Hey, Vlad! China is not your friend

It is said that only death and taxes are inevitable. However, there are three other factors which, if not inevitable, are almost certainly inexorable. They are, in turn, demography, revenge and relative economic heft.

Vlad, you have been warned.

Demography

First, let’s look at demography. China’s population in 2024 is estimated at around 1.419 billion and, in spite of falling fertility, is still expected to be over 1.3 billion in 2050. In contrast, Russia’s current population is estimated at around 0.144 billion. And is expected to have fallen to around 0.121 billion in 2050. Importantly, Russia’s European population today (that is west of the Ural Mountains), barely reaches 0.115 billion.

Of the residual 29 million, only around 5 million reside in the Russian Far East (that is east of Lake Baikal and the Lena River). This tiny population (less than the population of Scotland) resides in an area of 6.2 million square kilometres; an area that constitutes one-third of Russia’s total land mass and is significantly larger than the European Union at 4.2 million square kilometres.

With a population just on one-tenth of China’s, Russia is at risk of reverting to what it was in between 1240 and 1500, a vassal state of the Mongol’s Golden Horde. Surviving only through collaboration, obeisance and the payment of annual tributes that included, money, manpower and mink furs. While the Russian Far East itself, is at real risk of absorption into a ‘Greater China’.

Revenge

Then there is revenge. Russia, in the mid-16^th century, did throw off its subservience to the Golden Horde. Then, in 1581, a detachment of Cossack troops, directed by Ivan the Terrible and commended by hetman Ermak Timofeevich, crossed the Urals and defeated the forces of the Khanate of ‘Sibir’. This success triggered an eastward trek of Russian traders, adventurers and explorers to Yakutsk in 1632, down to Lake Baikal and eventually, in 1647, to the Okhotsk Sea.

The Han (2^nd century BCE through 1^st century CE) and, later, the Tang (late 1^st century CE) Dynasties controlled the regions to the east of Lake Baikal and north of the Amur River. On the basis of this history, China will still claim precedence to the land mass north of Mongolia, Manchuria and the Koreas. In addition, as suggested by maps distributed to secondary schools during the Maoist regime, implying claim to eastern Kazakhstan and to all of Kyrgyzstan.

Russian territorial control in Siberia was formalised in 1689 by way of the Treaty of Nerchinsk between Tsarist Russia and the Qing Dynasty. It confirmed Russian authority over that part of Siberia between Lake Baikal and the Argun River; roughly the area north of present-day Mongolia.

However, under the subsequent Treaty of Aigun (1858), China ceded all of Siberia north and east of the Amur River and hence the formal expansion of Tsarist Russia to the Sea of Okhotsk. While the Convention of Peking (1860) ceded to Russia all that territory along the Sea of Japan from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, including Sakhalin Island (400,000 sq km). And, under the Treaty of Tarbagatai (1864), China ceded to Russia a further 440,000 square kilometres on China’s western border with Kazakhstan.

What is significant is that these treaties, Nerchinsk, Aigun, Peking and Tarbagatai, are four of only five treaties signed under duress by the Qing Dynasty during China’s ‘century of humiliation’, that still remain in place. The colonisation of Hong Kong and Macau, the Japanese colonisation of Manchuria, the annexation of foreign concessions in Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankou and Guangzhou, as well as many other territorial and trading rights have all been reversed. Only Taiwan and territories in Far East Siberia (including Sakhalin) remain in contention.

To add fuel to the fire, the Bolshevik regime in Moscow made promises to China in 1919 that the Soviet Union would return to the Chinese people “all that had been taken from them by the Tsarist Empire during the period of the unequal treaties” (a total land area of around 1.5 million square kilometres). Not surprisingly, as events turned against the White Russians and there was no further need of Chinese assistance, the Bolsheviks reneged on their offer. Further compounding the ‘humiliation’, in 1945 Stalin forced China to accept the independence of Mongolia.

It is evident that China has a long memory. There will come a time when China, a global super power with an estimated two million soldiers and, by 2030, at least 1,000 operable nuclear warheads, will have more than sufficient confidence and geo-strategic strength to pressure Russia into accepting the abrogation of treaties forced on the Qing dynasty during the 19^th century. In all probability, leading to transfer of the Russian Far East from Russian to China.

Economic Disparity

Which brings us to the inexorable pressure of relative economic heft. By any measure the United States (nominal GDP @ US$29.2 trillion), the European Union (@ US$19.4 trillion) and China (@ US$18.5 trillion) are the world’s three largest economic entities. While Russia ranks a distant eleventh with a nominal GDP in 2024 of around US$2.2 trillion (and shrinking); sitting below Italy at number ten with a nominal GDP in 2024 of $US2.4 trillion.

Not only of only modest economic heft, Russia is also burdened by defence and security spending of at almost eight percent of GDP, a shrinking tax base as its population continues to fall (by at least one-third of a percent per annum), widespread (but not necessarily effective) trade and banking sanctions, falling oil and gas revenues, and interest rates recently increased to 21 percent.

Which, Vlad, suggests that you should be paying attention.

Russia is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place. Option One would be to continue down the current path into vassalage under China’s boot heel. A China that, in due course, will seek reversal of the unequal treaties and the absorption of around one-third of Russia’s existing land area. Noting, short term, that de facto colonisation (by commerce rather than coercion) is already under way across most of the Russian Far East.

Chinese traders, property developers and resource extraction companies are steadily taking over economic life in most towns and cities in the Russian Far East. And that, long term, “Mr Xi’s China reveals an ambition to be so powerful by mid-century that no other country on earth will dare to thwart or defy it.”

Or, Option Two, Russia could acknowledge the European heart of its culture: Viking forbears (Scandinavia), the Cyrillic alphabet (Byzantium and Bulgaria), Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), inter-marriage (Catherine the Great), and its debt to the industrial, social, educational and cultural revolutions initiated by Peter the Great after his ‘Grand Embassy’ through western Europe in 1697/98.

In acknowledging Russia’s European roots rather than its tenuous Asian associations and working to forge peaceful and productive links westward rather than to the east, it is not improbable that, over time, a Europeanised Russia could evolve as an equal partner in the European Union. An equal partner in an economic entity with a combined nominal GDP (2024 data) of over US$21 trillion; rather than remain as a vassal state to China with a nominal GDP at barely ten percent that of its controlling partner.

And demographically? Would Russia have a more independent future as the most populous nation in the EU (by 2050 around 100 out of 600 million), or as an adjunct protectorate with a population at barely seven percent of the Chinese ‘imperium’? Will Russia see a better future as one partner in the third leg of a stable tri-partite world, or as the price-taking gas and oil supplier to China in an increasingly unbalanced bi-polar world?

We can only hope, Vlad, that you are listening. Or that at least your citizens (and those of Europe and the United States) are thinking longer term than you and your ‘siloviki’.

Further Reading:

Chaguan. (2024), China’s rise divides the world, The Economist, 31 August.

Figes, O. (2022), The Story of Russia, Bloomsbury Publishing, London.

Hosking, G, (2001), Russia and the Russians, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London.

Kaplan, R.D. (2013), The Revenge of Geography – what the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against fate, Random House Trade Paperback, New York.

Parry, R.L. (2024), Taiwan taunts China with a history lesson, The Times, 3 September.

Snow, P. (2023), China & Russia – Four centuries of conflict & concord, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Thubron, C. (2021), The Amur River, Chatto & Windus, London.

Wood, M. (2020), The Story of China, Simon & Schuster, London.