In part four of a five-part series on Putin’s Russia, Financial Times’ reporter Neil Buckley writes about two cities on the Sino-Russian border: Blagoveshchensk and Heihe. He describes the sometimes-prickly relationship between a post-Soviet city in hard times and its Chinese boomtown neighbor just a stone’s throw away across the frozen Amur river.
The Chicago Tribune’s Moscow correspondent, Alex Rodriguez, had to this to say about Sino-Russian relations in a recent report he filed from Russia’s far east:
Siberia’s southern neighbor, China, ravenously consumes Russian oil and timber, sending some of it back to Russia as finished goods. That lopsided conduit benefits China far more than Russia, experts say, and only deepens Siberia’s plight.
“Without a sustainable economy in the country’s eastern half,” says Dmitri Trenin, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “I see Russia becoming a junior partner to China.”
