China vs. Russia: A New Angle to Consider
Filed under: Russia
The New York Times reports:
Just as the speed and scale of China's rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut. Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water. Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country's 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
View images of Chinese pollution-related horror here.
One reason that Russia could a face an expansive China gobbling up its far eastern regions is the population explosion in China. China has ten times more people than Russia, stuffed into a country with close to one-third Russia's land area. Russia's population is falling annually at the rate of 0.5% or more, whilst China's is growing at an even faster rate.
But now it becomes apparent that it is not merely China's size that will push its population outward; China is also toxifying its environment at an extremely rapid rate, perhaps rendering large chunks of its territory uninhabitable or certainly less than desirable. That means a triple whammy for Russia: Not only are Chinese motivated to seize its territory by growth, but also by pollution -- and on top of that, Russia is one of the countries that will most directly receive the spillover of Chinese pollution in the near term.
In response, Russia seems to be pursuing a policy of appeasement with China, even going so far as to conduct a recent round of joint war games. Can Russia really be so insular and ignorant that it thinks the Chinese won't notice Russia's virulent, pandemic racism and adopt Russia as a bosom friend? Does Russia really think it can talk its way out of Chinese territorial designs, matters of basic demographics? Didn't Russia learn anything from Stalin's deal with Hitler?
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