Sampanviking
Banned Member
Well no doubt about it, the region is vast and you could easily build a couple of new Chinese Provinces in it and nobody else would ever know! (hey maybe they have already!)
I think if you look at the kind of deals co-operation between SCO countries and China’s wider overseas Investment deals, you start to see very tangible methodology. You have probably noticed that I keep referring a lot the SCO, this is because it is primarily an Economic Block with a Security aspect, rather than the NATO style organisation that most people seem to think it is.
Two types of deal are at the forefront of Current Chinese Overseas Investment.
1) The concession – which is Hong Kong style development in which Chinese Capital will build a major Development and Infracture project and have sole benefit from the Income for a period of years, before handing it back to the host country. A good example of this is the new Industrial and Financial Districts being built in the Laotian Capital.
2) The payment in Kind Development Project, where China build initial Infrastructure and is paid in a fixed tonnage or value of commodities or Raw Materials accessed by the project. A very good example is the $9Billion Investment project in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which an initial investment in thousands of miles of modern Roads, Highways and Railways, plus Schools and Hospitals will be repaid in a fixed tonnage of Copper and Cobalt, and then continue as joint venture with local partners thereafter.
Russia cannot be stupid, they must realise that the easiest way to lose a vast territory is to leave it empty and unproductive. Developed, it becomes a key asset and further cemented to the center. Eastern Siberia desperately needs bodies to live and work in it, even simply to start proper Geological Surveying and Prospecting. If you see the SCO as a proto form of EU, then you will also see that it is the perfect vehicle for supplying those bodies and the Capital development will require.
This also leads onto your last point and so I would invite you to look at how the EU has changed our European Territorial perceptions in the last fifty years in lands, which have large and long established populations. Eastern Siberia has nothing like and so the scope for new Political Arrangements; over the coming decades, through the SCO are almost limitless.
The incentive for Russia to do this is obvious, to build a new engine for growth that can help diversify the entire national economy and a build a Chinese style long term boom with which to try and tempt former Soviet Republics and Satellites in Europe back to its fold from the EU/NATO.
