The Sino-Russian Alliance: A Temporary Convenience or a Long-Term Strategy?
The world is a complex stage of power dynamics, alliances, and rivalries. Among the most intriguing relationships is the one between China and Russia. Historically, these two nations have had a tumultuous relationship, marked by periods of cooperation and conflict. However, in recent years, they have been seen as close allies, united by shared interests and common adversaries. But is this alliance a temporary convenience or a long-term strategy?
The Sino-Russian alliance, as it stands today, is a product of the current geopolitical climate. Both nations find themselves at odds with the West, particularly the United States, and this shared adversity has brought them closer. However, this alliance is not a natural state of affairs. Historically, China and Russia have been more predisposed to being major rivals than friends.
Russia has a long history of conflicts with powers in East Asia, dating back to the Mongol conquest of Russia during the 13th century and spanning well into the 20th century with wars against Japan. China, too, has had a long history of conflict with European powers, notably during a period referred to as their “Century of Humiliation” (1839–1949), when China was weak, divided, and at the mercy of foreign powers.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doctrine states that this period of humiliation ended in 1949 when the Communists emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil War. However, many of the territorial concessions that pre-communist China was forced into making with foreign powers remained even after it supposedly ended. Taiwan, seized from China by Japan in 1895, remained de facto outside of Beijing’s control, while Hong Kong remained under British rule until it was peacefully returned in 1997.
One of the most unequal treaties forced upon China during its Century of Humiliation came from Russia. In 1858, the Qing dynasty, under duress from the Russian Empire, agreed to surrender a huge piece of land known as Outer Manchuria. This land would eventually become incredibly important to the Russians, housing big cities like Habarovsk and Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean and the home base of the Russian Pacific Fleet.
The 1860 treaty that surrendered all of this land to Russia under duress locked the Chinese out from being able to directly access the Sea of Japan, limiting them instead to just the East and South China Seas. For a century and a half since that annexation, many Chinese nationalists, including Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, have never forgotten what happened and have labeled the loss of Outer Manchuria as yet another of China’s unequal treaties to foreign powers.
In the 1960s, China and the Soviet Union’s relationship began to deteriorate significantly over their different interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. Mao privately made comments that the Russians had unilaterally absorbed Outer Manchuria into their country a century ago and that the issue had still never been resolved. His comments sparked outrage in Moscow and led to a crisis along the Sino-Soviet border, bringing the world’s two biggest communist countries to the brink of full-scale nuclear war.
The border remained theoretically in dispute between them until it was formally demarcated in 1991. But just because they both finally legally agreed on the border in 1991 doesn’t mean that they will always legally agree on it forever. Russia itself agreed on the internationally recognized borders with Ukraine through multiple treaties, only to then renege on those treaties based on their supposedly historical rather than legal claims to Ukrainian territories like Crimea and the Donbass.
The historical strains over Outer Manchuria are far from the only place of divergence between Moscow and Beijing. After the Soviet Union collapsed, five new countries emerged in Central Asia. Over the decades since then, most of them have moved away from Russia and gotten closer to China. China has spent the years carefully cultivating its Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to restore the ancient Silk Road trade routes running across Central Asia.
The region is rich in hydrocarbon resources like oil and gas that the ever-hungry and resource-poor Chinese economy needs to keep itself running. With Chinese backing, pipelines for oil and gas were built from hydrocarbon-rich countries like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan that now flow east towards China. China now imports around 15 percent of its entire natural gas demand from these three countries, greatly helping Beijing in overcoming its heavy reliance on more vulnerable liquefied natural gas imports coming in from the sea through the Malacca Strait.
China has also overtaken Russia in terms of trade volumes with all of the Central Asian states since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequently, all of the Central Asian states have a viable and more attractive economic alternative to Russia these days. This is complicated for Russia. Geographic control over Central Asia has been an imperative foreign policy goal of Moscow’s for centuries because it contains yet another of the most major historical invasion routes into the flat Eurasian steppe.
However, Russia also needs to accommodate China’s growing interests in the region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s objectives in Central Asia span far beyond simply acquiring the region’s rich hydrocarbons. China also wanted to stabilize their turbulent Xinjiang Province, a region racked by internal violence and instability fueled by ethnic and religious differences from the majority Han Chinese government.
By the early 2010s, the instability in Xinjiang had reached a boiling point, and the Chinese Communist Party decided to respond with harsh repression. The Chinese People’s Armed Police established a permanent presence just across from their border in Tajikistan along the Tajik side of the Wakhan Corridor. Their objective in doing this was to stop the spread of Islamist militants and arms flowing into turbulent Xinjiang from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This move was a severe affront to the Russians and a sign of their growing displacement in Central Asia at the hands of the Chinese. But for now, Russia has little other choice but to accept the new reality in the region and Beijing’s emerging supremacy. Moscow’s more important focus is on the perceived fight against the West across the European Plain, and losing influence and ground in Central Asia to China appears a price they are willing to pay in order to maintain that focus.
But a price they may not be so willing to pay will be on another major point of divergence between them in the not-so-distant future. One of the greatest macro problems that will be facing China this century is a major shortage of available water. China itself is currently home to around 20 percent of the human population, but China also only controls around seven percent of the world’s available surface freshwater.
Around 80 percent of China’s limited water supplies are found exclusively in southern China and Tibet. The North China Plain, where big cities like Beijing and Tianjin are located, is one of the most heavily populated locations on the planet with more than 400 million people who call it home. Yet, the whole plain only has enough local water resources to match the water consumption rate in Saudi Arabia, a desert country home to less than one-tenth of the population. All the rest of the North China Plain’s water supply must come in from other parts of China via pipes and aqueducts or from abroad.
The warming effects of climate change throughout the rest of the 21st century will only inevitably make this situation even worse with time. In 2022, a record-shattering drought in China saw the lowest levels of rainfall within the Yangtze River Valley since record-keeping began back in 1961. Viral pictures and images emerged of China’s longest and greatest river running almost completely dry in several of its locations, a potential harbinger of China’s looming generational water crisis still to come.
The big problem is that there aren’t many places around China for them to acquire more water from. The nearest available sources of vast freshwater resources are to the south in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, and Bhutan, all of which China already has fairly adversarial relationships with and which are also located far away from the North China Plain where the water scarcity crisis will be the most severely acute.
India would never sit idly by if China attempted to move in and take over what precious few water resources they have available. And so, the fight here in this direction will be ferocious. Those facts naturally point the direction of China’s water anxieties north into the Russian Far East.
Somewhat luckily for China, there is a massive body of easily accessible and underutilized freshwater here very near to their borders, Lake Baikal. By volume, this is by far the largest lake on the planet, with more freshwater available within it than all of the North American Great Lakes combined. It alone contains nearly a quarter of the entire Earth’s surface freshwater and could sustain the entire global population with drinking water for around 50 years.
The Chinese have already been eyeing it. In the 2010s, a state-owned Chinese company called AquaSib began buying up land around the lake’s perimeter. Then in 2017, they announced plans to construct a pipeline from it to China that would deliver water supplies. But the proposal spurred angry protests from the local Russian population who feared that the pipeline would only become the start of a long project to divert the lake’s water away to China through more pipelines still to come. The Russian government decided to step in and shut down the whole thing, and no water pipelines from the lake have so far ever been built.
But as climate change continues to reduce the water supply for hundreds of millions of people in China’s arid North Plain and as China’s roaring economy continues to demand ever greater amounts of energy inputs like oil, gas, and coal, China’s interest in the vast water and energy resources in the nearby and sparsely populated Russian Far East will inevitably continue to grow.
Today, in the 21st century, there are only 8 million Russians across the entire Far East, half of whom live just within the former Qing-controlled Outer Manchuria. This is in stark contrast to the more than 109 million Chinese who live within just the three Chinese provinces that border the Far East, outnumbering the Russians by more than a 13 to 1 ratio. The Russian Far East is as resource-rich as China is poor and is sparsely populated as China is densely populated, and the weight of that calculus has always been alarming to Moscow.
And then, only to make matters even worse from Moscow’s perspective, the Far East’s population has been steadily shrinking with time. Between 2012 and 2018, the Russian Far East lost more than a hundred thousand people, and that was even before the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine began killing or driving even more people away and restricting Russia’s access to Western capital.
Putin’s Russia has been left with little other choice then but to begin opening up the Far East to Chinese investment and labor, which has long been resisted in Russia over concerns, misplaced or not, of the area becoming demographically dominated by the numerically superior Chinese. For decades, these fears remained mostly unfounded, as before the invasion of Ukraine, there were perhaps as few as only three hundred thousand Chinese migrants in the Russian Far East compared to the more than 8 million Russians.
But the more and more that Russia has to rely on China to provide capital and labor to develop the resources in the Far East that will be mostly getting exported to China, and the more Russia has to shift away from Europe and towards relying on China’s cash to keep their government operating, the more Russia begins to force itself into becoming China’s junior partner on the world stage, a fact that couldn’t possibly be lost on Beijing.
Now, because Russia is so much more desperate for this relationship than China is, it will be firmly up to China to decide the relationship’s extent and course. So long as they each share a common enemy in the United States, with more important front lines to worry about in Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific, they are likely to remain closely aligned, with Russia just having no other alternative to choose from and China wishing to keep its northern flank secure and continue accessing cheap Russian and Central Asian resources coming in from overland to help overcome its heavy reliance on maritime energy imports through the Malacca Strait.
But without the US as a common enemy, China and Russia are far more predisposed to being rivals than friends. At the moment, China would like to keep Putin’s regime in power in the Kremlin because they’re basically just giving Beijing everything they want right now. They’re distracting the United States away from the Indo-Pacific with a major war in Europe, they’re giving China free economic reign in Central Asia, and they’re selling China enormously discounted oil and gas supplies while they’re building even more gas pipelines into China to increase the flows further.
But if that ever stops in the future, if Putin gets removed from power and a new government takes over that’s less friendly to Beijing, then all bets are suddenly off. China has cited its historical claims, no matter how legally tenuous, as a justification for its vast territorial claims in other theaters, like in the South China Sea. It is always possible in the future that if Beijing finds itself in a position where it is the senior partner in an alliance with a desperate and ostracized Russia, where Beijing wields an outsized influence as the number one customer by far of Russia’s energy-based economy, that Beijing can make certain demands from Russia then Moscow couldn’t possibly refuse.
In this future, if the Russians ever decide to stop or slow down the deliveries of energy and water resources to China or raise their prices, they may find themselves at the mercy of a revisionist China who suddenly decides to invoke their historical claims to Outer Manchuria once again, and by proxy, perhaps even more of the almost uninhabited Russian Far East beyond Outer Manchuria as well. If Russia finds itself in a weakened geopolitical position, with a military disgraced by a disastrously failed war, a terminal demographic decline that they can’t possibly reverse, and an economy completely based around selling resources to China, what other answer than “yes” could they possibly give an aggressive and expansionist China making territorial demands of them?
A formal alliance with China is a very, very dangerous one for this exact reason, and it’s likely why the Kremlin will continue to sell resources to China and cooperate with them to an extent in the near term. But it’s also why long-term cooperation over the span of decades between them is highly unlikely. The historical fault lines around Outer Manchuria, Russian fears of China’s demographic superiority, China’s displacement of Russian influence in Central Asia, and the looming water crisis in the North China Plain all point towards divergence between Moscow and Beijing in the eventual future.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to go badly and weakens Russia even further, all China has to do is sit by and play the long game as Russia and its resources are forced into shackling itself further and further to Beijing. The invasion of Ukraine has certainly been going terribly for the Russians. In September of 2022, the Ukrainian Armed Forces quietly built up troops for a surprise counter-offensive against the Russians in the north, which was complicated by the fact that they decided to organize it without informing the United States, who is providing them with most of their intelligence and supplies.
Nonetheless, and to the surprise of nearly everyone, the Ukrainians quickly saw runaway success after they attacked. In a matter of only three weeks, the Ukrainians smashed through the Russian front lines and retook a Montenegro-sized piece of their land back. And almost simultaneously, the Ukrainians launched another dramatic and successful counter-offensive down in the south that saw them manage to recapture the city of Kherson, the only regional capital of any Ukrainian oblast that the Russians were ever able to capture after their initial invasion.
In conclusion, the Sino-Russian alliance is a complex and dynamic relationship that is shaped by a multitude of factors. While the two nations currently find themselves in a position of cooperation, the historical, demographic, and resource-related challenges suggest that this alliance may not be sustainable in the long term.
