If people insist on engaging in the geopolitical equivalent of map-painting as a mental exercise, they might at least do themselves the courtesy of applying some imagination while doing so.
The Sino-Soviet confrontation led to the militarization of China’s entire northern and western borders, becoming an existential threat that preoccupied the entire generation of Chinese leadership from Mao to Deng. This tension was only resolved shortly before the collapse of the USSR, through the joint demilitarization of the border by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev. If one reads through the speeches, internal meeting minutes, and memoirs from the period, it is clear that all the major Chinese leaders from Mao to Zhou Enlai to Deng, genuinely believed the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to China than either the West or the Chiang regime in Taiwan. The fact that China went to a border war with Vietnam, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, shows this was not simply some public posturing to strengthen ties with the United States in the emerging triangular diplomacy. Rather, Chinese strategic thinking truly saw a Soviet-aligned Vietnam as an existential risk, one that could allow China to be squeezed or blackmailed by the Soviets from both its north and south like a sandwich under pressure.
What proved fortunate was that Russian historical revisionism regarding the Soviet period allowed both sides to effectively wipe the slate clean of the institutional hostility created by the Sino-Soviet split. To jeopardize this by restoring a hostile frontier over claiming Vladivostok and Outer Manchuria, thereby reshaping China’s entire strategic depth for the worse, is a pathetically poor trade. The lesson of the Sino-Soviet split is that neither states benefitted from the constant paranoia and hijacking of strategic resources caused by burden of militarizing their gargantuan adjacent borders and that it is better for the two states, so long as they mutually persist, to maintain at mininum a cordial relationships so that third-parties can't use this friction to take advantage of either of them like the US did during the first Cold War. Yes, it is true that on the Chinese domestic internet, you occasionally encounter the Outer Manchuria reclamationist types who, oddly enough, always seem to prioritize this misadventure above the far more consequential and pertinent national goals such as reunification with Taiwan, securing the South China Sea, liberating the Ryukyus, or even pursuing wildly ambitious but strategically meaningful dreams like gaining Australia. Oddly enough.
Outer Manchuria is currently worthless territory. But it will not always be. In 100 to 200 years, when climate change has rendered much of the land below 30 degrees north and above the equator uninhabitable due to near-perpetual wet bulb temperatures, when sea level rise has made it necessary to wall off China’s entire coastline because the central China plains are geographically barely above sea level, and when the thawing of northern permafrost opens up new habitable zones, then Outer Manchuria will become valuable and gain real strategic and economic significance in terms of human habitation.
Of course, in the event that Russia were to suddenly disappear, Thanos-snapped out of existence, from the map, China shouldn't be blamed for not hesitating in claiming its northern territories. But given that Russia is a nuclear power and under the premise that both states continue to exist in the current territorial dynamics, it is in China’s interest to take a more imaginative approach to its relationship with Russia. It took Europe a century to go from its millennia of hostilities that led to two continent-wide wars into pursuing a political union. The main obstacle to something similar between China and Russia will be racism and cultural chauvinism, particularly on the Russian side. But one to two centuries is a very long time, and as was the case with the EU, behind the carrot of a negotiated union could lie, for Russia, the stick of China's unilateral and unconditional climate change-driven annexation by necessity at great potential bloodshed to both nuclear states. The Sino-Soviet split taught both states, just like the World Wars taught Europe, that having the other as an adversary is a strategic nightmare that should be avoided. Even in the current ambiguous “alliance but not quite alliance” relationship that leaves both sides wanting and skeptical, the long-term potential for a hypothetical Eurasian union is arguably stronger and more plausible than Europe’s becoming the European Union was in the 1800s or even early 1900s. Frankly, if two centuries of sustained and cordial cooperation still isn’t enough to overcome racist white Russian resistance to the notion of integration with Asians, then there's not much left to be said about the racial coexistence of humanity.
The prize for such a long-term vision would not just be Outer Manchuria, but the entirety of Siberia up to the Arctic Sea coast. In one or two centuries, given the current trajectory of climate change, China may indeed be pressed to consider relocating a large portion of its population northward. Under the premise that both states persist in their current territorial forms, the real question is whether China should try to nibble away at Russian territory in the hopes of avoiding a nuclear response and perhaps eventually reclaiming some parts of Outer Manchuria at great cost, or whether it should invest in a long-term diplomatic architecture that positions it to eventually achieve something far more ambitious: the entirety of Northeast Asia through diplomacy.
The Sino-Soviet confrontation led to the militarization of China’s entire northern and western borders, becoming an existential threat that preoccupied the entire generation of Chinese leadership from Mao to Deng. This tension was only resolved shortly before the collapse of the USSR, through the joint demilitarization of the border by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev. If one reads through the speeches, internal meeting minutes, and memoirs from the period, it is clear that all the major Chinese leaders from Mao to Zhou Enlai to Deng, genuinely believed the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to China than either the West or the Chiang regime in Taiwan. The fact that China went to a border war with Vietnam, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, shows this was not simply some public posturing to strengthen ties with the United States in the emerging triangular diplomacy. Rather, Chinese strategic thinking truly saw a Soviet-aligned Vietnam as an existential risk, one that could allow China to be squeezed or blackmailed by the Soviets from both its north and south like a sandwich under pressure.
What proved fortunate was that Russian historical revisionism regarding the Soviet period allowed both sides to effectively wipe the slate clean of the institutional hostility created by the Sino-Soviet split. To jeopardize this by restoring a hostile frontier over claiming Vladivostok and Outer Manchuria, thereby reshaping China’s entire strategic depth for the worse, is a pathetically poor trade. The lesson of the Sino-Soviet split is that neither states benefitted from the constant paranoia and hijacking of strategic resources caused by burden of militarizing their gargantuan adjacent borders and that it is better for the two states, so long as they mutually persist, to maintain at mininum a cordial relationships so that third-parties can't use this friction to take advantage of either of them like the US did during the first Cold War. Yes, it is true that on the Chinese domestic internet, you occasionally encounter the Outer Manchuria reclamationist types who, oddly enough, always seem to prioritize this misadventure above the far more consequential and pertinent national goals such as reunification with Taiwan, securing the South China Sea, liberating the Ryukyus, or even pursuing wildly ambitious but strategically meaningful dreams like gaining Australia. Oddly enough.
Outer Manchuria is currently worthless territory. But it will not always be. In 100 to 200 years, when climate change has rendered much of the land below 30 degrees north and above the equator uninhabitable due to near-perpetual wet bulb temperatures, when sea level rise has made it necessary to wall off China’s entire coastline because the central China plains are geographically barely above sea level, and when the thawing of northern permafrost opens up new habitable zones, then Outer Manchuria will become valuable and gain real strategic and economic significance in terms of human habitation.
Of course, in the event that Russia were to suddenly disappear, Thanos-snapped out of existence, from the map, China shouldn't be blamed for not hesitating in claiming its northern territories. But given that Russia is a nuclear power and under the premise that both states continue to exist in the current territorial dynamics, it is in China’s interest to take a more imaginative approach to its relationship with Russia. It took Europe a century to go from its millennia of hostilities that led to two continent-wide wars into pursuing a political union. The main obstacle to something similar between China and Russia will be racism and cultural chauvinism, particularly on the Russian side. But one to two centuries is a very long time, and as was the case with the EU, behind the carrot of a negotiated union could lie, for Russia, the stick of China's unilateral and unconditional climate change-driven annexation by necessity at great potential bloodshed to both nuclear states. The Sino-Soviet split taught both states, just like the World Wars taught Europe, that having the other as an adversary is a strategic nightmare that should be avoided. Even in the current ambiguous “alliance but not quite alliance” relationship that leaves both sides wanting and skeptical, the long-term potential for a hypothetical Eurasian union is arguably stronger and more plausible than Europe’s becoming the European Union was in the 1800s or even early 1900s. Frankly, if two centuries of sustained and cordial cooperation still isn’t enough to overcome racist white Russian resistance to the notion of integration with Asians, then there's not much left to be said about the racial coexistence of humanity.
The prize for such a long-term vision would not just be Outer Manchuria, but the entirety of Siberia up to the Arctic Sea coast. In one or two centuries, given the current trajectory of climate change, China may indeed be pressed to consider relocating a large portion of its population northward. Under the premise that both states persist in their current territorial forms, the real question is whether China should try to nibble away at Russian territory in the hopes of avoiding a nuclear response and perhaps eventually reclaiming some parts of Outer Manchuria at great cost, or whether it should invest in a long-term diplomatic architecture that positions it to eventually achieve something far more ambitious: the entirety of Northeast Asia through diplomacy.
