China’s Quiet Map of Russia for a Post-Putin Far East
Chinese President Xi Jinping with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin during his Moscow visit.
While Moscow sells a fairy tale of “limitless friendship,” Chinese media openly debates how—and when—Russia’s Far East could slip into Beijing’s economic grip.
By TRH World Desk
New Delhi, December 22, 2025— While the Kremlin assures Russians that China is a “strategic partner without limits,” Chinese media appears to be calmly sketching where those limits will eventually be redrawn. Not in Moscow’s favour.
According to an analysis by Oleh Cheslavskyi, published in Medium, Chinese outlet NetEase—one of the country’s largest digital platforms—recently published a striking article arguing that China must prepare for Russia’s collapse and ensure that “seven million square kilometers of the Russian Far East must not be lost.” The phrasing alone is chilling. It suggests not speculation, but expectation.
The Far East, celebrated by Vladimir Putin as the symbol of Russia’s “pivot to Asia,” is described by the Chinese author as a “chicken rib” for Russia: vast, resource-rich, but undevelopable due to money shortages, depopulation, and the resource drain of war in western Russia. For China, however, it is a strategic treasure trove—oil, gas, timber, gold, and space.
What follows is not conquest rhetoric, but something far more modern: a blueprint for “soft annexation.” No tanks, no flags. Instead—long-term contracts, infrastructure investment, yuan circulation, loans, and political influence. Nominal sovereignty, practical dependence.
Cheslavskyi highlights how Chinese media openly revisits the “unequal treaties” of the 19th century, when imperial Russia took over a million square kilometers from a weakened Qing Empire. In China’s official historical memory, this is not settled history—it is an unpaid bill.
The article boasts of progress already made: gas pipelines locked in for decades, bridges linking Chinese logistics to Russian territory, yuan-based trade, Chinese firms embedded in agriculture and mining. “No one who comes to power can cancel this,” the author notes—a remarkable admission.
Most alarming is the tone. Russia’s collapse is discussed not as a remote scenario, but as an eventual certainty. The Far East is already framed as a vacuum waiting to be filled.
For Russians raised on propaganda about eternal friendship, this is a brutal awakening. Beijing is not a brother-in-arms. It is a patient creditor—waiting calmly for bankruptcy.
The question, author raises, is no longer “if” the map changes. It is “who redraws it.”
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