Leering Bear, Rising Dragon: Life Along the Sino-Russian Border

by Collin Spears, BFPR Chief Foreign Policy Correspondent Washington, D.C.

Background

The Chinese government declared 2006, The “Year of Russia”; and in turn, Russia celebrated 2007 as “The Year of China.” These mutual pronouncements were part of a decade long rapprochement between the two states. After many years of mutual acrimony and suspicion the barriers that divide the two nations have abated, replaced by a bridge of pragmatism. This new relationship, based on mutual resentment of global Western dominance and a shared interest in Central Asian security; has an unintended consequence: both nations are seeing increased economic interaction on their border. Conversely, this contact has fed lingering paranoia and insecurity in Russia, a former great power that is seeing itself eclipsed economically and politically by China, a state it once considered a “little brother.” Less then a decade ago, this was reflected in an ominous warning given by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, ”If we don’t make concrete efforts…the future local population will speak Japanese, Chinese or Korean” (Wines 2001). Currently, the Russian political elite are not publicly expressing fear of territorial encroachment and potential colonization, but these attitudes are increasing in the general population. This xenophobic sentiment is an outgrowth of reawakened Russian nationalism, which has served as a swathe for the disillusionment that came from loss of empire. However, to have a truly constructive engagement with China, Russia must move beyond its historic tendency to loath any nation along its periphery it cannot dominate.

Eastward Russian expansion at the expense of China began hundreds of years of suspicion and animosity between the two nations. In August of 1689, Imperial Russia and the Chinese Qing Dynasty signed their first treaty over land disputes in the modern Russian Far East, which was formerly part of China. Almost three-hundred years later, under the new political incarnations of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, conflict along the 4,300km (2,700 mile) border renewed due to ideological clashes between the two communist states. At the height of tensions, the Soviet Union had as many as 700,000 troops on the border, adjacent to a million Chinese soldiers (Blagov 2005). A few years before, during the reign of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets repatriated many Chinese still living in the border area or deported them to Central Asia Republics. Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, openly bemoaned the amount of territory China had lost to Russia historically; land the Chinese believe was unfairly stolen. Nonetheless, in 1989 the Soviet Union and China normalized relations and reduced the militarization on the border by 1991.

The Chinese – African Relationship: Can Sub-Saharan Africans Think

by Collin Spears, BFPR Chief Foreign Policy Correspondent Washington, D.C.

In 2001, Former Singaporean Ambassador to the United Nations, Kishore Mahbubani asked a simple question, which was also the title of his book, “Can Asians Think?” Mr. Mahbubani sought to challenge, what he perceived as, Western paternalism. He believes that Asians do not need indefinite guidance by the Western world, because Asians are capable of independent thought, and just because these thoughts may differ from the West does not mean they are the result of defective thinking. A befitting question for the coming decade is, “Can Sub-Saharan Africans think?” For many Westerners it would seem the answer is, “No”, at least as far as Africa’s relationship with China.

In 2005, the Western media began to express “concern” with the increasing Chinese presence in Sub-Sahara Africa (Africa). During this period, many foreign policy observers began to promote the idea that China is plotting to take over Africa in some neo-colonialist attempt to gain unlimited access to natural resources. For example, Karin Kortmann, a German parliamentary state secretary stated in November of 2006, “our African partners really have to watch out that they will not be facing a new process of colonization” (Cheng 2007). The same year, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, Jack Straw, made similar allegations “Most of what China has been doing in Africa today is what we did in Africa 150 years ago” (Stevenson 2006). This Sinophobic boilerplate is hyperbole, but the narrative suggests that the average African is impotent and their leaders are all iniquitous or ineffectual.