Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [113]
Today, in its own national interest, China wants to promote regional stability in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, and Pakistan. It wants to prevent any manipulation by other great powers and to block the influence of religious extremists, separatists, and terrorists who want to undermine or overthrow the governments in those regions. In order to isolate the Xinjiang independence forces, China has offered special friendship to the six “Stans” of Central Asia, and to Turkey. Turkey has long been denied entry into the European Union, but China has offered it observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and has given Iran official membership. Most unexpectedly, even Israel has to be friendly toward China; because Israel is afraid that China will export high-tech weaponry, including nuclear weapons, to Islamic countries, it is selling sophisticated technology to China.
China also did not oppose Russian efforts to counteract American influence in the continental-heartland regions of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Ukraine. These multiethnic nations didn’t, however, want to throw themselves back into the Russian embrace. Kazakhstan, for example, has not forgotten the great suffering it endured as a result of Stalin’s forced-removal policies and on the Soviet collective farms. Uzbekistan was even casting amorous glances toward the United States and NATO. All the Central Asian nations agreed that China had no political ambitions in the region, and so they felt more confident in doing business with China. On the contrary, it was China that didn’t want Russia to get the idea that they were trying to muscle in on Russia’s sphere of influence. The new foreign-policy term for the Chinese and Russian governments was “coordinated diplomacy,” and that explains why the Chinese provided a huge loan to the small nation of Moldova, to the west of the Black Sea, with which China had never had any affiliation. It was to collaborate with the Russians in their effort to prevent Western power from moving East.
China has for a long time endured much humiliation to accomplish the task of making Russia a friendly ally. Through more than a century, Russia has occupied over 1.5 million square kilometers of Chinese territory, an area three times the size of France. Many years ago China gave up any claim on these lands and the two nations jointly declared the Sino–Russian borders fixed. As long as China doesn’t bring this matter up again, there is no further reason why China and Russia should have any major conflicts. Russia is very large, its population is in decline, and it is under threat militarily from the power of NATO on its western front. It is expending all its strength on managing the instability of its income from energy resources, controlling its non-Russian ethnic-minority populations, and reasserting the power and influence of the former Soviet Union.
Russia is overdependent on energy exports, and so this latest round of global economic decline hit it very hard. Fortunately, when Europe reduced its imports of natural gas from Russia, China immediately increased its purchases of Russian energy. From then on, Russian oil and natural gas and other staple exports, such as heavy weaponry and Siberian timber, were guaranteed a Chinese market. In 2010,