It is, to say the least, ironic that Putin’s neo-imperial war against Ukraine is, for all the talk of friendship and partnership “without limits” with Beijing, steadily reducing Russia to something close to a Chinese vassal state, a process that may eventually come at a very steep price. For, as far as Beijing is concerned, there is longstanding unfinished business with whoever is in charge in the Kremlin.

As I noted in a Corner post a few years back:

As the world has learned, Putin sees himself as something of a historian. As historians go, he is not the best, but one of these days he should spend some time looking into Chinese views on the “unequal treaties,” a series of 19th century treaties that China was (essentially) forced to sign with stronger powers, conceding this or conceding that.

Many of those treaties, such as that ceding the island of Hong Kong to Britain, have been transformed into irrelevance over the years, even if, in China, their memory still stings. But some of them have left a legacy that still endures, most notably in the delineation of the current Russo-Chinese border. This leaves the large swaths of formerly Chinese territory (including today’s Vladivostok) that had been acquired by the czars under an unequal treaty or two in Russia. That border has been ratified by the current regime in........

© National Review