A video on Chinese social media has called on Beijing to take advantage of Moscow’s weakened position to seize large parts of Siberia and Russia’s Far East.
The clip has gone viral in China and has racked up millions of hits among viewers on TikTok.
China’s leader Xi Jinping has publicly stood by Vladimir Putin ever since the Russian leader launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Both proclaimed a “no-limits” friendship that has seen Beijing provide critical components for the Kremlin’s military-industrial complex.
Despite the outward signs of a close relationship, tensions continue to simmer over disputed territories between the two countries.
Chinese nationalists are increasingly calling for Russia to return land they claim was stolen by the Kremlin in the 19th century.
The Treaty of Aigun in 1858 forced China to cede much of Manchuria to the Russian Tsar Alexander II.
The territory, comprising some 600,000 square kilometres, is part of Russia’s Far East and includes Vladivostok – the base of Putin’s Pacific Fleet.
In the video the Chinese narrator calls on China’s “thunderous” army to “rush north” and retrieve the country’s historic lands.
“What if one day Russia can’t stand it? What if Russia is crushed by the United States?” he asks.
“The country collapses, there is a second disintegration and Russia splits into dozens of small countries. Do you know what is going to happen?
“In less than two years, those small countries that are newly independent in the north will be stationed by the United States.
“From northeast to northwest, the entire northern half of China will completely lose the ability to strategically defend itself no matter how advanced the missile defence system is.
“We will lose reaction time so friends if Russia has a second disintegration for the future of the Chinese nation our thunderous army must rush north and recover the northeast (Manchuria).”
It is not just on social media that claims to Russian territory have been publicly aired by aggrieved nationalists.
In August 2023, the PRC’s natural resources ministry published a map that, among other unilateral and arbitrary demarcations, showed Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island on the Russian-Sino border as Chinese territory.
The map ignored the nations’ agreement nearly 20 years earlier to divide the 350-square-kilometre island roughly in half.