New Delhi: Like so many wars, this one began with a small act of theatrical performance. Early one morning in July 1938, a detachment of Soviet troops climbed over Zao Zernaya Hill just west of Lake Khasan. They crossed into territory claimed by Imperial Japan’s puppet republic, Manchukuo.
Gendarmes from the Manchukuo side politically intervened and asked the Soviets to leave. Lieutenant Vasily Veneviting equally calmly raised his rifle and shot one of the Manchukuo police through the head.
The forgotten war of Khalkhin Gol which followed led to the mauling of Imperial Japan, claiming some 25,000 of its troops to 10,000 Soviets. General Georgy Zhukov, hero of the Battle of Stalingrad and conqueror of Nazi-ruled Berlin, would establish his reputation there, breaking new ground in the use of massed armour and in the use of air power.
Fangchuan National Scenic Area, a strange mix of Disney World, forest and border viewpoints, today marks the scene of that massive conflict. There’s a little tower you can climb over and look over the Tumen River, which borders China, Russia and North Korea, the tri-junction where they meet. There was even once a plan for a three-country golf course, but it doesn’t seem to have materialised.
Hi, I’m Praveen Swamy. Welcome to this week’s episode of ThePrint Explorer. This week, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s Supreme Leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin have met for a summit aimed at reconfiguring the balance of power in Asia.
Among other things, North Korea and Russia have signed a mutual defence treaty and are going to be deepening their military cooperation. Kim’s defence industry is said to have supplied millions of artillery rounds to help Russia’s war in Ukraine in return for assistance with its own satellite and missile programmes.
And that’s the less important news. For decades, China has been seeking the right to navigate through the Tumen River, which would give its landlocked North East direct access to the port of Rajin on the Pacific.
Map from piece in NikkeiAsia to show area in question—being able to navigate the Tumen river to the Sea of Japan would be a major strategic gain for China. Highlights too Japan’s strategic vulnerability, how close to the geopolitical front line it sits. pic.twitter.com/PquAf7RbE1
— Robert Ward (@RobertAlanWard) June 20, 2024
The region was once a hub for heavy industry, particularly mining and automotive manufacturing, but it was left behind by history. There’s already a high-speed railway linking Changchun in Jilin province with Hunchun on the North Korea border, and Rajin is just another 15 or 20 km further away.
For decades, there’s been talk of Rajin eventually becoming a kind of Rotterdam on the Eastern Pacific. And while this might be a bit hyperbolic, there’s some truth to the description.
The reasons why the project hasn’t gone forward are much more interesting. North Korea is an ally of China, but it’s also feared its superpower neighbour. China wants regional hegemony, but it also wants stability and peace in East Asia, so it can sustain trade with countries like South Korea and Japan.
Kim’s nuclear weapons are a source of concern to China too, because they might destabilise the whole region. For its part, Russia has worried for decades about Chinese influence in its eastern regions. Vladivostok is a full day’s train ride from the village of Fangchuan, and there aren’t a whole load of Russians living along that track.
That’s why Imperial Japan once hoped it could push north into the area after all. The friendship bridge across the Tumen river at Fangchuan seems to have been deliberately designed not to allow large Chinese vessels access down the river, and North Korea has long been dragging its feet on proposals to redevelop the waterway and the port it leads to.
Finally, Vladimir Putin seems to have succeeded in persuading Kim to change his mind. As an axis against the West forms, the battlefield of Khalkhin Gol has emerged as one of the most important parts of the jigsaw puzzle.
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Failed dreams
Land-hungry peasants from Korea first began settling the vast marshes along the Tumen river sometime in the 19th century, planting barley, millets and fast-growing rice. The Treaty of Peking, signed in 1860 after the occupation of Beijing by French and British troops, saw China forced to cede Outer Manchuria to Imperial Russia.
This secured Russia’s long-standing goal of denying China access to the Sea of Japan. Korean settlement of the lands, though, continued, and even grew, especially after the invasion of their homeland by Japan in 1910. As Imperial Japan developed the industrial base of occupied Manchuria, it developed Rajin into a major seaport from where iron and coal could be shipped back to Tokyo.
The city boomed, growing from a population of just some 6,000 people in 1930 to 38,000 in 1940. For its part, the Soviet Union also developed its port at Vladivostok, housing a significant part of its naval power in the Pacific. Though Vladivostok did not have the same economic potential as Rajin, it was of obvious significance as a military seaport.
Then after Japan lost the Second World War, Korea dissolved into civil war, with China backing the North and the United States the South. The entire region plunged into the Cold War deadlock soon after, as the relationship between the Soviet Union and China became increasingly hostile.
Whatever little cross-border trade there was came to a grinding halt, and things stayed that way until 1999, when the Soviet Union collapsed and had long ceased to exist, and China moved down the road to economic liberalisation. In 1990, though, scholars and former government officials from China, the US, Japan, Russia, Mongolia, North Korea and South Korea met to consider economic revival in the emerging post-socialist regional order.
The Chinese expert Ding Shih-cheng presented a paper proposing the development of the Tumen River Triangle. The paper got the backing of the United Nations Development Program, and eventually led to the foundation of a body called the Tumen River Area Development Program (TRDAP).
Even though there was a lot of excitement around the TRDAP, the project went nowhere. For one, North Korea and Russia were perfectly happy to set up special economic zones which were part of the project, but weren’t all that excited about giving access China through the river to Rajin. From their point of view, this made complete sense. The river corridor would, after all, have obliterated any chance their own SEZs ever had of becoming competitive.
To make things worse, Japan pulled out of the project less than convinced of its economic viability and suspicious of North Korea’s behaviour. South Korea also bailed out as a consequence of its mounting tensions with the North. And North Korea itself kept dragging its feet, worried that economic liberalisation would be followed within the country by demands for political reform.
Events in Russia also led the country to rethink its involvement in TRDAP. In 2001, Gennadii Nazdratenko, the governor of the fast eastern region of Primorsky Krai, rebelled against Moscow’s authority. The rebellion was driven by complex local politics, but also underscored by Primorsky Krai’s deep links with China’s economy.
To President Putin, it began to seem that China’s economic power could be a political threat. From anecdotal accounts, it’s clear cross-border trade could have significantly improved livelihoods in the region for ordinary people. The South Korean economist Hyun-Gwi Park tells the lovely story of a Mrs. Lee, who bartered Chinese-made goods for seaweed and dried fish in North Korea.
Lee claimed to be making profits of over 100% in this business before her sister shut it down, saying that the travel was tanning her skin and would make it impossible for her to find a husband.
The New Cold War
From 2005, China again began pushing the idea, now rebranding it the Greater Two Men Initiative. Even though Russia and North Korea were very slow off the mark, events gave the project a new logic. First, North Korea and its nuclear program had undermined the regime’s hopes of closer economic ties with the South. Kim Il-sung, the father of the current Kim, who died in 1994, had been an enthusiastic proponent of deeper ties with the South.
The nuclear tests of 2006 and a series of military confrontations precipitated by North Korea, opposed to the North-South rapprochement. This was true of Russia too, of course. Instead of being integrated more deeply into Europe as it had hoped, Moscow found its peripheries being encroached on by NATO. To make things even worse, a new generation of anti-ballistic missile technologies threatened to degrade Russia’s nuclear deterrent.
The Economist Park makes a very perceptive point on how the experience of North Korea and Russia of the post-Soviet era shaped their behaviour. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Park notes, both Russia and North Korea went through horrific periods of hardship, characterised by joblessness, social dislocation, and in North Korea’s case, large-scale famine.
The two countries, moreover, never really bought into the post-socialist consensus and saw the Western push on human rights and democracy as a tool to dismantle their regimes. Faced with growing economic sanctions after 2016 and failing to reach an agreement with President Donald Trump at their summit three years later, Kim sought to build up an autarkic industrial economy in preparation for his struggle ahead.
The North Korean ruler, Bradley Babson writes, ordered his administrators to focus on metallurgical and chemical industries, electricity, coal, mining, and machine building to support various industrial sectors. Kim also reintroduced the concept of national defence economic work, a term very rarely used even in his father’s military-first era, the expert Rachel Min-Young Lee observes. He repeatedly called on industries to support national defence production rather than the civilian economy.
Furthermore, North Korea has consistently used war preparations formulations since early 2023, in line with its hardline US and South Korea policies, and in recent years, reigned in early market-oriented initiatives.
A switch to conservative economic policies in North Korea has generally reflected the state’s preference for a defence industrial base over the market economy. Like Kim, Putin was also preparing to sanction-proof his economy. Long before war broke out in Ukraine, Kayleigh Glenn writes, Russia pursued a three-pronged strategy implementing the Russification of key sectors against potential sanctions; second, seeking new economic and political partnerships outside the Western umbrella; and third, attempting to de-dollarize his economy.
The problem was both Russia and North Korea needed capital, and to get it, they turned ever closer to China. China had, as you know, benefited the most from globalisation, but President Xi Jinping’s overweening ambition led him to push aggressively for dominance in Asia and beyond. That in turn led him into growing confrontation, not just with neighbours like Japan and South Korea, but also the United States. To compensate, Xi deepened his relationship with North Korea and Russia, leading his nation to become the principal anti-American pole in a new Cold War.
The threat ahead
Kim Jong-il, the current ruler’s father, was fundamentally in show business, the scholar Andrew Scobell once memorably observed, writing scripts, directing casts, building sets and playing leading roles himself in major cinematic and theatrical productions.
All of this was done in order to project an image and a storyline, a version of reality that is believable, credible and appealing to the audience, whether foreign or domestic. Kim appeared to be the producer, director and leading man in his own feature film.
This kind of behaviour is without parallel in terms of scope, expense and sustained effort. After all, making a film is hard work. Kim sometimes carried all of this film stuff to ridiculous levels. The dictator famously arranged the kidnapping of the renowned South Korean movie director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife and actress Choi Eun-hee in 1978, in pursuit of his dream to create a movie industry. Every cult though comes to a point where it needs hard power to survive. And in a predatory world, that’s exactly what Kim Jong-un seems to have realised.
The current Kim we know likes fancy watches and Bentleys and Rolls Royces, his country’s elite shop in supermarkets where they can get knock-off French couture and the latest K-pop merch. Okay, unlicensed K-pop merch, but K-pop merch.
Andrei Lankov, among the most brilliant scholars of North Korea, notes that the party itself is fundamentally a distributor and producer of merch. But merch doesn’t keep regimes in power. To ensure his own survival, Kim turned to Russia. What started out as a small arms sale by North Korea to the Wagner mercenary group in November 22, expert Victor Cha writes, soon turned into a deep military relationship.
Even if Russia ran its defence production industries at full capacity, you see, its output of artillery, for example, falls short by some 50,000 shells a month. North Korea can easily fill that gap. Kim in return wants advanced telemetry, nuclear submarine technology, military satellite technology and advanced intercontinental ballistic missile technology. ICBMs with modern countermeasures, overhead reconnaissance capacity and nuclear submarines would allow Kim to target the entirety of the continental US with his 50 odd weapon nuclear force.
Washington would have real difficulty taking out all these weapons in a preemptive first strike. The North Korea-Russia alliance isn’t necessarily good news for China. At least that’s what some in the US have been arguing.
David Pearson and Chui Sang-hoon argue that it will inevitably draw in more Western military presence on China’s periphery. For years, China has tried to deny that it’s part of a new Cold War project. And the North Korea-Russia alliance that’s now been signed undermines this position. For its own good, the argument goes, China needs to keep its options open. But those options are being closed by its closest allies.
The journalist Laura Bicker observes that there are signs Xi disapproves of the burgeoning alliance between two of his closest friends. Some suggest Beijing even urged President Putin not to visit Pyongyang straight after meeting President Xi back in May. It seems Chinese officials did not like the optics of North Korea being included in that visit.
Xi is already under considerable pressure from the US and Europe to cut support for Moscow and to stop selling it components that are fueling the war in Ukraine. And he simply cannot ignore these warnings. Just as the world needs Chinese production, Beijing also needs global markets and investments to fight off sluggish growth and retain its spot as the world’s second largest economy.
Thus, you see China now offering visa-free travel to visitors from parts of Europe as well as from Thailand and Australia. And yeah, Chinese pandas are once again being sent to zoos around the world.
The older Kim, the scholar Samuel Ramani reminds us, spent much of his life vacillating in his relationships between his Soviet counterparts Nikita Khrushchev and Chinese leader Mao Zedong. This thwarted the formation of a trilateral axis. In the late 1950s, the Sino-Soviet split prevented these three powers from strategic cooperation on Northeast Asian security. No one after all puts an alliance before their self-interest, not even ideologically driven dictators.
Yet, there is an important flip side to this argument. The North Korea-Russia alliance might be an embarrassment to China, but it also gives it a powerful tool. It can now assert that it and it alone is in a position to influence and restrain two nuclear-armed states. This will ensure the West has to placate China to avoid regional conflagrations and tone down its efforts to isolate Beijing. There’s nothing like having a violent friend or two after all if you’re looking for respect and influence in a bad neighbourhood. And China seems to be playing that game.
And this is why the debate over the course of the Tumen River is worth watching closely. From the village of Hunchun just across the river, residents can smell the sea but cannot see its waves, journalist Harold Thibault reported after a visit last month. To every Chinese, that’s a reminder of the unequal border treaty forced on the country during the colonial era.
Even though it’s made alliances with Russia, that treaty has never been rolled back. Like Xiaoyu, who runs a small shop selling alcohol, food products and knickknacks, China knows Russia now needs its help. Before Russians came to Hunchun to buy clothes from head to toe, they didn’t even negotiate prices. Now they have less money, she told the journalist.
Letting Chinese ships move down that last 15 km of the Tumen River and letting it control the port at Rajin will signal that Beijing is indeed the preeminent partner in the new axis, which is reshaping Asia to its will. Brought to his knees by the crisis in Ukraine, Putin might have no choice but to make that concession and to pull his friend Kim along.
From the story of the Khalkhin Gol battle, we should take away some important lessons. The Second World War didn’t begin on 1 September, 1939 when Nazi troops struck in Poland, or for that matter in May 1940, when they invaded France.
It also began when Japan invaded China in 1931 and occupied Manchuria. And it also began in 1938 when the Soviet Union asserted itself on Zauzernaya Hill, that little hill above the Tumen River.
That’s the whole point with crisis. Nation states drift into them almost by accident, one step leading on to the next until it’s too late. The first ships to navigate down the Tumen will be carrying us along with them to a very different world. We should be watching them with the utmost care. I’m Praveen Swamy and I’m a contributing editor to ThePrint. Thank you for watching this episode of ThePrint Explorer.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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