For a long time I failed to understand why after 1991 the west didn't just plunder all of the capital of Russia and establish its own bourgeoisie, and instead allowed there for a Russian bourgeoisie to appear and solidify in power. I thought of it as a mistake they had made during the chaotic auctioning of the country to the most corrupt bidder. Now I believe that this fertile ground for investments and exploitation wasn't taken not because they didn't manage to, but because the US decided it was against its interests.

As a formerly communist country, new capitalist Russia couldn't entirely be deindustrialized and turned into a colony again, the people simply wouldn't allow it and revolution would happen again. The only possibility was for it to remain fairly industrialized. But allowing a capitalist developed country to simply emerge and economically join with its natural closest neighbors, Europe and China, while being a vast pool of resources and skilled labour, would have been too much of a threat to the US. So the decision was that if the US couldn't coup the entire means of production and leave Europe aside (which Europe wouldn't allow), Russia had to grow its own oligarchy to be antagonized and geopolitically opposed to the rest of Europe.

Though I get the chauvinistic name of that city is rather obnoxious, it would represent a failure of imagination if China merely wanted to map-paint and retake Vladivostok. Taking advantage of a Russian moment of weakness to reclaim Outer Manchuria, even if nuclear weapons are taken out from consideration, would validate all the Russian anxieties about China hiding under the surface and unless Russia disintegrates or is pushed past the Urals back into Europe, the Russian polity would still be a permanent neighbor of China's and this would engender hostilities and resentment that would last for a long time.

The primary reason why, in spite of this "natural friction" that Trump, Western think tanks and the contemporary wannabe Kissingerites like Mearsheimer have shouted to the skies about since 2022, Russia and China are not presently enemies is precisely because they were once historical enemies.

The Sino-Soviet border (including Mongolia which based Soviet troops) was the longest border in the world (longer than the modern Canada-US + Alaska border) and it was also completely militarized during the Sino-Soviet Split. For the Soviets, they had spent the entire early 20th century re-establishing a massive "buffer" between itself and its adversaries through the Warsaw Pact countries and the Central Asian SSRs, which was especially important in the ballistic age (as can be seen today, where the possibility of NATO missiles in Ukraine is one of the leading factors of the Russian escalation in 2022). Suddenly, with the Sino-Soviet Split, the Kremlin found the entire underbelly of the USSR directly adjacent to a new adversary with only Mongolia as a buffer (the geographic significance of this paradigm shift can been seen through the CIA establishing several posts in Xinjiang, irony of ironies).

Inordinate amounts of resources and manpower had to be redirected by both sides to this border. All the Chinese leadership from Mao and Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping seemed to genuinely believe that the USSR was an existential threat that surpassed even the Chiang regime on Taiwan or the United States. The Sino-Vietnamese War was directly consequent of the Sino-Soviet Split and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which allowed the United States to trap the USSR in "its own Vietnam" quagmire and which was a contributing factor to the Soviet collapse, was largely due to Soviet pressure to respond to China's demonstration of Soviet impotence in assisting its allies during its border conflict with Vietnam. In effect, the strategic agendas of both states ended up being completely hijacked by the military and security consequences of being right next to such a large adversarial state.

There's a book on the Sino-Vietnamese War concludes that 'If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor."' One could say that the geo-strategic lesson that ought to be drawn from the Sino-Soviet Split is that both sides must similarly "learn how to live with their big neighbor." This is the real pragmatic underlying reason why the "natural enemies" aren't letting their "natural frictions" lead them by the nose, even more than any contemporary (and potentially ephemeral) geopolitical/anti-imperialist alignment or material economic relations.

Through this, the situation is actually quite similar to that of post-WW2 Europe in that it was mutual self-interest after the experience of war (in typical European obstinancy, we had to learn that lesson twice) and learning the cost of enmity rather than any "enlightened inclusivity" that led to the multilateral initiatives which culminated in the European Union. This is now verging on serious bloomer territory, but I would say that imagining the prospects for a similar eventual Sino-Russian "Eurasian Union" in a century's or two's time, just maintaining the current bilateral relationship tempo, are actually more plausible than imagining the creation of the EU was in the 1800s.

China doesn't need Vladivostok nor Outer Manchuria at the moment but the pace of climate change means that, in a century or two, large parts of China will potentially reach wet-bulb climate and China's topography means that the entire Central China Plains is nearly at sea level and therefore will likely be one of the most endangered regions in the world for sea level rise. Even if China somehow managed to seize the entirety of Outer Manchuria, that would possibly not be sufficient.

However, large swathes of Siberia, in that trajectory, would likely become agriculturally viable and more climatically hospitable. Migration of large parts of China's population into Siberia then would not only be sensible from a strategic sense but also likely a humanitarian necessity. I'd say it would therefore be more in China's interests to think big and develop the course of Sino-Russian relations so that, in the far future, the implementation of a Eurasian "Schengen" for the whole of Siberia, rather than just Vladivostok, would be socio-politically feasible right at the time that Siberia actually becomes a region of serious importance through climate change.

Also, it would be a rather poetic way to restore socialism to Russia, though I'd be getting ahead of myself.

Some border disputes over the decades are expected, but calling China and Russia as "natural enemies" seem entirely unfounded.