The eleven contributors to this volume are remarkably consistent in their portrayal of the prospects for collaboration and conflict in contemporary Russian–Chinese relations. The two vast states share extensive common borders and rivers, signed a treaty in July 2001, participate in a new security organization (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization), struggle with challenges to their territorial integrity (Chechnya, Tibet, Xinjiang), and are mutually frustrated with aspects of US foreign policy and America's general vision of healthy economic and civic development. And finally, Russia exports energy eagerly consumed by China. China imports roughly 10 per cent of its petroleum (crude oil and refined products) from Russia, illustrated helpfully in a series of comparative graphs and tables by Richard Lotspeich (pp. 106–12). The rising price of oil has helped Russia recover from its post-Soviet “Time of Troubles,” notes Andrew Kutchins. Over the past decade Russian GDP has grown some eight times, wages as well as the stock market have risen, and Russian foreign exchange reserves increased by a factor of 30 (pp. 37–38). Russian oil production increased by more than 50 per cent between 1999 and 2007, adds Erica S. Downs in her discussion of energy relations (p. 150). Vladimir Putin has been consistently determined to treat “energy as a strategic resource to be wielded on behalf of national power,” as Gilbert Rozman puts it (p. 17).
The relationship, however, is far from equal, the reverse of the situation in the era of the “Great Friendship” initiated by Stalin and Mao in 1950. “China is the driving force” in the current reordering of Asia, notes Rozman, and Russia finds itself scrambling to diversify and secure demand for its oil and promote interest in its comparatively inferior vehicles, mechanized machinery, and consumer products (p. 24). Russia has “little to sell besides oil, gas, chemicals, and metals,” writes James Bellacqua (p. 2). In his article on economic integration and trade, Lotspeich offers numerous examples of the importance of China to Russia that contrast with Russia's meagre proportion of the vast and global Chinese trading networks. China, rather than Russia, has proven to be the central mediator on the Korean peninsula in the nuclear dispute with the United States, as Leszek Buszynski explains (pp. 269–78). Russia's meagre leverage remains only its oil. Downs, Buszynski and other scholars describe the history of Russia's effort to rethink the plan for the construction of a 2,400-kilometer pipeline from Siberia to Northeast China (pp. 152–53, 279). The originally planned Angarsk–Daqing route will instead proceed to the Pacific coast and the Japanese market, now with a spur south to China. The pipeline is under construction and scheduled for completion in 2014.
The willingness of the contributors to this volume to communicate frequently with each other adds to its usefulness and coherence. Their shared but limited sense of the parameters of “international relations” (oil, trade, arms, borders, migrants, strategy toward the US, etc.), however, might be complemented by attention to other kinds of problems that require exposure to different sorts of sources. The sex trade in the Russian Far East, for example, in part caters to Chinese visitors, an interesting contrast to the history of 19th-century European colonialism in China. Everyday cultural perceptions and their relationship to the making of foreign policy also deserve more attention in the Sino-Russian relationship. Russian perceptions of the Chinese evident in conversation, jokes, television, film and provincial newspaper discussions offer much material for study. This useful volume surveys the past ten years of Russian–Chinese relations, with an eye to potential dilemmas and conflicts in the coming decade.
