war could be good for you

Chris Doss itschris13 at hotmail.com
Thu Oct 3 15:10:58 PDT 2002



>
>I now write:
>
>If the grain belt moves some degrees of latitude north across the
>Amur River, mark my words: there will be more and more "illegal" migration
>of land-poor and landless Chinese peasants into the Russian
>Far East, and cross-border tensions (drummed up by demagogic scofflaws)
>will mount.
>
>John Gulick

Hey! The immigration _IS_ illegal. It is damn hard to get a work permit in Russia, much less citizenship. Hell, it's hard to work legally in Moscow even if you're Russian and don't have a residence permit (The obnoxious invention of Yury Luzhkov). Which doesn't keep lots of people from doing it anyway, of course.

There's already a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Russian Far East. That territory has been contested by China for a long time, and ethnic tensions are increased by the rapid decline of the ethnic Russian population there (mainly because of mass emigration of Russians from the Far East and Siberia to European Russia, where living standards are an order of magnitude higher unless you're lucky enough to work for a big natural-resource monopoly like Nikoil).

BTW in internal Russian politics there's a lot of debate between the "Eurasionists" who want a close alliance between Russia and China to counteract Western influence, and those that view China as the main threat in the future, esp. because Russia is selling it lots of high-tech weapons, and therefore want to anchor Russia in the West to counteract the influence of the southeastern flank. It's a bitch being a country so huge you border on both the EU and the PRC.

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