By most measures, China and Russia are two world powers headed in opposite directions in terms of their role on the world stage. China has emerged as nothing short of a geopolitical juggernaut, sporting a booming economy and a surging population, with a steadily growing military profile to boot. Meanwhile, Russia remains more or less adrift in the post-Cold War world. Talk of its future has been dominated not by lofty geopolitical aspirations, but rather by concerns about a shrinking population and the fate of an economy staked largely to finite oil and gas reserves. (Energy products and raw materials account for more than three-quarters of all Russian exports.)
The fade of one superpower and the rise of another may seem like a recipe for conflict down the road, and it may well be—especially considering the two countries share a border spanning nearly 3,000 miles. As geopolitical power has shifted from Moscow to Beijing, one of the most-discussed flashpoints for a potential confrontation between the two neighbors has been Russia's Far East, a resource-rich expanse of northeastern Asia the size of the U.S.'s lower 48 states. A world away from Moscow, it makes up about a third of Russia's land area, yet is home to just seven million people—about 5 percent of Russia's population. It is here, beneath the vast emptiness of the steppe and tundra, where much of the country's gas and oil wealth lies.
In a world desperate for energy resources, the RFE is a huge prize, and Moscow knows it—it is part of the reason why Russian leadership has worried in recent years that it may one day lose control of the region to China. Certain trends already at work bear out those concerns. With China's economic star on the rise, the RFE has increasingly oriented itself toward Beijing in terms of trade since the end of the Cold War. Nowadays, nearly all consumer goods in the RFE come not from other parts of Russia, but rather Asia, with China chief among the countries exporting to the region. Chinese shipments of fruits, vegetables, meat, and other agricultural goods to the RFE have also surged in recent years, to the extent that some local observers say China now controls the region's food security. “The Chinese now dominate the agricultural sector and the food supply,” says Lyudmila Erokhina, a researcher at Vladivostok State University. “We're totally dependent on them.”
Maybe more worrisome for Moscow, the RFE's population is becoming decidedly less Russian with each passing year. Chinese emigration to the area is on the rise, with the new arrivals coaxing life out of farms and fields that many local Russians had given up for dead in the harsh climate. (The fact that the Chinese have had some success cultivating the RFE's tough soil perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise; as recently as the 16th century, the region was essentially an outer province of China, before Russia started expanding into the area.)
The region's shifting demographics have not gone unnoticed by Moscow's power brokers, who recognize how high the stakes are for their country. They have even taken to issuing blunt warnings from time to time about what they perceive as the erosion of Russian influence in the area. During a visit to the RFE back in 2000, then President Vladimir Putin warned that continued inaction in modernizing the local economy and fostering business growth would mean that “even the indigenous Russian population will mainly be speaking Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in a few decades.” And that prediction, it seems, may already be coming to pass. Around the same time Putin painted his grim picture of the RFE's future, intelligence news provider Stratfor.com released a report declaring that by 2020, the Chinese would become the region's largest ethnic group.
To be fair, Moscow's gradual loss of the RFE to the Chinese sphere of influence is partially its own fault. Economically, ties between the RFE and Russia's more Eurocentric west have been severed for some time. Transit links spanning the several thousand miles between Moscow and major RFE outposts have remained expensive and inefficient for years, hindering the exchange of manufactured goods or raw materials in either direction. The RFE is “completely cut off from the rest of Russia,” says Maksim Perov, an expert on regional development in Russia, adding that local political corruption and high electricity costs are also to blame for the RFE's economic stagnation.
Without a renewed effort to spur development in the region, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has warned as recently as 2008 that, “in the final analysis, we can lose everything.” Implicit in that warning is that Russia's loss would be China's gain. Some experts think that even if the RFE “officially” remains part of Russia during the coming decades, the ongoing East Asian population boom will transform the RFE into a raw material supermarket that feeds the Chinese economy—essentially turning the region into a de facto part of China. “When you look at the border between China and Russia, the demographics and the demands on natural resources are such that there's something almost unnatural about the map of that part of the world,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser under President Jimmy Carter. “On one side of the border is a huge space, as large as the rest of Asia, inhabited by 35 million people. On the other side, the rest of Asia, inhabited by three and a half billion people, one and a half billion of whom are expanding dramatically, getting wealthier, richer, more powerful, more modern. Is that an enduring situation?”
It doesn't seem to be. Unless Russian leadership has an about-face and decides to heavily invest in modernizing the region, China will continue to eclipse Russian influence there. But even so, a grand military confrontation for control of the region doesn't seem to be in the cards. More likely, a shift in control of the RFE will be far subtler. After all, Russia and China remain linked today both through robust trade and regional alliances like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. A standoff between the two nuclear-armed neighbors wouldn't be in either's interest.
The expansion of China's sphere of influence into northeastern Asia may not be an aggressive one but it will still allow the country to secure key energy supplies as the global fossil-fuel crunch heats up. As the world's industrial powers lock into competition for those disappearing resources in the years to come, China's presence in the RFE has direct implications for future U.S. energy security and should not be overlooked.
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