The Hypothetical Collapse Of The Russian State And China-United States Military Balance

🇨🇳🇯🇵 🇷🇺 🇺🇸 Commentary

Commentary-themed posts are intended to broach or highlight a specific issue, not limited to recent and ongoing events. These posts will typically be much shorter and less detailed than analysis-themed posts.

The rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group against the Russian state in June 2023, which unfolded in a context of a much-anticipated Ukrainian offensive and cross-border raids by Russian citizens in Ukrainian military units subordinate to Ukrainian military intelligence, amounted to the first time in the Russia-Ukraine War that the future of the Russian state, with or without Vladimir Putin at its helm, was even in question. Around the time, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence rationalized his organization’s establishment of such (renegade) Russian-manned Ukrainian military units as a part of a gambit through which Ukraine could, in effect, indirectly occupy stretches of territory on the Russian side of the international border in the event of a collapse in Moscow’s power and authority across the Russian Federation.

While the unsuccessful June 2023 Wagner rebellion is, as of this writing, the closest that Russia has approached state collapse over the course of the Russia-Ukraine War, it nevertheless bears emphasis that there was and remains no indication that Prigozhin, a quite extreme Russian nationalist, had any intention of weakening Moscow’s control over its expansive territory, or that Putin loyalists had any intention of initiating a civil war had Wagner Group columns reached Moscow and ousted Putin from the Kremlin. Even so, the June 2023 episode catalyzed thinking as to the possible implications of the collapse of the Russian state for Ukraine and Europe more generally. Far less attention has, however, been given to the possible implications of the collapse of the Russian state for East Asia.

Oleg Kozhemyako, the governor of Russia’s Primorsky Krai, a Russian province which borders China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan and has the port city of Vladivostok as its capital, recently made minor headlines for publicly warning about possible Chinese irredentism about the Russian Far East, which was formally part of Qing China until ca. 1860. As things stand, such irredentism appears to be found more among Chinese netizens than the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, and there is presently no indication of a rupture in bilateral relations, not least while both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping remain in power, that would be required for Chinese irredentism toward Russia’s far eastern territorial holdings to become state policy. This does not, however, necssarily mean that Beijing will seek to preserve Russia’s current borders, the far eastern sections of which are evidently a product of “unequal treaties” imposed upon Qing China by the Russian Empire over the course of the 1800s, in the event of the collapse of the Russian state under the rule of Vladimir Putin or his eventual successors.

I am not a political analyst, and I have no intention of getting into the weeds of this complex and inherently hypothetical topic. As a military analyst, however, I cannot help but notice that China is separated from the Sea of Japan by just ~10.3 kilometers in orthodomic terms/as the crow flies and that the Tumen River flows for another ~16.5 kilometers from the easternmost point of the China-Russia border until it reaches the Sea of Japan. In other words, China may not border the Sea of Japan and has no direct port access to the Sea of Japan, but just a small amount of land, which was formally part of Qing China until ca. 1860, determines this.

The Qing dynasty at its territorial apogee. It goes without saying that “pre-modern borders” should be understood in terms of nominal territorial claims rather than areas under the permanent, full, and direct control of any central government.