WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN and President Jiang Zemin signed their 'friendship and co-operation' treaty this week in the Kremlin's gilded Marble Hall, the Russian President might have been motivated in part by a quite different emotion: fear of Chinese invasion.
Not fear that the People's Liberation Army will someday storm across the frontier to reclaim land many Chinese still believe is rightfully theirs, despite all those 'unequal treaties' signed long ago with the tsars. That prospect is highly unlikely. Instead, it would have been fear of invasion by seepage, of Chinese settlers and traders moving steadily into a depopulated hinterland as Russian residents decamp for the more congenial European parts of their vast nation.
The explanations lie more in demographics than politics. Crowded China's population rises by some 25 million per year, but Russia's population is in long-term decline - by nearly one million annually, with the rate increasing. This happens as more Russians flee the northern and eastern extremes of their country. Those rugged spaces no longer enjoy huge Soviet-era subsidies, making life increasingly harsh for those left behind.
'If demography is said to be destiny, the destiny of Russia for the next 50 years or more is appalling,' says Murray Feshbach, an expert on Russian population trends at Washington's Georgetown University. From Mr Putin's Kremlin perspective, the outlook must be grim. His goals, in the words of CIA director George Tenet, include restoring 'some aspects of the Soviet past status as a great power, strong central authority, and a stable and predictable society'. But working against him are demography, history and economics.
Mr Putin presides over a nation with more real estate - and perhaps more natural resources - than any other, but with steadily fewer people to occupy and develop it. Public health is in a parlous state, with a decreasing percentage of the population in their most-productive years: by 2050, those aged from 15 to 59 might be only half of today's total. This cannot be reversed in the short term, and that has grave implications for the economy. Some experts call Russia's condition terminal.
The causes are well known, with the effects accumulating rapidly. For example, the average Russian drinks 14 or 15 litres of alcohol annually, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) says major health problems arise at the eight-litre level. Medical authorities say heavy smoking among Russians means 20 to 30 per cent of all deaths come from heart disease or cancer. Drug-resistant tuberculosis has reached 76 cases per 100,000 people; WHO calls the 40-case rate an epidemic. Aids is spreading rapidly. Toxic chemicals and other deadly pollutants kill many thousands each year.