Russian security: scorn poured by Sun Liping
If Russia's concerns are ‘justified’, so was Japan’s invasion of China
Hello everyone!
The following op-ed is reposted from the MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) website. It doesn’t often cover China, let alone contrarians like Tsing-hua U. sociology professor Sun Liping 孙立平. We gratefully reprint it here (with some cosmetic edits!), surmising that it appeared somewhere else in the first place.
As in much serious PRC writing, while the ostensible topic (Russia) is real enough, ‘China’ may often be substituted for it to give the text’s full bearing.
Tsinghua U. sociology professor Sun Liping
Sun Liping, ‘Russia's security concerns: If this claim is “justified”, so was Japan’s invasion of China,’ MEMRI, 5 April 2022.
On March 13, 2022, Sun Liping, a renowned professor at Tsinghua University, published an article, titled ‘Russian security concerns: If tenable, so was Japan’s invasion of China back in the day,’ condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet, the article is no longer available online, as the Chinese authorities deleted it from the Chinese social media Weixin.qq.com.[1]
Sun wrote:
The security concerns of one state cannot justify waging war against another sovereign state. Were it to be justified, Japan’s invasion of China could then be justified as well, along with Tsarist Russia’s claims to occupy large areas of Chinese territory.'
Today’s Russia Is the metamorphosis of and successor to the Tsarist empire
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, one issue that has come up frequently is the question of Russian security, or ‘security concerns’. Russia’s rationale for going to war, it’s a bone of contention.
Security concern: is this a legitimate reason, or just a purposely fabricated excuse? If there actually is a sense of insecurity in Russia, is it based on reality, or purely on imagination?
I want to discuss the problem as objectively as possible.
I have, you may have noticed, often mentioned Russia’s imperial legacy in previous articles. Today’s Russia is the metamorphosis of and successor to the Tsarist Empire. But it is important to realise that along with its empire, Russia also inherited its troubles—to be exact, the troubles of the empire that it is encountering today.
An empire is, taken in a loose sense, a state with an emperor as its sovereign, usually a vast territory with vassal states, and a dominant position in a certain cultural region. Vast territories, often acquired by campaigns or other means of conquest, determined two major features of empire:
populations were diverse and poorly integrated
there was constant change and ambiguity of the external boundary.
These, we may say, are two weaknesses or flaws that many empires inevitably have.
What Russia now faces is both of these imperial legacy troubles. And this is the historical origin of its ‘security concerns.
We know that, after an earlier, more chaotic history, the Russian Empire began in the Grand Duchy of Moscow. It can be roughly understood here as a vassal state, with the monarch known by the title of Grand Duke.
The Grand Duchy of Moscow was formed by Grand Duke Vladimir at the end of the 13th century, and named after its capital, Moscow. How big was it? About 1,300 sq km, some 1/200th the size of Hulunbuir City in Inner Mongolia, China and 1/13,000 of the area of Russia today. Until the mid-16th century, when Ivan IV was crowned tsar, Russia was a small empire with only 2.8 million sq km of territory.
In its heyday, the Russian Empire’s territory reached 25 million sq km, some 19,000 times that of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. After the Soviet Union was created, while some land was lost, it still covered 22.4 million sq km. When Putin and anti-liberal philosopher Aleksandr Dugin blame the Soviet Union for losing some land in the Soviet era, this is precisely what they are referring to.
Such a large country with strong internal heterogeneity can only be maintained through a unified ideology and centralised system
In today’s parlance, this would be called wild growth.
Massive expansion of territory at such a rate was, of course, the result of war and conquest. In the process, a range of different ethnic groups became part of the empire. Many were forced to join via bloodshed and deadly hatred. I’m still unsure how many many ethnic minorities there were in the Tsarist Russian Empire’s heyday; I can’t tell, to tell the truth: there were no ethnic IDs back then. There are, we know, 194 ethnic groups in Russia today. Among them, by the way, there is no Han ethnic group, except for one called the Hua (huarenzu 华人族) ethnic group,1 with a population of over 28,000 people, accounting for some 0.02 percent of the national population.
Such a complex ethnic composition generated strong internal heterogeneity, resulting in low degrees of internal integration. There were in the Soviet era 53 subdivisions: 15 republics, 20 autonomous republics, 8 autonomous prefectures, and 10 ethnic regions. Within the USSR, there were 16 ethnic autonomous republics, 5 ethnic autonomous prefectures and 10 ethnic autonomous regions, 4 of which were co-autonomous between two ethnic groups.
Such a large country with strong internal heterogeneity can only be maintained through a unified ideology and centralised system. To explain it with the concept I put forward in the 1990s: if a country has a low level of social integration, it can only be replaced by political integration. But for all that, such states are fragile.
It is understandable that even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union’s successor, Russia, is still plagued by obsession with a national separatist movement. In fact, even during the Soviet era, national autonomous bodies strove for their independence or autonomy whenever possible. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has further stimulated the national separatism movement within Russia. Chechnya and the Tatars once refused to pay taxes to the Russian Federation treasury; Chechnya’s independence movement initiated two armed conflicts between Chechnya and the Russian Federation, which have not been completely settled to this day.
Russia [Has] A Delicate Psychology: Both Arrogant And Insolent, Yet Also Self-Abasing And Fearful
In this way, we can understand why Russia, though a behemoth, has such a strong sense of insecurity. Another source of this insecurity is external. As we all know, Russia is referred to as the ‘polar bear.’ In people’s minds, Russia is as big, aloof, and fierce as a polar bear. As a result, the smaller countries around Russia naturally fear it and avoid it as much as possible. The so-called eastward enlargement of NATO, as far as Western countries are concerned, may have the implication of expansion, but those small countries that are trying to join NATO are only looking for a protective umbrella. In Russian parlance, that is also their security concern.
That makes Russia a unique yet awkward presence in the world. An article I wrote a few days ago entitled ‘Explaining What I Mean by Saying “Russia is Both Too Big and Too Small”,’ is about this awkward situation. As someone remarked online: ‘Being big, it’s unwilling to be second to others; being small, it’s incapable of expressing its ambitions.’ This awkward reality, coupled with an entanglement of historical grievances, has created a delicate mentality in Russia: both arrogant and insolent, yet also self-abasing and fearful.
Still more troubling is that in the empire’s long history, the Soviet era led both naturally and artificially to ethnic mixing in many regions. Not only within Russia, this was true in the independent states that broke away from the Soviet Union as well. For example, Crimea and the Donbas regions, at the centre of the present conflict, are already heavily Russian, yet home also to a sizeable Ukrainian population, and other ethnic groups. Even were there a resolution to this conflict, we could expect to see trouble in the future.
To summarise the viewpoints of this article:
1) Russia’s security concerns are not entirely an illusory fantasy; they do indeed exist. Yet they have both past causes and future ramifications. It would oversimplify and even distort matters to emphasise that security concerns are legitimate given a country has them, without considering what caused them.
2) there is in fact no value or ideological barrier between Russia and the West. The biggest problem now is that Russia wants to integrate with the West but cannot in its current state. Both too big and too small, it is unfavourably placed in the actual international order.
3) one state's security concerns of cannot justify waging war against another. Were it justified, so would be Japan’s invasion of China, or Tsarist Russia's claims to occupy a large area of historically Chinese territory.
Hua 华 generally implies a broad church of Chinese ethnicities, including the Han 汉.
Interesting that MEMRI chose to translate and publish this article. There is some significant criticism of the way they use translation to promote their own narratives on the Middle East (see the translation scholar Mona Baker’s view on them here: https://www.monabaker.org/2015/04/17/narratives-in-and-of-translation/).