The China Threat has now become the Chussia Anxiety
Nov 7, 2024
The West need not fear a Chussia aligned against it. It instead needs to develop geopolitical strategies to deal with China as the dominant power in Eurasia. For like the United States at the end of the nineteenth century when it consolidated its borders and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, China has consolidated its security in Eurasia and is now free to project power globally.
On 8 February 2022, Vladimir Putin meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing announced to the astonishment of the world that they had agreed to a ‘friendship without limits’. Two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Western media, conservative think tanks, and many politicians began ranting about the ‘alliance of autocracies’, ‘axis of authoritarians’, and so on. The Chussia Anxiety was born.
The anxiety and the handy historical reference to pre-WWII alliances between the dictatorships had been long simmering. Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the West’s first round of economic coercion against Russia saw Moscow draw closer to Beijing. Since Xi Jinping’s elevation to the top job in 2012, the leaders have met over 40 times, although many of these have been in the margins of multilateral or regional meetings. As far as these things go, the leaders display affection towards each other.
They also share a deep sourness and suspicion of the US-led liberal West. Not without some justification, they are convinced the US will seek every opportunity for regime change and that the US’ allies are hand maidens in this. Both seek an international order that is accommodating of their rule and regimes. With the end of US global primacy and the emergence of a multipolar order, they believe this is their time. Xi said as much when farewelling Putin in March 2023, when he said ‘there are great changes in the world not seen for a century and we are driving those changes.’
So the China Threat has now become the Chussia Anxiety. This is a bigger and more dangerous adversary which requires an overwhelming response.
In July 2022, at the Madrid NATO Summit, where understandably and quite reasonably all focus was on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US and some NATO ministers, and especially NATO’s then Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, began talking about a single global theatre of conflict: NATO versus Chussia.
The Australian Prime Minister, ever willing to regurgitate an official’s brief and accommodate the US, even took up the cause of a single global theatre. Some European states quickly killed it off, but it didn’t stop Stoltenberg shifting to the need for an Asian NATO and proposing a formal NATO presence in Japan. Japan’s briefly incandescent Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba enthusiastically took this up before having it shot down by his party.
The Chussia Anxiety has much in common with the Russian Anxiety of the nineteenth century which was embodied in the Great Game. In my new book, Great Game On: the Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy, I show that Russia never had designs on British India. Anyone who has travelled through the vertiginous mountain passes between India and Central Asia will know why.
Yet for the best part of seventy years, until in 1907 Britain and Russia established a buffer zone in Central Asia with the Wakhan Corridor, British statesmen, politicians, journalists and an assortment of pundits advocated that Russia was an existential threat to the Empire and had to be resisted at every turn, and that it was intent on taking India.
Australia’s coastline is still host to cannon batteries, installed at great expense to meet the Russian threat and never used. These stand as monuments to the last time Australia was supporting a dominant power being challenged by an ascending one. A cast of British bearded adventurers, self-promoters, cads and ruffians fanned out across Central Asia to collect intelligence and seek commercial benefit. Many lost their lives.
Even after the Great Game came to an end, Britain’s Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, and his ever ambitious and mystical Lieutenant General Sir Francis Younghusband, invaded Tibet on the false pretext that the Russians were arming the Tibetans against them. The Tibetans had nothing more than ancient muskets with which to defend themselves against the might of the modern British army. Their losses inexcusable. Bayonets to Lhasa was another war crime before the concept existed.
Like the Russian threat to India, the Chussia Anxiety does not stand up to critical analysis. Putin and Xi are united by a loathing of the West and the desire to have an international order more accommodating of themselves. But convergence of interest basically ends there. They share no common ideology. Russia and China’s approach to security are at odds: Russia seeks to occupy buffer zones; China seeks tributary states that are deferential but not colonies. Accordingly, China’s fundamental principles in foreign policy are respect of borders and non-interference. Russia’s are not.
China is far more deeply integrated in the international system. It is utterly dependent on world markets for exports to generate wealth and for the energy and natural resources it needs to keep its economy going. Russia these days is a hydrocarbon economy with a strong arms and aerospace industry.
Moreover, their common history is fraught, and many legacy issues remain. Their long border has seen at times frequent conflict in north-western Xinjiang and the Russian Far East. During the deep and protracted Sino-Soviet split, which began in 1961 and lasted until Gorbachev visited Beijing in May 1989, war was just averted on the Ussuri River in Russia’s Far East and Beijing genuinely feared a Russian nuclear attack at these times. On one occasion in 1967, the entire Chinese leadership was dispersed around the country so real was the belief in a Soviet nuclear strike.
In the past, Russia and China had experienced an extended period of stability along their common borders. Following the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, the borders were settled for nearly two hundred years. At the time of the Treaty, the balance of power in the region was in the Qing’s favour and the remoteness of these areas north of the Amur River and Manchuria made them of little interest to the Tsar.
But when the balance of power shifted decisively in Russia’s favour in the nineteenth century following the Opium Wars, St Petersburg immediately pressed its advantage, forcing the Qing emperor to sign the Treaty of Aigun in 1859, which conceded all Chinese territory north of Amur River, and the Convention of Peking in 1860 which saw Beijing give up some 1 million square kilometres of Manchuria, including the port of what became known as Vladivostok and, along with it, China’s strategic and commercial access to the Pacific Ocean.
Of all the territory the Qing lost in the nineteenth century to foreign European powers, only the lands lost to Russia have never been returned. This today still rankles among Chinese nationalists. Before being silenced by the censors, bloggers have on occasions criticised Xi for not seeking the return of these lands as part of his personal project of national rejuvenation. Beijing, it is argued, can never heal the shame of the century of humiliation without the return of these vast territories from Russia.
And as if to acknowledge the point: in April 2023, Beijing decreed that the names of eight major cities in Russia’s Far East must henceforth be changed on Chinese maps to their earlier Chinese names. So Vladivostok, which translates as ‘Conqueror of the East’, reverts back to its earlier Chinese name, Haishenwai.
Xi Jinping, who is reputedly an admirer of Mao, will be acutely aware of the humiliation meted out to Mao by Stalin. When the victorious Chairman Mao went to Moscow as the leader of the world’s newest and biggest communist state, rather than being greeted as a revolutionary hero, and as an equal, as he expected, he was treated like an annoying little brother. Stalin kept Mao cooling his heels in a Moscow winter for two months, before the so-called Valentine’s Day treaty was signed on 14 February 1950.
Mao, desperate for Russian aid and security guarantees, ended up signing essentially the same bilateral treaty that his despised opponent, Chang Kai Shek, had signed with Stalin in 1945. Both treaties gave special privileges to the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, acknowledged Mongolia’s independence, effectively as a Soviet satellite state, and conceded all the territory lost under the Convention of Peking.
These concessions were hidden away in secret appendices which Mao described as the ‘three bitter pills’ he had been forced to swallow. Some years later, Mao said that China was ‘yet to present the bill’ for these concessions. Bizarrely, and presumably because of arrogance and associated insensitivity, when Xi visited Moscow in 2019 his great friend Putin presented him with a collector’s edition of Pravda from 14 February 1950 announcing the Treaty of Friendship.
Nor will it be lost on Xi, when he sees Putin embracing his great friend Narendra Modi that during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, Moscow supported capitalist New Delhi against communist Beijing, supplying it with advanced weaponry, along with the United States.
These anecdotes of mistrust, mutual incomprehension, and bad blood, and there are many more, help to make the point that whatever rhetoric the leaders spout about new models of relations for the twenty first century and putting the past behind, at heart are two huge and powerful contingent countries whose approaches to security are at odds and who have major territorial issues still to resolve.
Whereas in the nineteenth century, when the balance of power shifted abruptly in Russia’s favour and it moved decisively to exploit its advantage, today it has moved to China’s advantage, and Putin’s Ukraine folly has accelerated this shift. China is wasting no time in pressing its advantage in Central Asia and becoming the dominant power of Eurasia, with Russia as its supplicant.
The West need not fear a Chussia aligned against it. It instead needs to develop geopolitical strategies to deal with China as the dominant power in Eurasia. For like the United States at the end of the nineteenth century when it consolidated its borders and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, China has consolidated its security in Eurasia and is now free to project power globally.
The West must also not make the same mistake it made in the 1960s, when blinkered by ideology it failed to see the reality of the Sino-Soviet split and the geo-strategic opportunities that presented. The immoral disaster of Vietnam may even have been avoided had it done so.
Geoff Raby’s new book, China’s Grand Strategy: the Contest for Central Asia and Global Dominance will be released by MUP on 12 November 2024.
Geoff Raby was Australia’s Ambassador to China from 2007-11, during which he visited all provinces in China officially. He served in Beijing as First Secretary (Economic) and then Counsellor (Economic), 1986-91. He was Ambassador to the WTO in Geneva, Ambassador to APEC, and Deputy Secretary, 2003-07. He was also head of the Trade Policy Issues Division of the OECD, Paris, 1993-95. He is a non-executive independent director of ASX listed-companies Yancoal, where he chairs the Health, Safety, Environment and Community Committee, and sits on the Board of the Gavan Foundaton.
His most recent book, Great Game On: the contest for central Asia and global supremacy, was published by Melbourne University Press on 12 November 2024. His previous book was China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the World Order (MUP Nov 2020). He regularly contributes op eds and travel writing to the Australian Financial Review. He holds a PhD in economics. He was awarded the Order of Australia (AO) in June 2019 for services to Australia-China bilateral relations and to multilateral trade.
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