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Russo-Chinese Energy Cooperation

Stepping Stone from Strategic Partnership to Geo-economic Integration?

Akita International University, Japan, jgulick{at}aiu.ac.jp

The collapse of the Soviet Union has gradually drawn the natural resources of the Russian Far East into Northeast Asia's economic field of gravity. Contrary to what many experts predicted in the early 1990s, the opening of these natural resources to the wider region has generated a substantial dose of interstate friction. Since the turn of the century, much of this friction has revolved around Chinese and Japanese competition to secure hydrocarbon fuels through pipelines transecting the Russian Far East. This competition is mediated by a complex and contradictory situation: Moscow and Beijing are trying to bolster Russo-Chinese partnership through enhanced commercial exchange, but actors in Russian provinces bordering Northeast China remain wary of rising Chinese demographic and economic influence in the area. Nonetheless, the intransigent geopolitical disposition of the US and the changing configuration of world energy markets have given nearly irresistible momentum to expanded Russo-Chinese energy cooperation, even if this portends Russia's partial sidelining of Japan as a customer of east Siberian oil. However, it is still unclear whether expanded energy cooperation alone can pave the way toward genuine geo-economic integration in the Russian Far East—Northeast China border zone.

Key Words: economic integration • energy cooperation • geopolitics • Northeast Asia • Russian Far East • Russo-Chinese strategic partnership

International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol. 48, No. 2-3, 203-233 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0020715207075400


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