From NPR’s All Things Considered:
Few places in the world have been more directly affected by China’s booming economy than its once-mighty neighbor to the north. In Russia’s sprawling Far East, Chinese people and capital are moving in as Russians abandon the depressed region.
Russia’s relationship with China is starkly clear in the city of Blagoveshchensk, which sits on the Amur River that divides the two countries.
In the 1960s, the former communist allies fought bloody skirmishes along the river. When relations began to thaw in the 1980s, Chinese people flocked across the border to buy Soviet cars, farm machinery, kitchen utensils — anything they could get their hands on.
Now the trade moves in the opposite direction.
