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Friday, November 05, 2021

Say Their Name

If the Russian government won't worry about China, we should remind the Russians of why they should worry every chance we get.

When you're right, you're right!

China's and Russia's rivalries with the US and its partners have helped foster cooperation, but they have their own historical disputes, which, along with China's ascendancy, should worry Moscow, according to Burns, who was senior director for Russia on the National Security Council in the 1990s.

"My numbers may be a little bit off, but I think there are 6 or 7 million Russians living east of the Ural Mountains in that vast expanse, and there are 300 or 400 million Chinese living below them," Burns told lawmakers on Wednesday. "The Russians are going to have to worry, long-term, about economic domination of Russia by China."

"The Russians ought to be worried about a Chinese nuclear-weapons buildup in the western part of China, about the hypersonic missile test" earlier this year, "and the fact that China is completely unconstrained," Burns added.

About those "historical disputes," that would be huge swathes of the Russian Far East conquered from China. That is the most glaring example of the "century of humiliation" still haunting the Chinese Communist Party

Do the Russians really think they are too special to be prominent in China's pantheon of predators from the Century of Humiliation? 

China is using Russia. Have the Chinese mastered jet engine production? If so, the Russians need to worry about the day when China no longer needs to strip post-USSR Russia for high tech parts that China can't make for itself.

That day might be less than five years away.