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‘You Two Deserve Each Other’: Russia, China, and the Impending Fight Over Vladivostok
It seems that Xi Jinping’s move to a more openly aggressive foreign policy is extending in every direction, not just to his Southwestern neighbor India, but to his Northern ally, Russia. The PRC is now claiming past (and hinting at proper present) ownership of one of Russia’s major Pacific port cities, Vladivostok (Владивосток), on the basis of Qing rule in the territory. (For those who are unfamiliar with Chinese dynasties, the Qing were the final emperors of China and ruled from 1644 until 1912, but the territory under question was annexed by Russia in the 1860 Treaty of Beijing and Han people, who constitute(d) the majority of China’s population, had long been banned from entry by their Manchu rulers. Additionally, the Chinese Empire was not the first or last territorial entity to claim or assert ownership in the region). What does this bode for Russia and China individually, and their mutual relations?
>As a disclaimer, I understand very little Chinese, basically nothing beyond the ability to politely navigate a grocery store/restaurant and introduce myself, so my analysis will mostly fall on the Russian side of the issue, where I have a far superior linguistic arsenal. But, let’s begin by situating this (maybe) surprising turn of events within a broader context. For the sake of some minimal amount of brevity, I’ll summarize the pre-1949 relationship by saying that it was a mixed bag at the official level (borders were not firmly set in the pre and early modern worlds, and even beyond then people at a local level generally continue to interact regardless of their government’s wishes), and by the late 19th century favored Russia as the richer and more Westernized/militarily superior power.
Skipping a bit ahead, relations between the PRC and the USSR were often about as cosy as the climate of the Russian Far East. Naturally, the two largest Communist powers in the world were allies, and the Soviets sent aid to Mao when he was fighting the Kuomintang, but even then Stalin was stingy in the amounts that he sent, and as the years went on he hardly became more friendly. Mao, when he visited Russia, was made to feel like a lesser entity in all of his meetings with Uncle Joe, something that was particularly damaging to relations when the Chinese despot had such singular control, and in general the Soviets did not hesitate in displaying a paternalistic attitude towards the newer members of the Marxist-Leninist camp, encouraging technological and educational exchange programs but also emphasizing their superiority as longer standing, stricter communists and a more advanced society.
This rubbed the Chinese wrong in almost every possible way. Although Mao declared eagerness to remake Sino culture, he also embraced Confucian sayings and traditional values/cultural forms when they conformed with his goals, and his (and many others) sense of Chinese/Han national pride was offended by such an attitude from the Soviets, a society that Imperial China had regarded as barbaric and backwards only a few centuries previous. A whiff of colonial paternalism, a great sin in the Communist handbook, was also in the air. With the death of Stalin in 1953, and Khrushchev’s denouncement of him three years later, Mao felt more at ease to go his own way. From then on, relations were often less than cordial between the two great powers, and they competed for ideological purity, allies, and, briefly in 1969, territory.
Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, a more ‘special’ relationship has emerged, with various treaties of friendship, mutual trade and infrastructure projects, and close cooperation in the political, military, and global arenas. In order to answer our overarching question of “how”, we first have to ask “why”, when things have been going so well. As with China’s actions on India, my estimation is that things taking a turn for the worse was a huge part of the motivation to move in this direction. Xi takes great pride in his inscrutable image in the West, much as Putin does his man of steel/175 IQ political master variation, but he is also an admirer of Mao, and a staunch Han Chinese nationalist. Mao often took bold action when the situation internally in China was very bad (famines, mass purges, etc.) and Xi sees an opportunity to do the same at a time when China’s image on the world stage is very poor, and there is much fear internally because of the virus and the economic and social upsets that it has caused.
In other words, make moves that will inspire enmity when the global perception is poor in hopes that they will be swept under the rug with the ‘bigger’ issue of the virus when the time for handing out blame comes, and China asserts its vast wealth and propaganda machine to begin to shift it. Xi is also at a certain disadvantage dealing with Russia that he might not be with more firmly Western powers, because it is a bit harder to make the charges of imperialism that often inspire submission stick. The Chinese love to bandy about accusations of imperialism and reprimands for past wrongs on the part of their enemies, but there is a two-fold problem with them in relation to Russia. (This would also be a good time to acknowledge that China has a long history of colonialism just as brutal as any Western power in East and Southeast Asia, and a history of race/color based discrimination that far predates the arrival of any Europeans. The assertion that racism began in China with the coming of Europeans is laughably degrading, and if you want proof or a greater understanding, I heartily recommend that you read Construction of Racial Identities in China And Japan by Frank Dikotter).
Firstly, the Russians can easily counter that they were just as much victims of, and pawns in, the game of Western imperialism in the 19th century, and that many of their own aggressive actions were based on a desire to survive and/or protect pan-Slav interests. In another direction, the culture and educational milieu of Putin’s Russia is not particularly interested in seeking forgiveness for Russian expansionism, and places national pride above any sense of modern relational ethics or culpability for horrific historical events. So simply guilting based on imperialism won’t get them very far. Another push behind Xi’s move is a simple desire for revenge. China feels that it was badly treated by Russia, both in its imperial and communist forms, and wants to extract retribution by either making Russia look less powerful by handing over the city, or conflictual by refusing to negotiate. Xi made a power play similar to Putin’s current one with the nationwide constitutional referendum, when he managed to get the term limits of the presidency removed, and knowing that this made him more secure in acting just as he wanted to, seeing his ally do the same provokes fear. Minds that think alike recognize each other.
Smart as Xi may be, dictatorial leaders that preside over vast swaths of unhappy, oppressed citizens, no matter how many loyalists they may have, project paranoia both at home and abroad.
From this “why”, China’s hope of what this bodes, greater control in Eurasia and more security by the reduction of neighbors’ power and world image, is clear. On to Russia. Part of what motivated this spat to begin with were celebrations in Vladivostok of the city’s 160th anniversary, and a tweet from the Russian embassy in India celebrating how the city became a part of Russia. Just as Xi seems to be feeling threatened by Putin’s firmer grip on the reins of the Russian state, Putin looks to have his own fears regarding Chinese aggression and was egging India into continuing to oppose them. Naturally, Russia also wishes to have a good relationship with such a big, economically rising nation and if they can do it while pushing the Chinese out of a similar position, all the better. The origins of the conflict also likely reveal Putin’s response. Нет!
Putin’s power base in the Russian population, especially because he is distinctly unpopular with big percentages of the educated and monied classes, rests upon his reputation as a stellar Russian nationalist; Vlad (such a very Russian name) defender of the traditional territories, eager even to regain those that have been lost, a sharp rebuke to the ‘Western puppet’ Yeltsin in reestablishing Russia’s image as unbeatable and glorious all over the world. In no universe can Putin give up or compromise his status as a symbol of Russian pride and survive long term, especially when what is at stake is an important (albeit crime-ridden and depressing) port.
For China this is a chance for Xi to assert preeminence and Chinese hegemony, at least in its regional sphere, while for Russia and Putin it’s a window to live up to a reputation as great, national leader and maybe even make themselves look like the sympathetic aggressed upon, currying favor with some Western observers and rising third-world powers that feel threatened by China. The final part of the question was what this foretells for relations. Lacking some kind of magic crystal ball (I did take a very intensive IR class last year, and I mostly learned that I’m cut out for analyzing historical happenings, not predicting the future), I’ll explore possible avenues, and what they might foretell.
The most obvious would be for Putin to start, as he had steadfastly refused to do since the beginning of the pandemic, blaming China for the severity and spread of COVID-19, which has devastated Russia. Such a declaration, I think, would present a marked deterioration in national relations and probably permanently impact Xi and Putin’s relationship. For as long as they remain in power, full trust, such as that might have been, would never really reappear. Another possibility is that China could go beyond simply asserting that the territory was once their’s, and implying that it should be returned, by either making formal demands or beginning a border skirmish. As with the first option, a break down in association is inevitable. The chance that this might provoke Russia into large scale military action, or simply end up creating a conflict that China will find difficult to win, makes it unlikely, but President Xi hardly seems to be aiming for predictability nowadays. A less extreme reaction than either of the other two is a simple cooling of the countries’ relationship and a greater divergence in military and/or political objectives. Both countries, though, see a fundamental enemy in the US, and the NATO/Western-dominated world order, and that will always be a good cohesive principle.
There are a lot of lessons that can be learned here, but I think the most important for US policymakers and informed citizens, as well as allies of the post-WWII neoliberal order, is the exploitable weaknesses between allied autocratic nations. No matter how smart their leaders may be, paranoia that ruling a country where a significant portion of the citizens would either like to see you dead or obey out of fear rather than respect bleeds into foreign policy and the relationships between such power-hungry politicians. Pinpointing those fracture points, and increasing them while minimizing the chance for open physical conflict where possible, is a key way to decrease the credibility of those regimes in international eyes, and the view of their populations, and to begin destabilizing. Certainly, no two countries deserve to do this to each other quite as much as China and Russia.
*For the curious, a link to the video in question is here, and an article about the conflict in Russian state media here. Since I seem to write weekly/bi-weekly about Russia (consistency, thy name ain’t college student), I thought it would be fun to give this somewhat regular Russia centric report a name. Any ideas?
Published in Foreign Policy
I think that’s basically correct. From my limited understanding, as a learner and with someone that has Mandarin speaking friends, the only part that I can speak to is that some fundamental level Chinese characters are pictographic representations of the concept they represent in Mandarin, like for example the character for person (人) looks like a simplified version of a human being. However, most Mandarin characters developed according to the rebus principle. I think some very early Chinese scholar came up with 6 ways to classify characters based on their formation, but it’s even more complicated than that. I really enjoy linguistics, but with Chinese I struggle so much to maintain tone and remember characters (the grammar is pretty easy), I kind of have to sacrifice that if I want to get anywhere.
Not exactly. First, languages and writing systems are independent things. English’s first writing system was FUTHORC. Then it changed to the Latin alphabet. Both, however, were phonetic systems. Anyone who knows the FUTHORC runes can sound them out.
Latin characters are now used for many, many languages, including German, French, Italian, etc., although they do have some variations with accented letters or a few unique letters such as thorn (Ϸ, ϸ) and eth (Ð, ð) in Icelandic. So, writing systems can be independent of language. So, even though early Anglo-Saxon was written in FUTHORC runes, we could as easily put something into the Latin alphabet: Ceorl Weorϸrfeorϸr. (And yes, we used to also have the thorn in English.)
The Chinese writing system is ideographic. That means that a picture represents a word or concept. It is why their system is difficult to learn, because there are thousand of characters. Technically, we could use this writing system for English, just as we have used FUTHORC and Latin Characters. They are symbolic representations of spoken words.
But here we have to talk about dialects and languages. In a phonetic writing system, a word will be represented close to how it sounds, so “pipe” is spelled differently from “fife.” These two words started out as the same word (pipa), but one came through Old German and the other directly from Latin to English. If we used an ideographic writing system, they would be considered the same word, just pronounced differently in different dialects. A dialect is one flavor of a language. At some point, the flavors get so separated that they are not mutually intelligible. We have many dialects of English just in the US, such as Yankee, Southron, Midwestern, etc. They are still close enough to be mutually intelligible most of the time. Chinese dialects have been diverging for longer, and although they are all Chinese, they are not all mutually intelligible. Like American and Glaswegian dialects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLiyB4GPlfw
Long version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orA2f15j9bM
https://youtu.be/HYjab98obh0
I wish the quality were better, but it’s still a great bit.
I wish I could understand what they were saying.
The accents or the bad quality?
“Enough about mushroom head. Guess
what I come back from Malaga with.
Your virginity?
*shows elaborate Chinese character tattoo*
Is it, like, well spiritual and s***?
Nah, it’s my Chinese order –
spring rolls, prawn toast, duck.
Did your parents go ape?
I can do what I want, cos they’re
getting divorced. It’s the nuts!”
Or there is Patrick Stewart’s own native accent from the rural north of England.
And the West Country has its own issues.
Can’t count Edinborough as a real Scottish accent because it’s really got an Old English accent, it being really a Saxon city the Scots happened to nick a few centuries back.
The Mayan alphabet messed with linguists for ages till they realized that it’s actually a hybrid phonetic alphabet that looks like a purely ideographic one.
Ah, that reminds me of when I went canvasing with my uni’s Conservative Union/Society in Northwest London last year. Some guy saw my sticker and started shouting at me (mostly “Tory b****, cow, c***”); if I do say so myself, between having been an avid consumer of British media since I was quite young, and having lived here for two years, I’m more conversant at British slang than the average American, and I responded in (slightly less dirty) kind. I’ve had to do it to slightly too persistent chavs when I’m jogging in running shorts too.
My wife’s family is English, but she has an aunt in Glasgow. When her grandmother died, she flew into Glasgow for the funeral and week’s family get together. While there, seeing that the family was still a bit shell shocked she decided to nip off to Tesco to re-provision and reported back a rather hilarious few minutes at the till.
She whips out her US debit card (we used to keep a Lloyds account for use when visiting and to avoid what follows, but had just shut it the year before), and of course our banks were still stubbornly refusing to chip our cards, while theirs had abandoned stripes years before (this was 2009).
Cashier: Oh! Yay cart’s nay goh a ship innit!
Wife: Huh?
Cashier, pointing to the card: Yayr cart’s nay goh a ship innit. Ayve goh teh ring teh manjer.
ManjerManager: Yar cart’s nay goh a ship innit? Aye thas un oldun den.Wife: What?
Manager (again, pointing to the card): Yar cart. Eh haz neh ship. Dunno we still goh a reeder. (Rummages about, finds one, blows dust off, plugs it in). Aye, she’s yeh goh life.
Her father (who understands Glasweigan fluently and can pass for short for a local for short sentences- he says the secret is to never move your jaw and pretend you’re a ventrilloquist) was howling with laughter when she relayed this later.
Saw a movie set in Glasgow years ago. It had subtitles. English subtitles.
Sounds about right. A lot of British people can’t even understand that accent. If I remember correctly, the first Kingsmen movie has subtitles for a scene with a bunch of road men in a bar.
Even the other Scots have difficulty with the Glaswegian Dialect.
Haha, I think I’m pretty good at English (even Northern) and Welsh accents, but the heavy Scottish ones might as well be Swahili. (Also, I love how much more advanced the payment methods are here, it makes using the T in Boston feel so low tech, and I miss how fast I get in and out of the grocery store when I’m back home, though I favor Waitrose over Tesco). Two years ago I was in Scotland to visit St. Andrew’s University, because I had an unconditional offer from them, and I decided to leave before my interview with the history department head, telling them I was afraid of missing my flight (in reality I just hated the school). I tried to book a cab to bring me to the station I needed for my bus from Edinburgh to London, but I could not understand a word the operator said, and my mom had the same issue. I ended up just getting a connecting bus, and then taking a lovely ten hour bus ride with a man dressed as a woman from Edinburgh to London. Also in Edinburgh, my phone decided to die at the same time as my portable charger, and this lovely elderly Pakistani off license owner charged my phone and let me sit in his shop. Accents are a funny thing, as an immigrant. A lot of the times I’m very self conscious of mine, but kindness can come from the most unexpected places. I have a professor in my department who talks to me like I’m slow because of mine, but two guys I met and spent a night with in Sheffield (long story, they were a joining apprentice who was a bit older than me and his younger cousin) loved it and wanted me to say all kinds of words. It made me feel a little less bad after.
Same with Egyptian Hieroglyphics. It started as ideographic, but changed to a syllabary over time.
Edit: Got the wrong quote for the response.
At this point, I don’t think they’d particularly like it back from the Scots.
A kenna unnerstan a wurd.
It’s the principle of the matter.
My wife can pass for an Oxfordian if you give her a day back there to get back into things (she’s thoroughly American, being born here to an American mother). Her family spent a lot of time over there while she was growing up, and she lived there for a semester in Oxford. She said the hard part that Americans rarely get right is the volume. Lower your volume a few decibels and you’re already halfway there. Her brother, OTOH, cannot ever get the knack, and ends up sounding like he had cockney elocution lessons from Dick van Dyke – their cousins over there are merciless in this, but I think only to spare him a thrashing should he venture into the wrong pub.
The volume thing is very true, I think half the reason I can every do passably at any kind of English accent is that I’m naturally quiet and barely ever yell or scream (despite one of my Russian teachers trying to goad me into it on a regular basis). I can do an ok RP or Yorkshire accent (basically just an imitation of William Hague, because the first thing I really loved about Britain was the politics and I learned the accents by specific politicians), but it isn’t anything I’d bet money on. I can also do a decent Margaret Thatcher, especially the Iron Lady Speech (memorized that and This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin as a kid; I was a strange child), but I only ever do it for other’s amusement. Generally I find accents much easier when I’m speaking a foreign language, which makes sense.
Eh, it’s somewhere between an English dialect and a sister language. The split goes back to Middle English, although since there has been commerce between London and Edinburgh all the years between, they have somewhat kept up with each other.
Sounds like they skipped the 15th Century vowel shift that swept England. Back when i’s were y’s and nites were kanygtees. I’m sure they’ll catch up someday. It was very strange. I blame the French. They subverted our fine vowels with their fancy borrow words. I studied Chaucer for four semesters and my Middle English accent sounded a bit like the Glaswegian.
I also managed to get into an argument, when we were doing oral prep for exams, with a guy from the North of England about Margaret Thatcher in my Russian class. Proud moment. We managed to stay fully in Russian throughout, and the tutor was impressed, though a little baffled as to how we went from strong world leaders (we were working on incorporating unconventional/less used adjectives to impress the external examiner) to an argument about economic policy.
My advisor in college was half Scot, half German, and looked German – only Scot he seemed to inherit was the surname. But was a francophile to the core, and while fluent like a native in French, to his dismay found he pronounced French with thick German accent. So while he adored France and all things French, the affection was never returned. Shame too as his doctoral thesis required him to spend much of the late 60s and early 70s there, when the War was still a living memory.
“Don’t mention the war!” – Basil Fawlty
I didn’t mention the war!
Yes you did!
No I did not.
You did. You started it.
No I didn’t. You did when you invaded Poland!
Senior year of high school (because our school had budget issues and always slashed advanced/AP classes first), I ended up doing two independent studies, one for French 4 (Fluency). The teacher very kindly let me chose to focus on whatever I wanted, because she knew that just going through a textbook would be mind numbingly boring, and that was what I was already doing for AP World Politics and Government, so I chose to a long term project on Rene Girard, his influence and influences. One of the things I ended up writing a good bit about, because I read a lot his writing and writing by/about the popes that he influenced, was that he and John Paul II had a fascinating life parallel. They both came from countries that were conquered and brutalized by Germany during their youths in WWII (France and Poland), and later created very close friendships with Germans or German speaking men of the same age (Raymund Schwager, who was from neutral Switzerland, and then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI). A beautiful expression of forgiveness, and what the ability to see people for who they are as individuals, rather than as purely representatives of a race or nationality, can do.