Putin

We are similar in character.

—CHINESE PRESIDENT XI JINPING ON HIMSELF AND PUTIN

Russia is pivoting east just as China “marches west.” They could well collide in Central Asia.

Russia, of course, had burgeoning trade with China before the violent events in Crimea and Ukraine caused the rupture between Moscow and the West. Like other resource-rich countries, Russia saw the chance to profit by feeding the furnace of the Chinese economy, which, to take one measure of its scale, in the years 2011–13 poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. China had already surpassed Germany as Russia’s leading trading partner in 2011. In a pronouncement both ringing and clunky, Putin declared in 2012: “In the 21st century, the vector of Russia’s development is to the east.”

For Russia the east has always been a vector of its manifest destiny. America’s great westward sweep was matched by Russia’s to the east, which even spilled over into the Western Hemisphere to include Alaska and parts of northern California. The Russians did not confront any great warlike nations like the Comanches, making their takeover of Siberia and the Far East a relatively easy conquest, not the source of both sagas and shame as the conquest of Indian territory was for America. The drive was so successful that three-quarters of Russia is in Asia.

It was Russia’s eastward expansion that gave it the territorial basis for its own sense of greatness, but the east also carries associations of tragic humiliation and defeat. The only successful invasion of Russia came from the east, Genghis Khan having succeeded where Napoleon and Hitler would fail. The destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese navy in the Tsushima Strait during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 still resonates in Russia. Billed as a “short, victorious war,” a tonic for a society ailing from worker discontent and revolutionary assassination, the war had definite racist overtones. The Russian press called the Japanese “little yellow devils,” while the British and some other European powers equipped Tokyo and cheered “brave little” Japan on. But the cheering stopped when the war ended with an ominous first—the first victory of an Asian nation over a white European one.

It was inevitable that Russia’s eastward expansion would cause it to come up against China. Russia is the only European country that borders China. In fact, it has two separate borders with China. One is quite long, a touch over 2,500 miles in length, whereas the second, only 24 miles long and located between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, will not be visible on any map of normal size, but may well play an outsized role in the coming years because of pipelines passing through the ecologically precious lands of the Golden Mountains of Altai. In any case, unlike the United States, Russia and China are both countries with many borders, fourteen each in fact.

The first treaty China ever concluded with the West (the Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689) was to begin establishing borders with Russia, a process that was only finally completed by Putin and Hu in 2004. But fear and grievances remain. Many Chinese believe that by force or the threat of force Russia imposed “unequal treaties” on China and unjustly seized 1.5 million square kilometers. Mao espoused that view in 1964, and five years later Soviet and Chinese troops engaged in armed border clashes. “The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into the Soviet territory that China claimed. A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic,” wrote Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat ever to defect, in his book Breaking with Moscow.

The fear behind the old Soviet quip—all quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border—continues to fuel Russian anxiety. Speaking off the record, a highly placed Russian government figure told me that he expects the next war to be a “resource war” and China to be the enemy. It’s a pity that Russian-American relations have sunk so low, he said, when we should be forging an alliance to counter the mounting Chinese threat.

Putin has said of Russian-Chinese relations: “We do not have a single irritating element in our ties.” In fact, the relationship is fraught with tension. First and foremost is what could be called Russia’s demographobia. In the country’s vast Far East, there are only 7 million people, while China’s three northern provinces that border the Russian Far East contain more than 100 million. Many are already working in Russia, crossing the bordering as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin puts it, “small groups of 5 million.” Putin himself has said: “I don’t want to dramatize the situation, but if we do not make every real effort, even the indigenous population will soon speak mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean.”