A friend of mine — the one who conceived the question of dispute resolution — suggests that contemporary mainland China is converting from an agrarian to an industrial and post-industrial economy, and it needs more cities because of its huge population.
In a generation or so, Anne expects China to expand into far eastern Russia, the area that Americans think of as Siberia (although the territory is further east than what many Russians think of as Siberia). She does not expect the Chinese to expand while the current group of people in Russia with, as she says, `pension expectations' are alive — she did not say so, but my presumption is that she figures these people, who include the senior members of the military and the government, would fight a nuclear war. Anne suggests later.
In any event, the population of China is huge, while that of Russians is tiny. Moreover, the current Chinese government is Han Chinese. Although they do not like to think they treat `minorities' badly, they do. The Russians and others in the far east of the former Soviet Union are, from the point of view of Han Chinese, a `minority'.
Anne figures that the current Chinese government thinks of Russia as a `robber baron' economy that is unfamiliar with democracy and that is accustomed to authoritarianism. Perhaps the current President Putin is attacking the `oligarchs' in order to centralize control in the government. This is simply a centralization of authoritarianism. In any event, she pointed out that the Chinese government is `good at authoritarianism'.
Another point that Anne made is that water in the far east of Russia may be as important as or more important than oil. I think of energy as critical. This land has oil. Japan and China are fighting the routes of a pipeline: the Chinese want it to come into China, the Japanese to a Russian port from which they could ship it to Japan. (As I write this, the Japanese are winning the conflict by offering to pay more of the cost. But within 20 or 40 years, someone may invent and bring into use a successful hydrogen fusion reactor.)
Returning to Anne's point: what if water is even more important in 20 or 40 years? The Chinese government is spending a fortune to bring water from Tibet to the northern part of China. Perhaps it will do the same to bring water from north of China into northern China.
What I keep noting is that there are already a great many illegal Chinese immigrants to the north of contemporary China. Americans tend to think of Chinese as preferring a semi-tropical landscape, the way Americans prefer Florida or southern California over the northern states. But Europeans settled in New England; similarly Chinese will settle north of Manchuria.
Meanwhile, Anne figures that the current Chinese government has no expectation that the current Russian leadership will figure out how to bring more Russians into Russia's very far eastern provinces. Russians are trying to leave. In addition, she figures that the current Chinese government presumes that the Koreas, whether north or south, are relatively weak and will not themselves expand north.
And she figures that the current Japanese government is too racist to be interested in fighting a war over Chinese expansion into Russia.
As far as I am concerned, the question is whether a nuclear-armed state will overtly annex part of the territory of another nuclear-armed state? One aspect of nuclear weapons is that they prevent wars between two states that have those weapons. They are afraid of mutual destruction. But they do not prevent two states from competing in other ways.
Anne never suggested this; but suppose the Chinese government offered to purchase far eastern Russia the way the United States purchased far, far eastern Russia, known now as Alaska?
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