The balance of forces in the Far East has shifted away from Russia. The populations on either side of the border give China a huge advantage in numbers. Russian raw materials are needed by China. And China ultimately believes those lands were stolen from China.
Yet the trend of Chinese settlers moving in to Russia's Far East has apparently ended and reversed:
With the Soviet collapse of 1991 a fading memory, fears that a rising China might colonize and eventually annex the east are scoffed at by local experts - even if Moscow occasionally plays up the perceived threat to Russia's territorial integrity.
"We still face the task of defending our far eastern territory from excessive expansion by citizens of bordering states," Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev intoned at a cabinet meeting last month after returning from a trip to Vladivostok, where he opened the Russky Island bridge to traffic.
"There are fewer Chinese here than there were 10 years ago," replied sinologist Viktor Larin, adding that low-paid jobs were now being taken by migrant laborers from former-Soviet Central Asia and nearby North Korea. The Chinatowns of Russia's far east had all but disappeared, he said, as migrants were lured home by economic growth rates more than twice as high as Russia's.
The contrast on each side of the border is stark, the Chinese territories booming and drawing in ever more workers while the Russian Far East struggles with the drift westwards.
China's more than 1.3 billion population needs Russia's Siberian and far eastern natural resources, the oil, the minerals and timber , and "it's cheaper to buy them than to fight for them," said Larin.
"They don't need to settle here."
Fears China might occupy swathes of Russia's eastern territory were, he said, a "collective, subconscious myth".
It's interesting that the settlers have reversed the post-Soviet trend. That lessens the threat of creeping annexation as Russians lose ground in the cities and towns of the region.
I'm going to have to look for information on this to revise my thinking on the Far East as a potential Chinese threat to Russia.
But even if China finds it easier to buy Russian raw materials, if China ever feels Russia isn't selling those raw materials in a quantity that China feels it needs at a price it feels it should pay, intervention could seem like a rational response. If Russia ever cuts off exports to exert pressure on China, China could also feel it has no choice.
Remember, in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo nearly forty years ago, we contemplated invading the oil fields if our economy was ever threatened by a future cut off of oil exports. (Heck, I still have a board game based around that scenario.)
China would have added justification if they want to raise their old claims that the land was unfairly stolen from them.
Or, with Chinese prosperity in easy sight of Russia's backwater provinces, might local Russians choose to loosen ties to distant and uncaring Moscow in exchange for the opportunity to plug into the economic powerhouse to the south?
China's threat to Russia's Far East may be far more in the background than I assumed--especially the threat of a civilian invasion that swamps ethnic Russians with Chinese migrants. But I don't think the threat is just a myth. It's certainly bigger than the so-called threat that NATO poses which Moscow bleats about all too regularly.
