The Chinese Challenge to Russia in Siberia and the Russian Far East

The Soviet Union was broken up by internal forces. Today, Russia faces a potential threat to the long-term integrity of a vast proportion of its territory. That challenge is from China, and relates to all of Russia east of the Ural Mountains, i.e., Siberia and the Russian Far East. The author here examines the territorial, demographic, socioeconomic, cultural and other factors that set the context for this threat; and discusses possible scenarios for the eventual outcome. Key Words: Russia; China; Siberia; Russian Far East; China-Russia Comparisons; China-Russia Border Dispute; Demographic Migration; Future of Siberia and Russian Far East. The breaking up of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent states was due to internal factors, linked largely to the national bureaucraties that together comprised the bureaucracy of the USSR.1 Now, contemporary Russia, whose official name as one of the fifteen successor independent republics2 is the Russian Federation (RF), faces a serious territorial challenge to its vast possessions east of the Ural Mountains, i.e., Siberia and the Russian Far East. This challenge3 is from the People's Republic of China (PRC), which we will refer to here simply as China. We propose to examine the current circumstances pertaining to the Chinese challenge, before speculating on the various scenarios that may evolve from it The Current Context The Territorial Setting Territorially, Russia is the largest country in the world. Its maximum distance from the west to the east is 9,000 kilometers, or 5,600 miles, and from the north to the south is 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles.4 Its territory encompasses 17,075,000 square kilometers, or 6,600,000 square miles.5 The Ural Mountains (the Urals) divide Russia into two parts: the European, which is to the west of the Urals, and the Asian, which is to the east of the Urals. The Asian part of Russia, in turn, is subdivided into two regions: Siberia, consisting of Eastern Siberia and Western Siberia; and the Russian Far East. Being enormous in size, Russia borders on sixteen countries. Fourteen of them are linked to Russia directly by land. In its European portion, Russia is flanked by ten countries.6 The list of its Asian land neighbors includes four countries. The remaining two countries border the Asian part of Russia indirectly, by a water frontier. These are Japan and the United States. Altogether, the Russian land and water frontiers are the longest in the world. They extend for 57,792 kilometers, or 35,920 miles, of which the Russian-Chinese border is 4,200 kilometers, or 2,600 miles.7 Necessarily, the task of guarding a huge country which borders so many countries over such long distances presents a great problem for the Russian authorities. In this, Russia is not helped by having on its eastern flank such a giant neighbor as China. China's gigantism, compared to Russia, is not in its territory. The territory of China (9.6 million square kilometers, or 3.7 million square miles) is the fourth in the world, after Russia, Canada, and the USA.8 Where China overshadows Russia is in demographics, in the size of its economy, and in its current developmental dynamism. The Demographic Setting Let us use Table 1 to make demographic comparisons between Russia and China. While territorially Russia is 11.8 times larger than China, the Chinese population is 9.1 times greater than the Russian. Indeed, China has the largest population in the world, while Russia occupies only the seventh place. Facing this enormous Chinese population, Russia is also confronted with the problem of a very uneven distribution of its own population across its vast territory: as Table 1 reveals, less than 1/5 of its population resides in its Asian regions, which constitute two thirds of its territory20. It is true that only a small portion of China borders Russia. But in the land along this mutual frontier, there are more than nineteen Chinese per square kilometer for each Russian. …

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