THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 148

own fast-track economic development of late, which is drawing a plethora of business in-
vestors from the world over, thus limiting Beijing's influence.
North of Mongolia, as well as north of China's three provinces of Manchuria, lies the
Russian Far East, an interminable stretch of birch forest lying between Lake Baikal and
Vladivostok. This numbing vastness, roughly twice the size of Europe, has a meager pop-
ulation of 6.7 million that is in the process of falling further to 4.5 million people. Russia,
as we have seen, expanded into this area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
during a fit of nationalist imperialism and at a time of Chinese weakness that is long past.
In few other areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its eastern third, and particularly that
part of it close to China. Yet on the other side of the frontier, inside Manchuria, are 100
million Chinese, a population density sixty-two times greater than that in eastern Siberia.
Chinese migrants have been filtering across this border. For example, the Siberian city of
Chita, north of Mongolia, has a large and growing population of ethnic Chinese. Resource
acquisition is the principal goal of Chinese foreign policy, and Russia's demographically
barren Far East is filled with large reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds, and gold.
“Russia and China might operate a tactical alliance, but there is already tension between
them over the Far East,” writes David Blair, a correspondent of London's Daily Telegraph .
“Moscow is wary of large numbers of Chinese settlers moving into this region, bringing
timber and mining companies in their wake.” 26 Here, as in Mongolia, it is not a question of
an invading army or of formal annexation, but of creeping Chinese demographic and cor-
porate control over a region, large parts of which used to be held by China during both the
Ming and Qing dynasties.
During the Cold War, border disputes between the Soviet Union and China ignited into
military clashes in which hundreds of thousands of troops were massed in this Siberian
back-of-beyond—fifty-three Soviet army divisions by 1969 on the Russian side of the
Amur and Ussuri rivers. Mao's China responded by deploying one million troops on its
side of the border, and building bomb shelters in major cities. To help relieve pressure
on his western flank, so as to concentrate on the Far East, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev
launched the policy of détente with the United States. For its part, China saw itself as vir-
tually surrounded by the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellite state of Mongolia, a pro-Soviet
North Vietnam and its own Laotian client, and pro-Soviet India. All these tensions led to
the Sino-Soviet split, which the Nixon administration was able to take advantage of in its
opening to China in 1971-1972.
Could geography once again drive apart Russia and China, whose current alliance is
mainly tactical? And could the beneficiary be, as in the past, the United States? Though
this time, with China the greater power, the United States might conceivably partner with
Russia in a strategic alliance to balance against the Middle Kingdom, so as to force Ch-
ina's attention away from the First Island Chain in the Pacific and toward its land borders.