Both too big and too small, it is unfavourably placed in the actual international order." The biggest problem now is that Russia wants to integrate with the West but cannot in its current state.
This explanation of course undermines the prevalent official Chinese narrative of the aggressive eastward expansion of NATO.Īs Dave summarises: "there is in fact no value or ideological barrier between Russia and the West. Sun Liping also applies the security concerns to Russia's smaller neighbors who are afraid of Russia and want to join NATO's security umbrella. Sun reminds his readers that if one accepts Russia’s claim of security concerns as a justification for invading a neighbor, then Imperial Japan was also justified to invade China in 1937 and tsarist Russia was justified in taking swaths of land from the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. “‘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”. Attached you find a translation by David Kelly of Beijing Baselines of a brilliant analysis of Tsinghua University historian Sun Liping (孙立平) explaining the imperial expansion of Russia and the inherent problem of an empire that is both “too big and too small”.
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