it still buys some arms, it no longer buys large amounts: what it’s interested in is simply a weapon’s underlying technology so that China can copy it and produce its own (superior) version. Chinese students no longer want to learn Russian or attend Russian universities: they see Russia as a country in decline and would rather head to the West. China and Russia co-operate in space but the independent Chinese space programme is moving far ahead. Similarly, China has raced far ahead in information technology and AI.In 2010 China became Russia’s biggest trading partner but the exchange was very unbalanced: even in 2021 China accounted for 15% of Russia’s foreign traders but Russia constituted only 1% of China’s foreign trade. But then came the Ukraine war so, from 2020 to 2024 China-Russia trade doubled and it will increase further as more pipelines are built. The limits are now set simply by Russia’s constrained ability to pay. Russians worry that they are merely becoming a resource dependency for China and at grass roots the dread of the “yellow peril” remains alive, fuelled by China’s enormous demographic advantage.Above all, China’s advantage is still growing fast. Chinese trade and investment has poured into the Central Asian republics and outer Mongolia, all of which have become economic satellites of China. All these republics (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) belong, with Russia and China to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – but it was noticeable that Russia vetoed the notion of a SCO Development Bank (which China would have dominated) and that it pushed for India and Pakistan to join, clearly to balance China. Russia pushes its own Eurasian Economic Union with the Central Asian republics but it is far overshadowed by China’s Belt and Road initiative and the tide of Chinese investment.The Russians also worry that climate change could result in the desertification of North China with a consequent push of the Chinese population into the Russian North East. Moreover, climate change may well make Siberia far more attractive and there is already concern about illegal Chinese immigration into that vast area. As we have seen, however, the old gibe that Russia is “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons” is still very much alive. Russia, utterly outmatched in its confrontation with the West, is quick and loud in resorting to nuclear threats – for that is its one remaining advantage.For the moment the Russia-China alliance seems solid. But both the lessons of history and the sheer and growing strength of China give Russia plenty of food for thought. And should their alliance falter all manner of dominoes would begin to fall in all directions. But Russia can’t afford for it to falter whereas China has many options and virtually unlimited leverage.It is a truism that the future of humanity lies in Asia but just at the point when Russia needs allies more than ever its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has alienated most of its neighbours and the iron-clad Putin dictatorship has made Russia extremely unattractive to neutrals. Russia’s obvious ally is India, the great counterweight to China – but China’s rise has pushed India towards the American camp. So Putin has backed himself into a corner and it may take a change in the Russian leadership to alter that.

RW Johnson: The Russia-China conundrum

Related Stories

FT's Edward Luce: Why Trump is going for Zelenskyy’s jugular

Backing Ukraine isn’t charity, it’s self-interest: Lessons from the frontline

Mills and Hartley: The cost of SA's "non" non-alignment

The Economist: Cornered, Putin chooses escalation over ending his war