National identity: The case of Russia and China

By Donald Earl Collins

Russian officials’ party and state visit to China on December 11 to 12, 2024, at the invitation of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, reaffirmed the unprecedentedly high level of relations between Russia and China. There are no issues we cannot discuss. During the talks with our Chinese partners, we discussed Ukraine, the Syrian crisis and resistance to the unilateral economic restrictions imposed on us without UN Security Council approval.

The reason for this trust-based dialogue is obvious. There are bonds of friendship and neighbourliness between the people of Russia and China that are based on deep historical traditions. In 2024, we marked 75 years of our diplomatic relations and the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Despite the fundamental shifts underway in the world due to the rise of a multipolar world, some factors have not changed for decades. Russia and China remain responsible for the present and future of humanity. We will continue working together to implement this challenging mission, settling the problems we inherited from the past, which I would like to dwell on in greater detail.

“Divide and rule”: two dimensions of a destructive policy

The Western civilisation has always tried to impose its will on external players throughout its history. Its most effective method was not inflicting a direct military defeat on them, which Europe could seldom accomplish due to the permanent shortage of material and human resources. It employed a much simpler strategy of destroying the existing power structures from within and by proxy. The Western world tried to prevent people from joining forces to repel the enemy, and to incite rivalry and dissent among them. It aimed at creating or exploiting objective ethnic, language, cultural, tribal and religious differences.

There are many instances when some segments or groups of population rose to that deadly bait and allowed to be drawn into bloody and extended ethno-social and ethno-confessional conflicts. The ultimate form of that policy is the divide et impera – divide and rule – principle. The term became a household word in Britain in the 17th century, but the policy itself was widely used in the Roman Empire and borrowed by the European colonial empires. It was crucial for providing subsistence to nearly all major colonial systems and became an integral part of the parent states’ activities. It actually remains the key method for implementing the Western management practices.

There are many examples in history when ethnic conflicts were deliberately incited or strengthened. No parent state wanted dependent territories to prosper. It was much simpler to pit nations against each other and draw artificial borders on the political map that divided ethnic groups regardless of their interests. This is clearly seen from a combination which prominent German sociologist Georg Simmel described in a book he wrote at the turn of the 20th century. He wrote that “the third element [in a relation between two individuals] intentionally produces the conflict to gain a dominating position,” as the result of

which they “so weaken one another that neither of them can stand up against his superiority.”

A targeted push to fuel religious and ethnic tension and confrontation served as one of the key tools for delivering on the divide element. In fact, the United Nations is still working on redressing the most urgent and gravest consequences of this policy.

For example, London must be credited for inciting and reinforcing the Hindu-Muslim antagonism. British colonisers used to bring cheap agricultural labour to Burma from Bengal, a predominantly Muslim region. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was a major factor in this regard with the increase in demand for rice in Europe, transforming Burma into what can be called a rice basket. This led to the emergence of a Bengal Muslim community that was alien to the Burman Buddhist majority. Called the Rohingya, this community settled in the north of Rakhine State (Arakan) and developed its own identity which was quite radical. Mutual distrust and fierce competition for the already limited resources, i.e., the right to own land, between native Burmans and those who descended from labour migrants led to the bloody events of 1942-1943, which came to be known in British history books as the Arakan Massacres. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives. Inter-ethnic, religious and social strife continued to deepen, paving the way for the massive outflow of the Rohingya people to neighbouring countries in 2017, recognised as the biggest resettlement of people in Southeast Asia since the 1970s crisis in Indochina.

Cyprus got a similar “ethnic gift” from the UK, which went to great length to deepen the centuries-old conflict between the island’s Greek and Turk populations.

*The author is the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russian Federation