Programming note: Please join me tomorrow, Saturday, for a new edition of our weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm GMT - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~If you're not following our Sunday serialisation of America Alone, you're missing out, if I do say so myself, which I do. Many of you will be familiar with the main themes, but, speaking as the narrator, I'm particularly appreciative of the asides - the paragraphs that aren't especially germane to the central thesis but are also coming to pass. For example:
In the far east, we are slowly seeing the border between China and Russia blur. Entire regions are policed by both governments. Taxes are split between Putin and the CCP.
Chinese infiltration is an invasion in everything but name, and will be followed with annexation when Russia... pic.twitter.com/QZB7O5v9bJ
— Astraia (@astraiaintel) January 14, 2026
From Newsweek:
Is China Planning a Russian Land Grab? What to Know
Fascinating. But it's not "news" if you'd read a certain "alarmist" bestseller twenty sodding years ago:
What would you do if you were the fellows in the Kremlin..? You've got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland – which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian Empire couldn't hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the two thousand miles of the Russo-Chinese border. In the ever emptier Russian east there are sixteen million people and falling. In China, there are one-and-a-half billion and they need to stretch their legs. China is resource-poor; the Russian east contains eighty per cent of that country's resources. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of fifty-six will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of having it snaffled out from under. Facing extinction, Moscow doesn't have much to barter with – except dangling the Chinese an offer that could solve several of their structural problems.
For those who waste their lives reading the Euro-American "mainstream" media, one way to think of it is this: Russia is Denmark, China is the United States, and the Russian Far East is Greenland. Except that, whereas Trump has spent seven years musing on taking Greenland, Chairman Xi has just gotten on with it. Russians living long enough to "see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei"? Oh, wait, that's already happening:
Last year, the Chinese government decreed the country's maps should include Haishenwai—the Chinese name for Vladivostok, the administrative center of Primorsky Krai—and the Chinese names of seven other far-eastern Russian locations.
How do the Russian people feel about that? Well, there are ever fewer districts in the Far East that remain majority Russian. The continuing decline in population has left the Far Eastern Federal District with less than one person per square kilometre in an area twice the size of India. And at least a third of those left are also planning to leave:
Бегство на Запад: Дальний Восток продолжает терять русскоязычное население
Which means:
Flight to the West: The Far East continues to lose its Russophone population
So increasingly the people who are left in Vladivostok call it Haishenwei:
These longstanding trends, both of which have intensified since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin's expanded war against Ukraine, are the result of Russian flight. Ethnic Russians find it easier to leave the region than do members of other groups. This reality has been accompanied by three other developments that are changing the face of the Russian Far East but have received less attention. First, Chinese, North Korean, and Central Asian migrant workers are filling the gaps left behind by departing Russians...
Indeed. As a certain "niche Canadian" foresaw a generation ago.
Second, the non-Russians in the region are increasing in self-confidence and assertiveness...
Gosh, who'd've thought? It's almost like they're Muslims in Birmingham or something.
So, just as Ukraine can't hold the Donbass when the last flower of its youth are all in London servicing Keir Starmer, so the Kremlin can't hold the entirety of Northern Asia with less than one Russian per mile. It's all demography.
Me again two sod-bollocking decades ago:
In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russia's calculation is that sooner or later we'll be back in a bi-polar world and that, in almost any scenario, there's more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. If a Sino-Russian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, so, in a darker way, does a Sino-Russo-Euro-Muslim alliance of convenience.
The Sino-Russo-Muslim alliance of convenience is already here: see BRICS and the Rest of the Planet's disinclination to follow General Biden and Fieldmarshal Boris into the Donbass. Do you want to sit around and wait for an Islamised Europe to complete the picture?
I realise this isn't critically important like (for Americans) Levin attacking Megyn attacking Ben attacking Candace or (for Britons) Nigel attracting his third former Lord Privy Seal in a fortnight. I'm aware that by comparison China advancing its de facto territorial control ever closer to the eastern border of Europe is entirely trivial.
Meanwhile, back on the western front: the Ukraine debacle has now gone on for longer than either America or the Soviet Union was in the Second World War - over a no-account country most westerners never gave a thought to until they got the memo to change their Twitter avatars. It is the first war fought between two states with deathbed demography and, alas, it rapidly degenerated into an old-fashioned meat-grinder. On such a battlefield Ukraine can never win because it has insufficient Ukrainians: its huge formal borders are those of a Soviet administrative unit two generations past its sell-by date. On the other hand, Russia is taking longer to win than a major power should because it has insufficient Russians: a new Siege of Leningrad would be over a lot quicker - and the Siege of Vladivostok has already been lost.
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