Pressure Points - The geographic reality behind The Siberian Question
Fact No. 1 -
There is a body of water in Siberia that holds more unfrozen freshwater than all of the North American Great Lakes combined. It is over a mile deep in places. It is ancient, having formed twenty-five million years ago, and so biologically distinct that approximately eighty percent of its species exist nowhere else on Earth. It is larger in surface area than Belgium. Most people in the West couldn't find it on a map.
Lake Baikal holds approximately twenty percent of the world's unfrozen surface freshwater. Not twenty percent of Russia's freshwater. Twenty percent of the world's. In a century increasingly defined by water stress, that is not a geographic footnote. It is a strategic fact.
Russia controls it.
Fact No. 2 -
Approximately two thousand miles to the southeast, China faces a water crisis that its own government has described as one of the most severe resource challenges in the country's history. China's water table, particularly in the northern and northwestern regions that support both the bulk of the country's agricultural production and significant portions of its industrial base, is in documented long-term structural decline. Aquifers that took millennia to fill are being drawn down in decades. Agricultural regions that have sustained hundreds of millions of people for generations are increasingly dependent on groundwater reserves that are not being replenished at anything close to the rate of extraction.
This is not a future projection. It is a present condition. Chinese government reports, international hydrological studies, and satellite-based groundwater monitoring data have all confirmed the trajectory. The question is not whether China's water deficit is real. The question is how severe it will become, how quickly, and what happens when the gap between available water and national need becomes impossible to manage internally.
China needs fresh water.
Thus a geopolitical gap between Fact No. 1 and Fact No. 2.
China faces a structural water deficit that is worsening. Russia controls more than enough unfrozen freshwater to make up that deficit. There is no reason why water can’t be tradeable as a resource in the same way that oil and natural gas have been traded as resources for the past century. The distance, approximately the same as that from Los Angeles to Chicago, is crossable by pipeline. Access to the resource should be negotiable.
China’s need and Russia’s resource can be thought of as a gap where geopolitical leverage is forming. Not dramatically. Not through military seizure or explicit coercion. The way resource leverage has always formed. Through access agreements, infrastructure investment, bilateral negotiation, and the slow encoding of dependency into frameworks that outlast the people who built them.
This is not a scenario I invented. The infrastructure discussions between Russia and China around Siberian water access have been part of bilateral negotiations for decades. The terms have shifted. The urgency on the Chinese side has increased. The leverage on the Russian side has grown correspondingly. The question is not whether this gap will be bridged. The question is when, by whom, and through what mechanisms.
Why I wrote The Siberian Question
I spent the 1990s in Prague and Warsaw, building a technology company during the post-communist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe. I watched institutions built for one world scramble to function in another. I watched legal frameworks lag behind power shifts. I watched what happens when the mechanisms of leverage outpace the mechanisms of governance.
When I began researching the geopolitical trajectory of freshwater access, the Baikal-China dynamic was already visible to anyone paying close attention. It was not front-page news. It was not the subject of mainstream geopolitical commentary. It was a trajectory. Quiet, structural, accumulating below the threshold of alarm.
The Siberian Question is built on that trajectory. The novel asks what happens when the gap between Russia's water and China's need of it becomes acute. Coupled with China’s very long geopolitical memory, the stage is set for some real politick in Siberia.
It is not a prediction. It is an extrapolation from mechanisms that are already operational.
The trajectory is real. The timeline is fiction.
If the geography of The Siberian Question interests you, the novel begins exactly where this piece ends. At the moment when China decides to risk bridging that geopolitical gap counting on Russia’s weakness and dependency to accomplish its goals.
The first chapter is free when you join the mailing list at https://rossadams.net/mailing-list
The Price of Water, Book 2 of the Hammurabi Code Series, is set in 2051, after the gap has been bridged and the leverage has been used. The first chapter of The Price of Water is free as well. Just send me an email requesting it to ross@rossadams.net.
The Iranian Promise, Book 3, is in progress.