This is a consolidated recomposition of a previous tweet reducing it by number and increasing the word count (a perk as a blue badge muppet).
The looming bust-up between China and Russia over resources and territories - a summary view over the thread.
China and Russia’s alliance are not limited to territorial issues, they compliment each other in strengths and weaknesses. China has an large population base and capital rich economy that equals the US in purchasing power. In terms of natural resources. China is very poor with little oil and natural gas and minerals to continue fuelling its industrial expansion. It has to get most of its resources from other countries, hence the need to import all of its gas via the Persian Gulf and the Malacca Straights.
Russia is the opposite of China, it has a tiny economy, equivalent in 2023 to the economy of New York City, or in China;s terms smaller than the economy of the province of QuangDang. Russia is infinitely smaller in size of Capital wealth than China and has 10 times less people, but it does have the exact opposite - a bottomless supply of the resources China needs. Russia has the largest reserves of gas on the planet and large reserves of oil and coal too, and well as copper, diamond and nickel. Most resources are available in the eastern areas of Russia - in Siberia. Russia does not have the money or people to develop these resources in the Far East.
Equipped with China’s capital, they can exploit these resources. China can afford to keep supporting Russia in their efforts to push back NATO and the West in Europe, and does. In return they build the pipelines and infrastructure to feed the resources from China and reduce their dependence to imports via Malacca. Helping Russia push back against NATO also keeps the US distracted from securing Taiwan.
This relationship is temporary though, because China and Russia are inherently disposed to being competitors and enemies, more than friends. Russia has a long history of conflict with China dating back to the Mongul Conquest in the 13th century. China has also had a long conflict with foreign powers, described as the “Century of Humiliation”. Between 1839 and 1949, China was weak, divided and fragmented. During this century the British conquered Hong Kong and the Japanese conquered Taiwan, and the century of humiliation ended in 1949 when the Communists won the war on the mainland and established the Peoples Republic. Many of the territories gained by foreign powers remained in place even though the war had ended. Hong Kong was returned to China in the 1997, while Taiwan remains outside of Chinas control to today.
These “unequal treaties” as they call them, includes one with Russia. In 1858 the Qing dynasty had a civil war, and Russia seized on the turmoil and seized a massive territory called Outer Manchuria, agreed by treaty with Russia in 1860 - it surrender the territory which includes a vast coastline containing modern day Vladivostok with it’s Russian naval base HQ of the Pacific Fleet and nuclear submarines which depend on this port to operate anywhere in the Pacific. The territory also includes important cities such as Khabarovsk. This territory locks China out from access to the Sea of Japan and is equivalent to the size of Ukraine.
China views the 1860 treaty as a humiliation and an example of territories lost to foreign powers, and wants them back to end the humiliation. In the 1960’s China and Russia fell out over the interpretation between Marxism and Leninism. In 1964 the bust up got worse when the CCP declared the territory belonged to China. In 1968 Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and published the doctrine known as the Brezhnev Document, reserving their right to invade any Communist Government that strayed too far from from the Communist movement as Moscow defined it. Mau perceived this as a licence to invade China and overthrow him as leader.
The boundary between Russia and China on this territory was marked by the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. Soviets claimed the borders were on the banks of the Chinese side and included all the islands in the river, the Chinese said the borders fell in the river’s mid point. The matter came to a head in 1969 when an island on the Chinese side called Zhenbao and the Soviets claimed was theirs and was called Damansky. The fought a war over the island with great casualties and over 10k artillery rounds fired. This was a brink of a full scaled nuclear war. Russia was worried - China had over 1 300 000 troops amassed, against Russias 350K. Moscow feared them retaking all of the territory. The crisis gradually died down, until the dispute was resolved by demarcation in 1991 - but this agreement will not last forever - after all it is an “unequal treaty”. After all, Russia greed on territories by treaty over Ukraine in 1994 and 1997 and reneged on those treaties.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 based on their “historical” claims to the territories in Crimea and the Donbas. China could do exactly the same thing. The other divergence that exists - after the fall of the USSR, 5 new countries were created, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan - all of whom moved away from Russia and towards the China, which has spent the past decade developing relations with these in the Belt and Road initiative - restoring the ancient trade routes across Central Asia. These countries are resource rich in oil and gas, and with China’s capital support, they have all built pipelines leading to China to feed their appetite for industrial expansion. All pipelines flow east towards China, supplying 15% of their entire Gas demand, reducing their reliance on importing LNG through Malacca. China takes nearly all of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan’s gas, directly competing with their former Soviet masters, who see a diminished interest of buying from China and these countries have shut Russia out.
China has overtaken Russia on trade volumes with all of these countries.
This is why 3 of them never joined Moscow’s Russia’s Eurasia Economic Union. This runs contrary to Russia’s geo-political objectives. China has cracked down on Xinjiang province bordering the Central Asian Gap, destabilised by ethic and religious differences. By 2010 the boiling point was reaches and the Chinese Government responded by harsh repression and this resulted has resulted in the Uyghur and Turkic Muslim
#Genocide, with mass concentration and re-education camps currently running with over a million incarcerated.
In 2012 China established a permanent Police presence across the border in Tajikistan in the narrow corridor that touches China. This was allegedly to stop the spread of militants and arms into Xinjiang. Tajikistan is also part of the CSTO military alliance lead by Moscow. Russia did not take this kindly, Tajikistan had granted another foreign military power to establish themselves in a CSTO territory. For now Russia has no choice but to accept China’s presence in their region and Beijing’s emerging supremacy in the region. Russia is losing influence and ground in Central Asia while it focuses on it’s invasion of territory in Europe, and appears to be prepared to accept that, for now. There is a larger divergence emerging between Russia and China, and that is the greatest problem facing China over the next century - and that is the availability of natural water to fuel its population and industrialisation. China has 20% of the worlds population but only controls 7% of the worlds natural water resources. 80 % of China’s water supplies are found exclusively in eastern China and Tibet.
With over 400 million people living in the Northern part of China where Beijing and other cities are located, but only has the local water availability equivalent to Saudis Arabia!
It suffers from water scarcity for 6-9 months of the year. It depends on imported water from pipes and aqueducts from abroad. And the effects of climate change will only make this even worse for the Chinese. In 2022, saw the lowest levels of rainfall since records began - social media exploded with pictures of Chinas longest and biggest river running dry in several locations. There aren’t many places available to import water from. Reliance on areas such as Bhutan and Nepal is not an option as they feed the even larger population of 1.4 Billion Indians with water. Most of India will be facing water shortages this century too. India would not sit idly by if China tried to take their water resources - so there is limited options for China to use this as a solution to the crisis.
That points the only solution north into the Far East and Russia, and Lake Baikal in Russia is the nearest and greatest repository of fresh water on the planet. It contains more fresh water that all of the US Great Lakes combined, a quarter of all the worlds fresh water, which could maintain China for just 50 years. Chinese started buying up property around the lakes perimeter and in 2017 they announced plans of developing local water supply pipes to China - which resulted in anger from the local population who feared the pipeline would divert all the water away to china, with more pipeline builds to come.
Russia stepped in and shut down the whole initiative. China’s continued growth with keep them interested in securing these scarce resources in Russia’s far east and this may be part of China’s deal to support Russia in it war over Ukraine. There are only 8 million people who live in Russia’s far east - half of whom live in the disputed area of Qing in cities such as Vladivostok, that China wants returned due to the unequal treaty imposed on it to surrender that land to Russia. This is in contrast to the 109million people that live in close proximity to the border of that territory. This imbalance terrifies Russia, even more so because in recent years Russia has seen over 100K people leave the Far East territory before the COVID pandemic, which has exacerbated the position, with the growth of Chinese in local jobs and companies now dominating Russians in the territory. Before the invasion of Ukraine there were already 300K chinese in the Russian far east, and that is growing exponentially as the Russians have to rely on the Chinese capital to exploit the resources in the area, mostly exported to China.
Conclusion: Russia has forced itself to becoming the junior partner on the world stage, as the European markets have all but dried up. This partnership will fail, and fail violently - as China overruns Russia in it’s own back yard and it will retake all territories seized by russia in it’s unequal treaties, cutting russia off from access to the pacific and europe.
#Putin is doomed in its poisonous embrace with
#XiJinping and
#China - and he knows it. His only way of holding onto power and not losing his life in a rebellion, is to sell off real estate and natural resources to his greatest enemy - China. Please like and share if you enjoyed this tweet, thanks for. stopping by Bletchley Park.
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... Tämä se on irvokkuuden huippu!
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Toki voi olla, että joudutaan vielä kevättä odottamaan, mutta ehkä annetaan toiveajattelua ryssälle, että voi mennä pitkälle syksyynkin, eikä keväälle. Eihän sinne mutavelliin ole mitään järkeä mennä hyökkäämään. Toisaalta ei ole myöskään järkevää odottaa kesään, kun puolustajaksi jäävät ryssät saavat kasvillisuudesta parempaa näkösuojaa.
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Tuore Starsky
