Imagine a nation which is almost identical in geographical size to the United States - but with one billion inhabitants more. That surplus population, by the way, is three times the entire population of the U.S. right now.
The gross incompetence of Russian military forces attacking Ukraine cannot help but give heart to China´s leaders. In Beijing, one and only one conclusion is as inevitable as it is warrented:
We can beat those guys.
I see no reason to reinvent the clock. The New York Times summarized the basic realities back in 2015, seven years before the present war in Ukraine:
"Moscow recently restored the Imperial Arch in the Far Eastern frontier town of Blagoveshchensk, declaring: ´The earth along the Amur was, is and always will be Russian.´ But Russia's title to all of the land is only about 150 years old. And the sprawl of highrises in Heihe, the Chinese boomtown on the south bank of the Amur, right across from Blagoveshchensk, casts doubt on the ´always will be´ part of the old czarist slogan.
Like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering. Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia's land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. It's hard to imagine such a vast area changing hands. But like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering.
The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.)
The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia's 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese. With intermarriage, trade and investment across that border, Siberians have realized that, for better or for worse, Beijing is a lot closer than Moscow.
The vast expanses of Siberia would provide not just room for China's huddled masses, now squeezed into the coastal half of their country by the mountains and deserts of western China. The land is already providing China, ´the factory of the world,´ with much of its raw materials, especially oil, gas and timber. Increasingly, Chinese-owned factories in Siberia churn out finished goods, as if the region already were a part of the Middle Kingdom's economy.
One day, China might want the globe to match the reality. In fact, Beijing could use Russia's own strategy: hand out passports to sympathizers in contested areas, then move in militarily to ´protect its citizens.´ The Kremlin has tried that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and most recently the Crimea, all formally part of other post-Soviet states, but controlled by Moscow. And if Beijing chose to take Siberia by force, the only way Moscow could stop would be using nuclear weapons."
On June 25, 2022, Russia and China declared mutually they had signed an agreement in "the spirit of strategic cooperation and the idea of eternal friendship."
Russia may find out the hard way that agreement is comparable to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop "Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
Two years later, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany broke the Treaty and invaded Russia. The conflict cost the U.S.S.R.18 million lives.