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Chapter 4 On the Periphery of the “Clash of Civilizations?” Discourse and Geopolitics in Russio-Chinese Relations ALEXANDER V. LOMANOV Images of each other Chinese people I meet love to ask whether Russians think that China is a threat. The answers will depend a lot on how you formulate your question. A polling company called monitoring.ru asked 1,600 respondents in over 100 cities all over Russia in May 2000 whether they thought there was a country in the world today that represented a threat to Russia. 27% of respondents named the United States. In February 2001, this grew to 34%. China trailed the US in this poll with only 3% of the answers in May 2000 and 5% in February 2001. And the most amazing is that the third country was Japan. In May 2000 1% said that Japan constituted a threat to Russia, and in February 2001 it was already 3%. In other words, the increase in people who perceive Japan as a threat was the steepest. But responses could be absolutely different if you ask: Is China a potential threat to Russia? In case people are asked “Is China dangerous now?,” only 5% will say, yes. But if you ask “Will China be dangerous?,” it is more about your fears, about your interpretation of what you learn from history textbooks, the media, your own memories, and public discourses. There are polls in which you get a “yes” answer from more than one person in two, especially in the Far Eastern regions. This means that people do not think of the current People’s Republic of China as a threat to Russian security, but they think that somehow the would-be China could threaten Russia. That’s why mutual stereotypes between Russia and China are full of cynicism or ambiguity. Russian newspapers’ reporting on the visit of President Jiang Zemin to Moscow in 2001 had a huge amount of it. Very few newspapers, except those close to the Communists and close to the government, reported the official story of friendship and cooperation. Almost all independent newspapers took a critical and skeptical view. Reasons for mistrust Why are they so skeptical? Why do they think that this friendship could not be longlived ? Why did so many journalist say that the Russo-Chinese treaty was empty, good words without any substantiation, or good words that would not change the evil intentions of China or the imbalance of power (that is, China is strong and it will be stronger, and Russia is weak and it will remain weak, and the gap will only increase)? Chine össze 3 2005.05.31 11:42 Page 71 “Never trust the Communists” One possible explanation is a political one. Soviet people have lived through the Communist system, and there is widespread skepticism of it. They say: It is not because Chinese civilization is bad, not because Chinese culture is bad or Chinese are evil people that we should be skeptical, but because Communist parties are vicious. The Chinese Communists would go into an alliance with Russia and later destroy their former allies. That’s why we cannot trust China as long as the Communist Party is in power: because the practice of Communism is the practice of cheating your partner in order to gain more benefits. “Cooperation is unprofitable for Russia” The second reason why China–Russia relations are flawed is that there is a gap between words and deeds. There are solemn declarations of friendship, but the deeds are a quite minuscule amount of trade between two countries. Many Russian analysts say: What’s the use to talk about our friendship and good-neighborly relations? Washington and Beijing never say such things but they have more than $60 billion of mutual trade per year. We say a lot of words and we can hardly produce $8 billion per year. Besides, China, like the West, needs raw materials from Russia, but unlike from the West, what we get from China is not hard currency or high-tech but low-quality consumer goods. If we disregard military exports, Russian exports of civilian machinery and vehicles continue to decline. “Russia is threatened by Chinese immigration” The analysts say: You can be friends with Beijing, but that doesn’t mean that you can be friendly with those Chinese people who are coming to Russia. Those illegal immigrants will come in greater and greater numbers, so no treaties will protect you from the Yellow Peril. You can have...

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