This site has a policy against trolling. [1]

Feel free to demonstrate your assertions, or withdraw them. Otherwise, your comment will be removed.

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/06/22/trolls.html

The picture illustrates the point of you lacking any intellectual honesty. Your take a bit there, steal a bit in another place, use irrelevant imagery or facts, all arranged (and not so neatly) to fit your own schizophrenic ideological constructs.

I am not going to make any comments on your obviously incurable Russophobia. That would be a waste of time

You neither define your terms, nor cite examples to demonstrate them, nor cite counter-examples to demonstrate your own point.

Just a few words about that picture you use as an illustration of modern Russia. Do you realize that this color photograph is now exactly 100 years old?

You are right: the picture of healthy Russian children is from Russia’s past, not Russia’s present.

http://sechtl-vosecek.ucw.cz/en/expozice5.html

ElamBend,

It will have less to do with evening out population than with “Hey, look at all those natural resources!”

Since 1945, capital-rich countries have prefered a client-server/sphere-of-influence model with natural resource suppliers, instead of territorial annexation. The old Imperial model forces the capital-supplier to invest in public safety and social services in the resource-supplying countries. The new model allows minimal investment (essentially, just roads and railroads from a port of entry to the mines/forests/etc).

It’s a sad, sad shame, not the possibility of losing East Asia, but the decline of Russia. It is a broken society now, but oh, was it something spectacular. Being engaged to a Russian has opened my eyes to a culture that is fascinating and fantastic. It was by no means ever perfect, but the fix has been in for 90 years. [Just imagine if all the people that Stalin had killed had lived.]

So, what becomes of Russia.

Have you read East of the Sun? My father liked it, though I found it too dreary to read. The part of Russia I had sympathy with seemed to end very early… To me, the shocking part is that Outer Manchuria was discovered by Russia /twice/ — the Czarist society was so rigid that the second expedition had no knowledge of the high-profile first expedition sent out a century and a half previously… It was as if in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln chartered a ‘corps of discovery’ to discover the source of the Missouri River…

Steve French,

But will the Chinese decide to even out their population by buying/annexing/invading the unpopulated areas in some sort of Asian Manifest destiny

The three basic models models seem to be

a) ethnographic transition, where Chinese eventually form a majority in Outer Manchuria and Russia resigns itself to dealing with this minority
b) the Malaysia model [2], where Chinese form the entrepreneurial elite of Outer Manchuria, though nativist hostility remains
c) the Vietnam model, where a future Russian government simply expels all Chinese en masse

Mark in Texas,

Russia like Japan is a “fascinating and fantastic” culture but the neighbors of both places are happy to see them in somewhat reduced circumstances.

Indeed. It will be interesting to see how Russia’s beliggerent foreign policy and resource-centric development compares with Japan’s pacifist and industrial approach, as time goes on.

PS,

I think you’d be better off in Kazakhstan — similar oil-wealth and central asian authoritarianism, with a slightly less goolish youth movements… [3]

ElamBend,

Excellent links!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/East-Sun-Conquest-History-Siberia/dp/0671667556
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/03/14/malaysia-against-the-mixed-blooded.html
[3] http://catholicgauze.blogspot.com/2008/11/nashi-putin-youth-go-off-deep-end.html

Purpleslog:
they are:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE4DB153BF93BA35754C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DEFD81331F932A3575BC0A96F958260&scp=2&sq=chinese%20farmers%20russia&st=cse

Mark,
I’m less sanguine about the Russian culture’s love of relationships, as you describe it, it is a series of power relationships in order to get something; not true friendliness. I’ve found many Russians to be very distrustful and wary.

I agree, Japan is another of those cultures in slow suicide, but I don’t find it near as fatalistic or malicious or broken as Russia.

And that being said, I don’t think there are fortunes to be made in this day and age on physical frontiers, just technological ones.