Russian companies clamor to sign deals over Siberian resources — including iron, coal and timber — to sell into the insatiable Chinese market. Russian oil, too, is an increasingly sought-after commodity passing through Siberia to China.
For resource-starved China, overland supply of Russian metals and oil is an important diversification away from seaborne shipments. The transborder commerce in this region helped China surpass Germany to become Russia’s largest trading partner early last year, with $39.5 billion in goods and services passing between the two countries in 2009.
Last year the Russian Far East was the only region in Russia for which investment grew, rather than contracting. As a further sign of Russia-China interdependence, on Thursday, the two nations’ presidents, Dmitri A. Medvedev and Hu Jintao, plan to meet in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for a conference of their regional security alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
In one sense, this is good since it gets China looking inland and away from the sea (and us, with our allies and fleet in the Western Pacific). If China looks inland for resources to diversify from their sea lines of communication that China feels is vulnerable to our Navy, China will split their attention and military capacity between the land and the sea, hopefully becoming inadequate to match any of the military threats they face on land and sea.
On the other hand, if China becomes reliant on Russian raw materials, the Chinese might decide that the leverage Moscow has is too great--and that the Russians are too weak to hold their Far East. China might go to war to control those resources. If China wins, they have a much better position with control of large portions of the Russian Far East that gives them more avenues to threaten Japan i.n addition to the raw materials captured.
Or it could result in a nuclear war if Russia decides their conventional inferiority can only be bolstered by nukes to defend Russian territory. And then China shoots back, of course.
I'm just very uncomfortable with a weak Russia becoming so important economically to a strong China.
