China Positions No Threat for Russia

Some 10-15 years ago when the border with China was opened and the influx of traders from both sides – Russian and Chinese- increased tremendously, Russians looked down on their neighbors who were showing minimum of education and culture and wearing simple military clothes. Several years have passed and now many people admit and awe China’s booming development.

Russians residing in the Far East of Russia, the territory which shares a 4,300-kilometer border with China, fear the possibility of Chinese territorial expansion and at the same time are puzzled with the secret of Chinese economic prosperity.

An expert in Russian-Chinese relations, Andrei Ostrovsky, deputy head of Moscow-based Institute of the Russian Far East for Russian Academy of Sciences, revealed in an interview that Russia loses economic competition to China due to unsound economic policy.

“Russia positions itself in the world as the country selling energy resources. Thus we will soon find ourselves in line with such countries as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,” Ostrovsky stressed. Pitifully, when a country prefers such stance and relies heavily on oil resources, its industrial growth gets stalled.

“In Soviet times our machinery products made a huge percentage of exports to China but nowadays machinery export hardly makes 1.4 percent while 30 percent of Chinese export to Russia is technologically advanced products,” Ostrovsky pointed out.

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Chinese model of reforms can be successfully used in Russia but the main target is to achieve flexible transition avoiding hasty reforms, Ostrovsky concluded. “It is never too late to learn from our neighbor’s experience,” he added

(Vladivostok News, Russia)