A historical perspective makes it difficult to accept claims that Beijing and Moscow have a “no-limits” strategic partnership. A review of the relationship between the two Asian giants points to opportunities to manage their aggressive actions without resorting to armed conflict. The United States and its Allies and Partners would do well to study China’s famous military strategist Sun Tzu and employ his concept of “winning without fighting.” In the case of China and Russia, Imperial China’s strategy of “using the foreigner to manage the foreigner” points to important opportunities.
In past centuries, getting involved in Asian land wars proved unwise as it produced minimal gains at significant costs. Given that land wars in Asia tend to sap the strength of one or both belligerents, why wouldn’t we use this knowledge to manage the increasing belligerence of China and Russia?
A cursory survey of historical friction between the nations points to three geostrategic and geoeconomic opportunities:
Vladivostok: A strategic port that, until 1860, was a Chinese city called Haishenwai.
Central Asia: A region of enduring strategic concern for Moscow that is increasingly falling under the control of Beijing as China develops economic and logistical interests through its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure scheme.
The Arctic: Beijing’s best option for expanding its influence and access to resources and markets.
The question of whether to encourage friction between adversaries is worth considering. But for now, here is a realistic assessment of three opportunities.
As tensions with China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rise, U.S. law enforcement agencies increasingly discover Beijing-directed activities inside the U.S. designed to create divisions and weaken the nation. This aligns with the CCP’s concept of political warfare — bending an adversary to its will without firing a shot, as described by Kerry Gershaneck, a professor, author and former U.S. Marine Corps officer, in his book “Political Warfare.”
The U.S. and its Allies and Partners need to think through deterrence from an information perspective. Here are three areas where Chinese and Russian interests collide and where clever use of information can manage their external aggression.
Haishenwai
Beijing and the Chinese people hold a great interest in the history of Vladivostok. In the 17th century, a strong, ascendant Qing dynasty (1644-1912) seized a large part of eastern Siberia from a faltering Moscow. Russia ceded the region and the strategic port of Vladivostok to China via the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. Vladivostok was renamed Haishenwai or “Sea Cucumber Cliffs.” At the time, Vladivostok was considered an economic rather than military asset.
To the Chinese government and military, Vladivostok today represents an opportunity to escape the so-called first island chain (maritime boundary defined by U.S. Allies and Partners Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan), which could be used to restrict the movement of China’s commercial and naval traffic. The chain is seen as key to the U.S.’s regional strategy. If Beijing could get unhindered access to the Sea of Japan through Vladivostok, it would be a major step in defeating what Beijing fears could become a de facto blockade.
To the Chinese people, the loss of eastern Siberia and Vladivostok to Russia is a painful vestige of what the CCP calls “the century of humiliation,” generally considered the period between 1839 and 1949 when China’s government lost control of large swaths of its territory. This notion is a key element of contemporary China’s founding narrative. Several traces of this period, in the minds of many Chinese people, must be rectified before China’s recovery will be considered complete, according to analysts. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has stated explicitly that his highest priority is the annexation of Taiwan.
As the colonial powers extended influence into Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, the United Kingdom’s Lord Macartney traveled to Beijing to seek trade relations with China. Unaware of the peril, China’s Qian Long emperor rebuffed the British emissary, saying “our celestial dynasty has all things.”
The British responded with gunboats bombarding Shanghai, opening China to the West.
To this day, Chinese children are taught that foreigners, or “barbarians,” deliberately carved up China, using opium to weaken its social fabric and will to resist. Hence the mid-19th century is remembered for the Opium Wars of 1848 and 1860, and the resulting “unequal treaties” signed with France and Great Britain. Government schoolbooks avoid mention of the third party to these treaties — Russia — and its seizure of Chinese territory in eastern Siberia along with the port city of Vladivostok.
Russia, as the third signatory to the Treaty of Peking, took advantage of Qing dynasty weakness to claw back territories lost in the Treaty of Nerchinsk. As much as Beijing seeks to smother discussion of this history, Chinese citizens ask why the CCP’s program to achieve the so-called dream of rejuvenation doesn’t include this important port city and the still-raw slight it represents.
Central Asia
Perhaps as a response to the Vladivostok humiliation, China’s OBOR scheme is prominent in Central Asia. Beijing’s engagement with the five Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — threatens Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, given the region was once an integral part of the Soviet Union.
Russia also exercised influence over a sixth Central Asian state — East Turkestan — until it was annexed by Beijing in 1950. Beijing’s historical claims to East Turkestan are called into question by the Chinese name of the region: Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier,” as well as by the ethnic composition of its residents when it was annexed. Nearly all of Xinjiang’s people are Uyghurs or Kazakhs and its languages and cultures differ strikingly from those of Han-majority China.
Beijing’s ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang have forced the region’s Indigenous population to seek refuge outside of China, primarily in contiguous Central Asia. Such mass displacement creates instability, and countries on China’s western periphery are feeling the effects. The resulting turmoil threatens Russia’s southern flank.
Beijing’s OBOR scheme also has expanded CCP control of the region’s infrastructure, investment and trade, while increasing China’s presence. The first transcontinental New Eurasian Land Bridge Economic Corridor shipments to Europe began in 2017, demonstrating Beijing’s increasing reach through Central Asia — much to Moscow’s chagrin, scholars contend.
But what can Russia do? Economic sanctions on Russia after the start of its war with Ukraine made Russia dependent on selling to China’s energy markets as well as Beijing’s clout in international forums such as the United Nations Security Council.
To protect its economic and security interests in Central Asia, Beijing established the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2001. Russia is nominally a co-founder, but the SCO’s purview conflicts with that of the existing Central Asian multilateral security organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which traces its roots to 1992, after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Moscow is concerned about China’s growing influence in Central Asia, which encroaches on its traditional sphere of influence.
The Arctic
As with OBOR in Central Asia, Beijing seeks access to Arctic resources and alternate routes to markets. China is producing modernized Xuelong icebreakers, ships designed to navigate icy waters, reflecting Beijing’s expansive plans for the region. Once again, however, its purported partner Russia takes exception to this incursion into its periphery, despite Beijing’s self-proclaimed status as a “near Arctic state.” Although Moscow denied a People’s Liberation Army Navy request to access Russia’s Arctic port of Murmansk, it allowed a Chinese icebreaker, purportedly on a “scientific mission” to make a port call in August 2024.
China’s presence in the Arctic, as in Central Asia, presents Moscow with another potential security dilemma.
Soft Power Strategies
The tenuous partnership of convenience between China and Russia belies a history of open hostility as demonstrated by the 1969 Ussuri River war, also known as the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, where both sides sustained heavy troop losses during four months of fighting along their border. In 1978, the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed a mutual defense treaty aimed at China, which Beijing obviated by invading northern Vietnam in 1979, knowing Moscow wouldn’t respond.
The CCP’s concept of political warfare seeks to use diplomatic, information, military and economic, and other instruments of national power to advance its interests, at the expense of other nations if necessary. U.S. strategists could institute an information campaign to make Chinese and Russian people aware of these areas of friction. An information campaign could then encourage the people to demand that their leaders abandon external adventure to deal with more pressing domestic issues as well as historical suspicion of their nearest neighbor.
A strategy to deal with the new Beijing-Moscow “axis of disruption” would leverage knowledge of traditional frictions between the two and make the governments answer to their people. To those who would say that authoritarians don’t have to listen to their people, consider the events that led to Xi abandoning the “zero-COVID” policy in 2022. The spark for this incident was an apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, where people with COVID, or suspected of having COVID, were forcibly quarantined in a building locked from the outside. Ten people died and nine more were injured in the fire, according to news reports. The people’s response was mass protests across the country, reflecting widespread fatigue from heavy-handed and ineffective lockdowns in China while the rest of the world largely had returned to normal. The weapon that forced Xi to back down was information — word of the Urumqi incident moved through China so quickly the censors couldn’t prevent it.
Wise use of China’s traditional strategy of “using the foreigner to manage the foreigner” would force Beijing and Moscow to shift resources and attention away from adventure in Taiwan and Ukraine and toward each other.
National security practitioners must quickly upgrade their understanding of conflict in the current economic, political and military climate; adapt their strategies to incorporate nontraditional tools such as information; and then use them to the best advantage of Allies and Partners.
