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early years of Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure. Before that, the last time the central authority showed any interest in the region was during the reigns of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The emperors had extensive plans for regional expansion, but their schemes were derailed by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and by the 1917 revolutions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Russian Federation came into being, nobody in the Kremlin was particularly concerned about the Russian Far East. The region’s governors have always been extremely intransigent and for a long time mafia groups were the most powerful force in the area. The region’s economy had very few links to the rest of Russia: locals made a living by smuggling natural resources, shuttle trading with neighbours, and reselling second-hand Japanese cars.
Until recently, Russian officials and oligarchs did not have much interest in East Asia either. Raised for centuries with a Eurocentric worldview, the Russian elites holiday in the Mediterranean, keep their money in Swiss or Cypriot bank accounts, and send their children to British schools. Russia’s dependence on European gas and oil markets has also ensured that the focus remains on Europe. Asia seems a long way from Moscow, and has been seen only as a bargaining chip to use in dealing with the West. For example, after the “gas war” with Ukraine in 2006, the Kremlin successfully used a threat to send hydrocarbons to Asia instead of Europe to force European clients to renegotiate their long-term contracts. But Gazprom subsequently seemed to forget about its grandiose plans to build two pipelines to Asia and instead spent several years trying in a desultory fashion to get the Chinese to pay European prices for its natural resources.
The situation began to change after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. In 2009, as Europe started to buy less Russian energy, Russia’s economy contracted by nearly 9 percent. Over the same period, China’s GDP grew by 8.7 percent. At that point, Russian officials started to think seriously about the changing role of the Asia-Pacific region, while the oil and gas oligarchs took a new look at these dynamic emerging markets. However, even as it became clear that Russia stood to benefit from greater dealings with Asia, the question remained as to what form the country’s integration into Asia would take. Russian elites have still not come up with an answer. The Ukraine crisis and its possible implications for the Russian economy make pivoting to Asia one of the key priorities of the government. But so far it seems that Moscow has no clue how to accommodate its own conflicting interests in the region.
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In late 2010, on the initiative of then President Medvedev, Russia developed a new strategy aimed at strengthening its position in Asia. The document that detailed the new approach was classified as secret, but according to officials familiar with it, it said Russia should not simply provide raw materials but rather build infrastructure in East Asia and export high-tech products there. In conversation just after the APEC summit in September 2012, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov told me that Russia was already exporting sophisticated equipment to Asia, and in the future, would begin exporting services, including education.
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich has said that Russia would only allow Asian investors to participate in infrastructure projects in the Russian Far East if similar projects are assigned to Russian contractors in Asia. Russia has repeatedly tried to establish a programme of common economic projects with Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. One reason why the programme has never been agreed is that each time, Russia includes a list of “world-class”
roads and railways that must be built by Russian companies in South-East Asia.
The vision of Russia as a major European power in Asia, looking on countries like China and India from the perspective of an “older brother”, has its roots in Soviet times – the same time in which the worldview of many of contemporary Russia’s decision-makers was being formed. Many of them still hold onto this image of Russia’s relationship with Asia as if nothing had changed. They can even find some support for this nostalgic picture: Russia is still building nuclear power plants in China, India, and Vietnam and still selling high-tech weaponry and electrical equipment in the region.
In fact, however, they are deluding themselves. In 1990, China was the main buyer of Russian arms, but by the 2000s, sales had started to decline. The Chinese began to copy Russian models and learned to design their own weapons. Sooner or later, Chinese engineers will learn how to make even complex equipment that they are not at present able to produce, such as engines for fighter planes. The Tianwan nuclear power plant, which Russia is building in China, provides an instructive example of the changing relationship between Russian and Chinese industries.
Local production share on its third and fourth blocks is at an unprecedented 70 percent; Rosatom (the Russian State Nuclear Energy Corporation) will build only the heart of the station, because the Chinese already know how to do the rest themselves. In the medium term, it is even possible that Chinese nuclear power companies will start competing with Russia in emerging markets.
These problems are compounded by Moscow’s inadequate perception of the supposed Chinese threat to the Russian Far East. Of special concern to the 81
Russian administration is the difference in demographic potential. The Russian Far East makes up one-third of Russian territory, but it is home to just 4 percent of the country’s population: 6.2 million people, of whom 2 million live in the warm Primorsky province. On the other side of the border, in the three neighbouring provinces of north-eastern China (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning), nearly 110 million people live in just 804,000 square kilometres. The contrast is fuelled by the exaggeration of data on Chinese migrants to Russia. Some alarmists put the number of Chinese immigrants at up to 2 million people, but the 2010 census puts the figure at just under 29,000 people. Expert estimates suggest a maximum of 500,000 Chinese people in Russia, including tourists, students, and seasonal migrants, with the majority concentrated in central Russia and especially in Moscow.