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- Thread starter bd popeye
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See thats the thing about these contracts, they don't mean much if you are weak. China can claim they only signed it under duress of Russia being stronger in the past or something like that. There are always ways to weasel out of contracts like this. How did Russia even get these lands in the first place? Late Qing was too weak and Russia demanded some land as payment for helping negotiate stuff. China owned Outer Mongolia in like the early 1920s but Russia took it over via force.
Now you see why Russia needs to portray itself as strong so much. Because its really only force that allows it to claim so much land and without that, we can easily argue a lot doesn't deserve to belong to it. That can be said of many nations but Russia really relies a lot. China was literally in civil war for decades and invaded by countless outsiders so it became known as a massive punching bag aka sick man of asia. And yet it all came back into one united nation. Thats how you know China has a lot more legitimacy. It also helps even if you are mongolian, tibetan, yi or hell even Uyghur, you look a lot like the rest of China compared to Russia were they really are filled with completely different looking people.
Again I support Russia winning against the west here. But their legitimacy is only as good as their ability to fight. So they better start getting their shit together coz its no longer a laughing matter. They talk a big game so I expect them to honor it.
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Myanmar would be a far better canidate because it is more valuable and developed than Mongolia despite nonstop war since independence and there are Han people there in territories that were Chinese plus Sino Tibetan brotherhood.
The most valuable commodity for China here is reputation. If they are willing to uphold a deal even when the other party is caught in a moment of weakness then other countries are going to be willing to sign deals. This is very useful when the US starts trying to get the rest of the world to boycott China and Chinese companies so I don't see any value is going for a landgrab.
Besides, it's much more useful for China to leave Vladivostok in Russia's hands than to control it themselves. As long as Russia's military has access to the Pacific, then that's an extra headache for Japan and the US to deal with so it's in China's interest to keep the current borders. But I'd say that this is a much less important factor in Beijing's calculations.
Look at this map of East Asia over time:
China's borders change very frequently in Chinese history. Qing held outer Manchuria for like a blip in Chinese history. The loss of outer Manchuria is really not a priority given a) Russia is nuclear power state, b) US is by far the biggest threat here, c) China has plenty of empty wild lands, outer Manchuria makes little to negligible difference.
Reputation huh? Now we are going back to the soft power vs hard power thing again.
You know with all that has happened in just the last few years, I am more convinced that soft power is overrated as hell and really is a second thought to hard power.
I remember people whining about how China has crap soft power and reputation and how they are jealous of places like Japan or South Korea who have it. Well now both are seen as old aging has-been vassal states with low birth rates who now need to consider asking immigrants to come to their countries to save them. South Korea has went up and fallen down in such a short time its amazing. Like they have a president who thought it was a good idea to declare martial law without a plan, Samsung and others are losing out, their sporting performance is going down hill, Kpop is no longer as cool etc.
Meanwhile China who has been slandered for years and years is suddenly "cool". Get real. The reason China is "cool" is the cumulation of decades of hard work to get its technology, living standards, infrastructure etc to world class while everyone else was mocking it. It didn't need to do a huge advertisement show of its weapons. The recent fight between India and Pakistan let China's prowess prove itself on the battlefield rather than arguing on the internet about how good it was on paper. Basically China's prowess can simply no longer be denied and now people are forced to accept it.
Anyway where I am going with this is if China was to do something, its less to do with reputation and more to do with being practical. It is not practical to start landgrabbing Russia when it has its hands full already with US, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan and even India. China already has enough guys to deal with, it doesn't need to make another one. Not having to worry about the north or west parts of China is something it has almost never seen before.
Its just frustrating to watch Russia at the moment given how good it was on paper. Russia is strong enough so it doesn't need China's help etc. Thats fine but please actually live up to it. Otherwise its like a teammate who says he can handle it and it turns out he can't so now the team is fucked.
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What type of truck did they use? Like civilian?
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I read in a twtr post before that the rare card is a last resort type of card, and once used, must be use completely?
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Like self destruct??
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Russians need to scan QR codes to pass, just like China did during the epidemic.
Completely digital payment may not be possible, but it needs to be implemented at least in the business field such as logistics.
so that problems can be quickly identified and responded to from big data.
Completely digital payment may not be possible, but it needs to be implemented at least in the business field such as logistics.
so that problems can be quickly identified and responded to from big data.
If people insist on engaging in the geopolitical equivalent of map-painting as a mental exercise, they might at least do themselves the courtesy of applying some imagination while doing so.
The Sino-Soviet confrontation led to the militarization of China’s entire northern and western borders, becoming an existential threat that preoccupied the entire generation of Chinese leadership from Mao to Deng. This tension was only resolved shortly before the collapse of the USSR, through the joint demilitarization of the border by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev. If one reads through the speeches, internal meeting minutes, and memoirs from the period, it is clear that all the major Chinese leaders from Mao to Zhou Enlai to Deng, genuinely believed the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to China than either the West or the Chiang regime in Taiwan. The fact that China went to a border war with Vietnam, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, shows this was not simply some public posturing to strengthen ties with the United States in the emerging triangular diplomacy. Rather, Chinese strategic thinking truly saw a Soviet-aligned Vietnam as an existential risk, one that could allow China to be squeezed or blackmailed by the Soviets from both its north and south like a sandwich under pressure.
What proved fortunate was that Russian historical revisionism regarding the Soviet period allowed both sides to effectively wipe the slate clean of the institutional hostility created by the Sino-Soviet split. To jeopardize this by restoring a hostile frontier over claiming Vladivostok and Outer Manchuria, thereby reshaping China’s entire strategic depth for the worse, is a pathetically poor trade. The lesson of the Sino-Soviet split is that neither states benefitted from the constant paranoia and hijacking of strategic resources caused by burden of militarizing their gargantuan adjacent borders and that it is better for the two states, so long as they mutually persist, to maintain at mininum a cordial relationships so that third-parties can't use this friction to take advantage of either of them like the US did during the first Cold War. Yes, it is true that on the Chinese domestic internet, you occasionally encounter the Outer Manchuria reclamationist types who, oddly enough, always seem to prioritize this misadventure above the far more consequential and pertinent national goals such as reunification with Taiwan, securing the South China Sea, liberating the Ryukyus, or even pursuing wildly ambitious but strategically meaningful dreams like gaining Australia. Oddly enough.
Outer Manchuria is currently worthless territory. But it will not always be. In 100 to 200 years, when climate change has rendered much of the land below 30 degrees north and above the equator uninhabitable due to near-perpetual wet bulb temperatures, when sea level rise has made it necessary to wall off China’s entire coastline because the central China plains are geographically barely above sea level, and when the thawing of northern permafrost opens up new habitable zones, then Outer Manchuria will become valuable and gain real strategic and economic significance in terms of human habitation.
Of course, in the event that Russia were to suddenly disappear, Thanos-snapped out of existence, from the map, China shouldn't be blamed for not hesitating in claiming its northern territories. But given that Russia is a nuclear power and under the premise that both states continue to exist in the current territorial dynamics, it is in China’s interest to take a more imaginative approach to its relationship with Russia. It took Europe a century to go from its millennia of hostilities that led to two continent-wide wars into pursuing a political union. The main obstacle to something similar between China and Russia will be racism and cultural chauvinism, particularly on the Russian side. But one to two centuries is a very long time, and as was the case with the EU, behind the carrot of a negotiated union could lie, for Russia, the stick of China's unilateral and unconditional climate change-driven annexation by necessity at great potential bloodshed to both nuclear states. The Sino-Soviet split taught both states, just like the World Wars taught Europe, that having the other as an adversary is a strategic nightmare that should be avoided. Even in the current ambiguous “alliance but not quite alliance” relationship that leaves both sides wanting and skeptical, the long-term potential for a hypothetical Eurasian union is arguably stronger and more plausible than Europe’s becoming the European Union was in the 1800s or even early 1900s. Frankly, if two centuries of sustained and cordial cooperation still isn’t enough to overcome racist white Russian resistance to the notion of integration with Asians, then there's not much left to be said about the racial coexistence of humanity.
The prize for such a long-term vision would not just be Outer Manchuria, but the entirety of Siberia up to the Arctic Sea coast. In one or two centuries, given the current trajectory of climate change, China may indeed be pressed to consider relocating a large portion of its population northward. Under the premise that both states persist in their current territorial forms, the real question is whether China should try to nibble away at Russian territory in the hopes of avoiding a nuclear response and perhaps eventually reclaiming some parts of Outer Manchuria at great cost, or whether it should invest in a long-term diplomatic architecture that positions it to eventually achieve something far more ambitious: the entirety of Northeast Asia through diplomacy.
The Sino-Soviet confrontation led to the militarization of China’s entire northern and western borders, becoming an existential threat that preoccupied the entire generation of Chinese leadership from Mao to Deng. This tension was only resolved shortly before the collapse of the USSR, through the joint demilitarization of the border by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev. If one reads through the speeches, internal meeting minutes, and memoirs from the period, it is clear that all the major Chinese leaders from Mao to Zhou Enlai to Deng, genuinely believed the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to China than either the West or the Chiang regime in Taiwan. The fact that China went to a border war with Vietnam, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, shows this was not simply some public posturing to strengthen ties with the United States in the emerging triangular diplomacy. Rather, Chinese strategic thinking truly saw a Soviet-aligned Vietnam as an existential risk, one that could allow China to be squeezed or blackmailed by the Soviets from both its north and south like a sandwich under pressure.
What proved fortunate was that Russian historical revisionism regarding the Soviet period allowed both sides to effectively wipe the slate clean of the institutional hostility created by the Sino-Soviet split. To jeopardize this by restoring a hostile frontier over claiming Vladivostok and Outer Manchuria, thereby reshaping China’s entire strategic depth for the worse, is a pathetically poor trade. The lesson of the Sino-Soviet split is that neither states benefitted from the constant paranoia and hijacking of strategic resources caused by burden of militarizing their gargantuan adjacent borders and that it is better for the two states, so long as they mutually persist, to maintain at mininum a cordial relationships so that third-parties can't use this friction to take advantage of either of them like the US did during the first Cold War. Yes, it is true that on the Chinese domestic internet, you occasionally encounter the Outer Manchuria reclamationist types who, oddly enough, always seem to prioritize this misadventure above the far more consequential and pertinent national goals such as reunification with Taiwan, securing the South China Sea, liberating the Ryukyus, or even pursuing wildly ambitious but strategically meaningful dreams like gaining Australia. Oddly enough.
Outer Manchuria is currently worthless territory. But it will not always be. In 100 to 200 years, when climate change has rendered much of the land below 30 degrees north and above the equator uninhabitable due to near-perpetual wet bulb temperatures, when sea level rise has made it necessary to wall off China’s entire coastline because the central China plains are geographically barely above sea level, and when the thawing of northern permafrost opens up new habitable zones, then Outer Manchuria will become valuable and gain real strategic and economic significance in terms of human habitation.
Of course, in the event that Russia were to suddenly disappear, Thanos-snapped out of existence, from the map, China shouldn't be blamed for not hesitating in claiming its northern territories. But given that Russia is a nuclear power and under the premise that both states continue to exist in the current territorial dynamics, it is in China’s interest to take a more imaginative approach to its relationship with Russia. It took Europe a century to go from its millennia of hostilities that led to two continent-wide wars into pursuing a political union. The main obstacle to something similar between China and Russia will be racism and cultural chauvinism, particularly on the Russian side. But one to two centuries is a very long time, and as was the case with the EU, behind the carrot of a negotiated union could lie, for Russia, the stick of China's unilateral and unconditional climate change-driven annexation by necessity at great potential bloodshed to both nuclear states. The Sino-Soviet split taught both states, just like the World Wars taught Europe, that having the other as an adversary is a strategic nightmare that should be avoided. Even in the current ambiguous “alliance but not quite alliance” relationship that leaves both sides wanting and skeptical, the long-term potential for a hypothetical Eurasian union is arguably stronger and more plausible than Europe’s becoming the European Union was in the 1800s or even early 1900s. Frankly, if two centuries of sustained and cordial cooperation still isn’t enough to overcome racist white Russian resistance to the notion of integration with Asians, then there's not much left to be said about the racial coexistence of humanity.
The prize for such a long-term vision would not just be Outer Manchuria, but the entirety of Siberia up to the Arctic Sea coast. In one or two centuries, given the current trajectory of climate change, China may indeed be pressed to consider relocating a large portion of its population northward. Under the premise that both states persist in their current territorial forms, the real question is whether China should try to nibble away at Russian territory in the hopes of avoiding a nuclear response and perhaps eventually reclaiming some parts of Outer Manchuria at great cost, or whether it should invest in a long-term diplomatic architecture that positions it to eventually achieve something far more ambitious: the entirety of Northeast Asia through diplomacy.