The Quiet Rivalry Between China and Russia

Cu, 11/03/2017 - 10:01 -- Uyghur1
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Source: New York Times

China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the
trade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly
ambitious because, like all grand strategies, it is aspirational. Yet the future of
Eurasia is written into its design.

This new Silk Road serves several goals of China’s leaders, who are intent on
making their country a full-fledged superpower. It is a branding operation for many
of the roads, bridges, pipelines and railroads that China has already built, linking it
with the former-Soviet-controlled countries of energy-rich Central Asia. In the
process, One Belt, One Road seeks to develop — and at the same time surround —
the Muslim region of China that abuts Central Asia.

Further westward, China intends to create an organic alliance with Iran, a state
that because of its immense size, location and population, as well as its long imperial
tradition, functions as the fulcrum for the Middle East and Central Asia.
The larger Chinese goal is to dominate Eurasia, which means relegating Russia
to a second-tier power.

China and Russia share a land border of more than 2,600 miles, an
interminable stretch of birch forest separating mainly the Russian Far East from
Chinese Manchuria, whose particulars were formally agreed upon only in the last
decade. In 1969, the dispatch of about 30 Soviet divisions to this border, and China’s
deployment of 59 divisions in response, deepened the Chinese-Soviet split and
allowed for President Richard Nixon’s opening to China and his détente with the
Soviet Union.

In few areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its far east. The ethnic Russian
population is only an estimated 6 million. Chinese migrants are moving steadily
north into this vastly underpopulated Siberian back-of-beyond, rich in the natural
gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold that China covets. China lost part of this region
to Russia only in the 19th century, when the Qing dynasty was in its death throes,
and the rest in the 20th century.

At the same time, China is vanquishing Russia in Central Asia. In the last
decade, the China National Petroleum Corporation has become Central Asia’s main
energy player. China pumps Kazakh oil to Europe and also to China through a
pipeline, and the Chinese transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to western
China. Chinese money has also been coursing through Central Asia to build power
grids and transportation infrastructure, altering the landscape and forming the
backbone of the One Belt, One Road plan.

The prize is Iran. Lying at the other end of Central Asia from China, Iran has 80
million people and straddles the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and the Persian
Gulf, providing Beijing with the incentive to build rail lines through the Iranian
plateau, make energy deals with Tehran, use Chinese state companies to excavate
Iranian mines, and send armies of entrepreneurs there. Russia’s Eurasian Economic
Union, including Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was formed in 2014
to counter China’s growing influence in Eurasia.

Russia is not only losing out to China in its far east and Central Asia, but in
Europe, too. While Moscow has been undermining the independence of the former
Soviet republics in the Baltic and Black Sea basins through subversion and military
incursions, Beijing has been strengthening trade ties throughout Europe. The Trump
administration’s aversion to free trade — combined with its apparent ambivalence
about defending European allies — has provided China with an opportunity in
Europe, further enhancing Beijing’s plans for the western terminus of One Belt, One
Road. China’s gains will weaken not only American influence in Europe, but Russian
influence, too.

For example, Greece, because of its tensions with the European Union and its
Orthodox religion, should be drifting closer to Russia. But it is slipping into China’s
economic grasp, as the port of Piraeus becomes another western endpoint of the new
Silk Road. China is also competing for nuclear power plants and other energy
infrastructure in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. President
Vladimir Putin’s compulsion to challenge the West — while China under President Xi
Jinping is quietly on the march all around him — demonstrates his strategic
shortsightedness at a time of Russian economic vulnerability.

China and Russia refer to their relationship as a “comprehensive strategic
partnership,” in which Russia supplies oil to China and the two countries hold joint
military exercises. And, officially, their relationship has rarely been better.
But trade is lopsided in China’s favor; the fall in energy prices has made China
considerably less dependent on Russia. Russia sells arms to China’s adversaries,
India and Vietnam. And China has copied Russian weapons designs.

These deeper geopolitical realities mean China and Russia will be only allies of
convenience. And because the Beijing-Moscow rivalry is long-term, understated and
focused on remote terrain, thus lacking in appeal for the news media, it is easy to
ignore.

China’s geopolitical ambitions, like Russia’s, arise out of internal insecurity. The
Chinese state is weakest in the west — that is, in historic East Turkestan — home to
the Muslim Turkic Uighur minority, which the dominant ethnic group, the Han
Chinese, view with trepidation.

Islam represents an alternative identity for the Uighurs, one independent of the
Chinese state. Unlike the Tibetans with their Dalai Lama, the Uighurs don’t have an
elite leadership with which to communicate with Beijing. Rather, they embody an
anarchic force that could be provoked into upheaval by an environmental disaster or
other emergency. China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, by joining the rest of Turkic
Central Asia economically and politically closer to China, is meant in part to deny the
Uighurs a rear base in an uprising.

China can be stopped only by its own internal demons. As Samuel P.
Huntington wrote in his classic 1968 study, “Political Order in Changing Societies,”
the more complex a society gets, the more responsive its institutions must become,
otherwise the creation of a large middle class is destabilizing.

China’s autocracy, precisely because of its successes, could face a crisis of
legitimacy as social, ethnic and religious tensions intensify in both Han and Uighur
areas, especially in the event of any further slowdowns in economic growth that
thwart the rising expectations of its people. That’s why the ultimate success of One
Belt, One Road will be determined less by what happens in Central Asia and
elsewhere than by what happens inside China itself.

The United States, which has longtime allies to defend against Chinese bullying
in East Asia and against Russian bullying in Central and Eastern Europe, is helped
by the quiet geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Moscow. Because the contest
between China and Russia is largely determined by their geographical proximity and
therefore must persist, America will have the greater possibility to maneuver,
hardening or softening its position toward each power as the situation demands.
The United States must only prevent China from dominating the Eastern
Hemisphere to the same extent that it has dominated the Western Hemisphere. But
it must do this without selling out Central Europe and parts of the Middle East to
Russia.

The solution to this conundrum for the United States lies outside geopolitics. It
is precisely because Washington has no territorial ambitions in Eurasia that
Americans are not viewed with suspicion by local populations there the way the
Chinese and Russians are. By relentlessly promoting free trade, human rights and
civil society America will gain credibility with societies undergoing rapid social
transformation across the region.

This is how the United States gains entry into Eurasia without crudely trying to
balance one power off against the other at a moment when the Chinese-Russian
rivalry is far more subtle than it was in Nixon’s time. The very economic
development that China promotes will make societies along the path of the new Silk
Road — particularly in the sterile dictatorships of Iran and Central Asia — harder to
manage, and thus to rule.

It is precisely the universal values that President Trump disdains that can now
pay geopolitical dividends. A populist-nationalist agenda that confines American
interests to North America will only marginalize the United States on the other side
of the world.

Robert D. Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a
senior adviser at Eurasia Group, is the author of the forthcoming “The Return of Marco
Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century.”

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