The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [125]
This stark contrast does not go unnoticed by Russians. They have long feared the “yellow peril,” a perception that millions of Chinese are poised to flood across the border and swallow up this region. The fear has fomented an intense xenophobia toward Chinese immigrants, something Russian politicians and media often stoke by asserting that millions are illegally entering the country. One individual even suggested that forty million Chinese would sneak into Russia by the year 2020.516
Most migration experts estimate illegal Chinese immigration to be in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. Nor do Russians let their fearmongering get in the way of putting undocumented Chinese migrants to work, for example in the farm fields of the Amur Oblast breadbasket.517 However, the fact remains that this “yellow peril” fear is deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche, something that is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the history of this region.
Much of what is now the Russian Far East actually belonged to China until 1860. Ethnic Russians began arriving in significant numbers only in the 1930s, after Soviet planners closed the border and set about turning the region into a deeply subsidized supplier of raw materials for the centralized Soviet economy and a protective military fortress to the outside world. The Soviet arms buildup there deeply troubled China, Japan, and South Korea. Tensions with China scraped bottom in the 1960s with a series of border skirmishes, including a bloody clash for Damansky Island on the Ussuri River, in 1969.518
Attempts to link the economies of European Russia with Asian Russia never made much sense. The only real transportation link between them was (and is) the Trans-Siberian Railroad, with 9,300 kilometers separating Vladivostok from Moscow. By the 1980s the Soviet Union was ready to abandon the fortress resource colony model for the more sensible idea of opening up the Russian Far East to Asian Pacific trade. Mikhail Gorbachev gave a famous speech in Vladivostok in 1986 that called for the region’s deep subsidies from Moscow to be scrapped and Russia’s eastern flank opened up. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those subsidies did indeed go away. So also did much of the military defense spending that supported up to 40% of the jobs in this region. The place descended into deep economic malaise and people began to leave.
At its peak population in 1991, the Russian Far East contained a hair over eight million people. Today its population is 20% smaller and will likely shrink further. More detached than ever from distant European Russia, this region struggles to reconcile its dire and obvious need to glom economically on to China, South Korea, and Japan with its deep xenophobic fear of being swallowed up by China. It is the poorest, least healthy, most economically strapped region in all of Russia. Despite its oil and gas riches, electricity is spotty and expensive. A corrupt bureaucracy and perverse tax system dissuade foreign investment. Its resource-hungry neighbors China, Japan, and South Korea, while more than happy to buy raw materials from the region, hesitate to pour badly needed capital into it. Repeated plans from Moscow to develop and improve the region’s quality of life have failed. However, Russia is Heilongjiang’s largest trading partner, and as of 2008 the province had concluded more than two thousand collaborative projects there worth about USD $2.9 billion. Trade between China and Russia’s Primorsky Territory was over USD $4.1 billion in 2009.519
What does the future hold for the Russian Far East? Politically, the relationship between Beijing and Moscow is better