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See why violence is growing on the Russia/China border

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The Cold Boundary, 2008 - China/Russia - As trade grows on the border, tension and resulting violence grows also, but the conflict is largely mysterious. As Moscow and Beijing promise a new era of friendship, intolerance and racist violence swells on the Russia/China border. Trade is bringing wealth to both countries.

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The Growing Shadow Of The Oroqen Language And Culture | Cultural Survival

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Tucked away in the foothills of the Greater Hinggan mountains in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia lies Alihe, a city of quite modest size by Chinese standards, with a population of around fifty thousand.

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Ma Fuxiang ( traditional Chinese: 馬福祥; simplified Chinese: 马福祥; pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Ma Fu-hsiang French romanization: Ma-Fou-hiang or Ma Fou-siang; 4 February 1876 - 19 August 1932) was a Chinese military and political leader spanning the Qing Dynasty through the early Republic of China and illustrated the power of family, the role of religious affiliations, and the interaction of Inner Asian China and the national government of China.

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The Tajiks, together with the small group of Ethnic Russians are the Chinese Minorities of European Origin. The Tajiks have been roaming the extenses of Central Asia for countless generations becoming a distinct ethnic group of their own. However, according to research their origins mainly derive from Persia. The Pamir mountain tribes, including the Tajik are classified as Homo-Sapiens Alpinus, a distinct branch of the Human Tree all by themselves. Beyond this, scientific opinions conflict. The 19Th Century European explorer (Sir) Marcus Aurel Stein (and others) in his books referred to them simply as Sarikoli. Languages spoken in the area suggest there were originally multiple tribes, at least the Shugni and the Wakhi. Robert Shaw observed mainly Sarikolis and Wakhis, referring to the Tajiks collectively as Ghalchah.

This page was last updated on: May 27, 2017

As for the Tatars, they are a small Muslim group almost exclusively found in Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region in Western China. The ancestors of the Chinese Tatars are Volga Tatar tradesmen who settled in China. Thus, the Tatars have a tradition in commerce and trade.

Chinese Tatars have their own spoken and written language. They speak an archaic variant of the Tatar language, free from loanwords introduced in later Times and it uses an Arabic variant of the Tatar alphabet, not in use in the Former Soviet Union since the 1930s. The Tatars also use Uygur, the main trading language in Xinjiang , or Kazakh language.

Tatar music and dance is very popular in Xinjiang today. Every wedding or festival regardless of ethnic group features Tatar Dance and Song. The Muslim festivals of the Tatars are similar to the other Muslim Groups in the Area. A special place is held for the plowshare festival, which usually is held in June. The plowshare festival is a celebration of Nationality for the Tatars and all come out in traditional tatar wear and engage in horse-tugging, horse racing or manly wrestling matches. The plowshare festival is the highpoint of

This Map Includes Cities and Towns (shown by size) - Main Ethnic Communities in Xinjiang AR, Main Monuments & landmarks of Xinjiang AR, the Taklamakan Desert in South-Central Xinjiang AR, major highways, provincial railroads, a variety of border passes in the Karakoram Mountain Range and the Tian Shan Mt. Range, plus main waterways, rivers and lakes of this large region. - Click Map to go to Full Version !

This page was last updated on: May 27, 2017

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Ethnic Minorities of European Descent in China and Their Cultures, by China Report.com

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The Tajiks, together with the small group of Ethnic Russians are the Chinese Minorities of European Origin. The Tajiks have been roaming the extenses of Central Asia for countless generations becoming a distinct ethnic group of their own. However, according to research their origins mainly derive from Persia.

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Русский язык в Китае - Википедия

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стали преподавать более 300 лет назад, в правление династии Цин. С тех пор его популярность переживала немало взлётов и падений. Золотым веком русского языка в Поднебесной можно считать годы советско-китайской дружбы, когда он занимал ведущее положение среди всех иностранных. С началом экономических реформ 1970-х годов позиции самого изучаемого иностранного языка занял английский.

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see p.136 onwards for focus on Russian in Ergun

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China, with the world's largest population, numerous ethnic groups and vast geographical space, is also rich in languages. Since 2006, China's State Language Commission has been publishing annual reports on what is called "language life" in China.

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Through portraits, landscapes, and collaborative works, Jim Goldberg's expansive Open See follows refugee and immigrant populations traveling from war-torn, economically devastated, and often AIDS-ravaged countries, to make new homes in Europe. The photographer spent four years documenting the stories of refugees in over 18 countries, from Russia and the Middle East to Asia and Africa. To convey a "more in-depth understanding" of the people he was working with, he tapped into a practice he had developed while in graduate school: hand finishing photographs, and including handwriting to tell the stories of his subjects, making each a unique object encapsulating a story

Here, Goldberg reflects back on this body of work, the processes he employed, and considers how the international migrant crisis has gone on to develop in the years that followed.

What was your original motivation for wanting to start the project?
Open See grew out of my first Magnum commission, Periplus, which consisted of eight photographers who were sent to document different aspects of Greek culture in the run up to the 2004 Summer Olympics. My focus during the commission was on the immigrant communities in Athens. After my first trip I realized I wanted to go deeper and that the project I wanted to produce was going to take some time to develop. Open See tells the story of refugees, immigrants, and trafficked individuals journeying from their countries of origin to their new homes in Europe. This project addresses the struggle of immigrants to leave conditions where war, disease, and economic devastation prevail. It also addresses their labors to adapt to new European cultures and the reciprocal efforts of those cultures to adapt to their new "citizens."

On the people you photographed for Open See, do you know anything of their stories about how life has panned out for them since?
Most of the people I photographed were seeking asylum. I was told at the time that out of the 14,000 people who applied, only three were given it. Their lives were incredibly fragile, unpredictable, and transitory. I would meet someone one day, and they would be gone the next. Out of the hundreds of the people I met and photographed, there is only one person that I'm still in touch with.

In the ten years since Open See, how have you witnessed the circumstances surrounding migration change?
In 2003, when I started this project, migration, refugees, and trafficking were hardly on anyone's radar. If anything, we know now that the problems have only gotten worse. There are over 65 million people displaced today, and another 21 million trafficked. Sadly, xenophobia has also increased exponentially-especially in this country. As more people are displaced, more doors are being closed to them than ever before.

Where might you focus your attention if you were looking to tell these stories in 2017?
One could certainly focus their attention on migration, refugees, and victims of trafficking right here in the U.S.

How do you imagine that work might look?
Impossible to say. The work evolves and adapts as the topic does. I also find myself experimenting with a lot of different media and materials these days.

What, in your opinion, is the role of an artist/photographer when it comes to the issues of the global migrant crisis?
My role is and always has been to figure out conceptual narrative strategies that can relate and retell the stories or situations that are going on in the world around me.

Your work employs the technique of writing on the photographs themselves, which are hand finished, often with writing. As a device, why do you think this works so well for this type of project?
When I was in graduate school, I developed the technique of writing on photographs as another way to tell a story. Of course, it turned out to be something much more, something integral to my practice for 40 years. At the time, though, I certainly wasn't thinking that far ahead. I just saw something that I felt I needed to make sense of, which is how most visual artists' projects begin. Adding text to photographs created a better, more in-depth understanding of the people I was working with. The subjects become participants by retelling their stories, and the viewer perceives a closer connection through the honest word choice and handwriting they see.

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Through portraits, landscapes, and collaborative works, Jim Goldberg's expansive Open See follows refugee and immigrant populations traveling from war-torn, economically devastated, and often AIDS-ravaged countries, to make new homes in Europe. The photographer spent four years documenting the stories of refugees in over 18 countries, from Russia and the Middle East to Asia and Africa.

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Economy

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Boom and bust along Chinese-Russian border | Journal Reporters

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Booming China, Struggling Russia: Where Two World Powers Meet DW reporter Mareike Aden explores the border region between Russia and China and discovers two very different economic climates. Trade makes for friendly ties, but many Russians are intimidated by China's growing power.

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Chinese border town booms with business with Russia

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China tries to boost business with Russia courtesy of border towns. CNN's Eunice Yoon reports.

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Water is a photographic project exploring a natural resource in crisis. A 2010 United Nations report has warned of a "looming warning crisis" and reports that nearly 3.4 billion people will face water scarcity by 2025. As more people live in cities and our populations grow, our dependence on dwindl

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Damanski - Zhenbao :: FIDELITY Foundation of support frontier veterans :: Actions and Events

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Sino-Soviet border clash on Damanski Island (Zhenbao-dao) on March, 1969 is the tragic example of bloodshed, proceeded from inability of the political leaders to compromise in ordinary border situation. Best sons of two great nations paid their lives for inertness of political mentality.

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Seven million people live on the frozen resource-rich taiga of Russia's Far East, a region nearly as large as the contiguous United States. Roughly 1.3 billion Chinese are packed like pickles next door, where corruption, spiraling unemployment, environmental disaster, and growing rural unrest are taking the luster off the Chinese economic miracle. Unfortunately for China's dire need for new demographic and economic horizons, Russia isn't eager to share its chilly sandbox with the neighbors. The struggle between Dr. Malthus and Doctor Zhivago threatens the balance of power in the Far East. But economics-rather than a Tom Clancy-style showdown-will likely decide the winner.

If the Earth's territory were divvied up according to demographic need and by potential for economic development, China would play Pac-Man at the expense of the Russian Far East. Four time zones wide, the RFE extends from the Bering Sea-a few miles from Alaska-in the northeast, to the Sea of Japan in the southeast, to China in the south, and Siberia to the west. The 100 million inhabitants of the RFE's Chinese neighbor, the Northeast Provinces (also called Manchuria), live in an area that is roughly one-eighth the size of the RFE.

The RFE's poor manufacturing base, crumbling physical infrastructure, high transportation costs, and small natural markets discourage local enterprise. The perversions of Soviet economics were accentuated in the RFE, resulting in economic dislocation even more severe than elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Moscow's make-work, value-destructive factories that struggled to survive after the command economy collapsed at least had a natural local market of millions of Muscovites. But after Soviet subsidies ended, similar facilities situated on RFE Frozen Plain No. 948,373 had a more difficult time getting raw materials-and selling their shoddy goods to markets thousands of kilometers away. On another front, periodic power shortages plunge large swaths of the RFE into Arctic darkness every winter-an eight-month-long exercise in frostbite that makes North Dakota seem balmy by comparison. Tiny cadres of progressive businesspeople who have managed to unlearn the lessons of 70 years of Soviet-style communism have to battle local politicians who set the Russian standard for incompetence and corruption. The RFE is Russia's Wild West, but post-Soviet Russia doesn't have the patience, time, manpower, or money to wait for Manifest Destiny to take hold-nor to exploit the RFE's superabundance of natural resources, including timber, oil and gas, minerals, and fish. It's no wonder that the region's population has declined by 10 percent over the past decade.

China-and Manchuria in particular-has its own set of problems. Overpopulation, resource misallocation, and twisted economic incentives that are a result of the Chinese capitalist experiment are pressuringeconomic growth, particularly in the inland areas. According to the Economist, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has projected that unemployment could rise to 15 percent (compared with an official rate of less than 4 percent), with comparatively underdeveloped inland areas hit the hardest. The shuttering of state-owned enterprises throughout China-and especially in parts of Manchuria-part of the painful process of dismantling the infrastructure of the state economy, has resulted in widespread labor unrest. Private companies and rural enterprise have failed to pick up the employment slack: Arable land is scarce and exhausted, and land loss has accelerated as aquifers have dried up, resulting in declining grain harvests. The absence of a political safety valve has raised concerns that rural unrest could derail China's slow economic liberalization process.

The endless horizons of the RFE would create new opportunities for land ownership for tens of millions of unemployed Chinese rural dwellers. Unlike Russia, China has the ingrained entrepreneurial spirit, as well as the incentive and cash, to make the best of the Russian Far East. The RFE's natural resource wealth-especially oil and gas on Sakhalin-would provide Beijing with a significant measure of energy-security comfort. Moving in on Vladivostok, Russia's only temperate Pacific port, would at once end Russian trade in the Pacific; terminate any lingering relevance for Russia's Pacific navy; and enable China to pose an immediate threat to Japan. Russia's focus, though, long ago shifted west, just as its influence in East Asia has long been on the wane.

China's designs on the Russian Far East have strong historical roots. China controlled most of what is now the RFE until the 1850s, when Russia took advantage of China's preoccupation with the Opium Wars to take control of a large swath of the area. A few additional land grabs, followed by a prolonged series of pogroms and deportations, meant that by 1937 Russia had effectively eradicated the Chinese presence in the RFE. But China has subsequently been cagey about recognizing the treaties that resulted in the confiscation of its territory and unwilling to definitively admit defeat.

China is already hip-deep into a stealth economic invasion of the RFE. The region is heavily dependent on Chinese imports for its food supplies and consumable items. The vast distances between Russia's economic center and the RFE have meant that the area frequently looks south, rather than west, for economic opportunity. Anecdotally, the Chinese presence in markets, restaurants, real estate, and investment throughout the RFE is significant; according to the U.S. government's Commercial Service, China is one of the three largest foreign trade partners of at least five of the nine administrative regions of Russia's Far East Federal District. Wildly imprecise estimates of the Chinese population in the RFE range between 100,000 to an improbable 10 million, on the back of illegal immigration facilitated by the sievelike nature of the 2,700-mile border between the two countries. In July 2000, intelligence provider Stratfor.com forecasted that the Chinese could become the RFE's dominant ethnic group by 2020; it later warned that the Chinese government's crackdown on domestic crime gangs, and the criminal opportunities offered by the untamed nature of the RFE, compounded by the incompetence and corruption of Russian law enforcement, was leading to the dramatic expansion of Chinese criminal activities in the RFE.

The conflicted xenophobia that characterizes much of Russia's attitude toward foreigners is exacerbated when it comes to the "Chinese question," as RFE residents delicately term it. The RFE welcomes Chinese investment and tourism but fears the loss of local jobs and the RFE's natural wealth flowing across the border. Russian vendors periodically protest the encroachment of Chinese sellers in local markets, and Russian authorities often treat visiting Chinese with the heavy hand normally reserved for dark-skinned people in Moscow. The Russian parliament confirmed the country's anti-Chinese credentials (and allowed xenophobia to trump greed) in December 2002, when it strongly encouraged the China National Petroleum Corp. to withdraw from a privatization auction for Slavneft, at the time Russia's seventh-largest oil producer. CNPC had indicated that it was willing to pay $1.3 billion (or 75 percent) more than what turned out to be the winning (Russian) bid.

Still, for Moscow, the RFE is a distant underperforming colony that is gradually slipping into economic and demographic irrelevance. China needs an outlet for simmering rural unrest, and it has historically had designs on the Russian Far East. Admittedly, the likely difficulties of negotiating a fair price (the $2.5 trillion suggested by a usually sane Russian legislator as Russia's price for turning over the disputed Kurile Islands to Japan suggests that Moscow would aim high) is one barrier to the transaction. And Vladimir Putin would have a spot of trouble trying to convince the Russian electorate that selling off the motherland's crown jewels is a good thing

But a Far East version of the Louisiana Purchase-the Siberian Bargain, to take a bit of geographical license-would allow Moscow to get rid of its Far Eastern headache and raise some cash to see it through the next dip in commodity prices, and it would pave the way for China to buy a few more decades in its capitalist experiment. Occasionally, economic rationality prevails. Might Russia and China see the (snow-blinding) light?

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Why China should purchase the Russian Far East.

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Seven million people live on the frozen resource-rich taiga of Russia's Far East, a region nearly as large as the contiguous United States. Roughly 1.3 billion Chinese are packed like pickles next door, where corruption, spiraling unemployment, environmental disaster, and growing rural unrest are taking the luster off the Chinese economic miracle.

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SUIFENHE, China-In 1989, the opening of the border between Russia and China raised Russian fears of a "yellow peril": millions of Chinese citizens flooding north into relatively unpopulated, but richly endowed, Siberia. Some contrarian publications even went so far as to suggest that Russia should just accept the inevitable and sell the whole territory to China.

Demographically, it makes sense that Chinese people would flock to Russia. Look at it in economic terms, though: China's economy is booming, and its prospects seem limitless. Meanwhile, Russia is highly dependent on uncertain oil and natural gas reserves. Professionals already make more money in China than they do in Russia, and as China's economy grows, blue-collar wages will likely outpace Russian pay. So, rather than Chinese people moving to Russia, isn't it more likely that Russians would move to China?

I asked this question of many Russians in the Far East, and I usually got the same answer: It's already happening. Thus far, the Russian migration to China seems to be only a trickle. But it's not hard to imagine that this is just the start.

The energy in Suifenhe, a relative backwater, is so much greater than in Vladivostok-a city three times the size-that taking the four-hour bus trip across the border is like switching from black-and-white to color. The road from Vladivostok becomes progressively worse the closer you get to the border, and the land is almost empty of people. As soon as you cross the border into China, there is a massive shopping mall with red cupolas, an apparent nod to Russian architecture, and an international-standard Holiday Inn.

The mall is part of what was supposed to be a joint Chinese-Russian free-trade zone, where people would be able to come to shop and tour visa-free. But all Russia has built on its side of the border is a church, which Chinese tourists photograph through the chain-link fence.

The day I arrived was one of the biggest celebrations in recent Chinese history: the 60 th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Still, at the many construction projects around the city's center, workers were on the job until after dark. I thought back to Vladivostok, where a huge suspension bridge is under construction. It is supposed to be ready by 2012, when the city plays host to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Ostensibly, this is a priority project overseen from Moscow, but when I mentioned to my translator that I hadn't seen anyone working on it, she smiled. "Yes," she said. "We notice that all the time."

Suifenhe's economy is driven by Russian shoppers on package tours, and the shops in the city center all have signs in the Cyrillic alphabet. One sporting goods store was called CSKA, after Moscow's legendary soccer team. I flipped through the T-shirts on sale at another boutique and saw shirts advertising the 2014 Sochi Olympics and United Russia, Vladimir Putin's political party.

But in addition to the many Russian tourists, there is a growing population of Russian expatriates living in Suifenhe. One, a journalist named Stanislav Bystritski, is a former reporter for a Vladivostok TV station. He moved here five years ago and produces two Russian-language shows on local Suifenhe TV, one oriented toward Russian tourists and one for Chinese people who want to learn about Russia and the Russian language.

As he showed me around town, an elderly Chinese man greeted us with a smile and said " Horosho," which means good in Russian. It seemed a strange thing to say, but Bystritski told me it was a common greeting by Chinese people here, because it sounds like it could be a Chinese word and is easy for Mandarin speakers to pronounce.

He echoed what I had heard in Blagoveshchensk and Vladivostok-Russians come to China because it is easier to get a good job and easier to do business. "So many Russian businessmen say it's easier to work here, there is so much less corruption and bureaucracy," he said.

Suifenhe's government once had plans to build a Russian quarter, reportedly with the expectation that up to 50,000 Russians might relocate here, though those plans appear to have been abandoned. Bystritski said that the rules on apartment ownership by foreigners have been loosened, so the government may have decided that there is no longer a need for a special Russian district. (We couldn't find out for sure. Bystritski set up a meeting with a member of Suifenhe's local government to talk about that and other issues involving Russian migrants. The official apparently assumed I would be Russian, and when Bystritski introduced me as an American, the official's eyes widened somewhat cartoonishly. He probably wasn't the best person, he said, and in the end I couldn't get anyone from the local government to talk to me.)

Still, I was able to meet several Russians who had moved here. Petr is building a small complex of apartment buildings for Russians. The Suifenhe government is so enthusiastic about the project that it is bulldozing the homes of the Chinese people who currently live in the area.

Viktor, a Russian engineer who moved here at the beginning of 2008, is working on a pollution-control technology that has excited more interest in China than it did in Russia. "The Chinese are more interested in innovative projects, so there are more opportunities here," he said. His wife, Natasha, works as a technician with Suifenhe's pioneering (and, to a civil libertarian, rather ominous) "electronic security" system, in which surveillance cameras all over town are controlled from a spotless control room in a glass-fronted building called the Suifenhe Cyberport. She says she wants her 4-year-old son to be raised "in Chinese traditions," and she is making sure he learns Chinese.

"People are so friendly here, I feel so comfortable," she said. "This is my new home."
Click here to view a slide show about where Russia meets China.

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SUIFENHE, China-In 1989, the opening of the border between Russia and China raised Russian fears of a "yellow peril": millions of Chinese citizens flooding north into relatively unpopulated, but richly endowed, Siberia. Some contrarian publications even went so far as to suggest that Russia should just accept the inevitable and sell the whole territory to China.

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Nobody's River is an all-womens source to sea expedition across southern siberia on one of the world's greatest and least known free flowing rivers, the Amur.

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The Amur River is the longest undammed river in the Eastern Hemisphere and serves as a main water source for many of natural worlds fiercest predators and most beautiful inhabatants.

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Tips From Nobody's River Director Skip Armstrong The Nobody's River expedition was supported by a National Geographic Young Explorers grant. Knowing and working with a handful of filmmakers, I've seen my fair share of the "real life" behind the finished product and much of it comes down to the editing room-or cave, as many of...

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Tips From Nobody's River Director Skip Armstrong The Nobody's River expedition was supported by a National Geographic Young Explorers grant. Knowing and working with a handful of filmmakers, I've seen my fair share of the "real life" behind the finished product and much of it comes down to the editing room-or cave, as many of...

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The Amur River border. Once a symbol of conflict, could it turn into a water resource stake?

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Les relations entre la Chine et la Russie se sont considérablement détendues depuis une dizaine d'années. Ce réchauffement diplomatique met un terme à la forte tension qui régnait entre les deux pays. Le commerce croît, et les investissements chinois dans la zone frontière stimulent la croissance le long du fleuve Amour.

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The Amur-Heilong River Basin has become an arena for economic cooperation and competition between the countries of Northeast Asia.

Transboundary Challenges
Intense economic development has increased human-induced pressures on both ecosystems and species. Repeated reports at the beginning of the 21st century describing degraded or lost biodiversity, habitats, water quality and other natural resources raise concerns over how much more human pressure Amur eco-regions can bear without losing the potential for natural recovery.

The Amur-Heilong River Basin exemplifies transboundary regions in need of shared environmental responsibility. Land-use patterns and cultural traditions and pace of economic development are drastically different in Russia, Mongolia and China, but sustainable development requires cooperation in the field of environmental protection and nature resource management.

Contrasts in Human Populations

Uneven distribution of human population is one of sharpest contrasts of Amur-Heilong River Basin. The total human population in the Amur-Heilong is about 75 million people and population ratio for China , Russia and Mongolia is 400:25:1. Average population density is 35 people/km ² in the basin, which translates into more than 90 people/km ² in China, 3.5 people/km ² in Russian Far East and 0.83 people/km ² in Mongolia.

Ethnic composition and cultural traditions differ significantly between countries of the basin. The most commonly spoken languages of the Amur Heilong River Basin are now Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Mongolian, closely followed by Buriat and Korean languages. The ethnic composition of indigenous people is mainly influenced by Mongolian-language tribes in Amur Headwaters that today are mainly represented by Buriats, Khalkh, Barga, and Daur groups - all those best adapted to nomadic life in the Daurian Steppe. Then north and east of Amur-Heilong still has communities of the Tungus-Manchurian language ethnic groups: Owenk, Olunchun, Hezhe-Nanai, Udege, Ulchi and other hunters and fishermen of Northeast Eurasia.

Human Impacts

The degree of human impact on the environment in the Amur River basin is uneven, but is already quite substantial in all three countries. The plains support extensive agriculture, especially in China, while other dominant land-use types are extraction of mineral resources, and forestry. Development of international trade spurs construction of transportation infrastructure, and oil&gas pipelines provide additional challenges. Several major tributaries are already blocked by hydropower dams, while lower reaches are severely affected by water pollution from industry and agriculture. Poor land-management practices and accelerating climate change lead to widespread wildfires and land degradation.

Threats to biodiversity have been assessed by many projects in each basin country, but rarely considered across international borders. Some of these threats arise and affect ecosystems mainly within a single country, but still have transboundary causes and consequences. Illegal logging and forest fires, for example, are now confined largely to Russia. Overgrazing by livestock sporadically occurs in Mongolia and Russia, and is rapidly growing throughout northeast China. Expansion of agriculture and infrastructure is largely an issue in China where rapid economic growth has enabled large government investments in irrigation, flood control, and road-rail infrastructure. Transboundary transport infrastructure is rapidly growing to connect Russia and Mongolia with China and other Asian markets. Excessive harvest of biological resources: timber, terrestrial wildlife is also triggered by international market demand. Fish resources are overexploited and total catch decreased manifold in recent decades, which necessitated Russia and China to agree on common fishing rules. Transboundary pollution and degradation of spawning rivers by logging and mining adds pressure on remaining fish populations.

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Human Population and Impacts in the Amur-Heilong

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The Amur-Heilong River Basin has become an arena for economic cooperation and competition between the countries of Northeast Asia. Transboundary Challenges Intense economic development has increased human-induced pressures on both ecosystems and species.

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Few rivers have captured the soul of a nation more deeply than the Yellow River in China. It is to the Chinese what the Nile is to Egypt: the cradle of civilization. The fall of this famous river is a tragedy whose consequences extend far beyond the 150 million people it directly sustains.

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"Abstract beauty collides with the gritty reality of contemporary Asia in Ian Teh's work, producing an effect that is at once mesmerising and disconcerting. If his subject is the world of the unseen - the people and landscapes that are everywhere, but strikingly unnoticed - then his images,

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Dragon and Bear - 1969, Soviet Union, China, Chairman Mao, Long March 32630 HD

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This is a 1969 documentary film about the relationship between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and the flash points between the two of them. The film presents a brief history of China and provides an in depth examination of the bitter conflict between communist China and the Soviet Union.

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Fifty Most Populous Refugee Camps (2013)

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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees administers camps sheltering a vast population of displaced people. These largest camps together house nearly two million people.

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At the time, undocumented Chinese workers flooded into Russia because the Russians were paying higher wages. The Chinese marveled at the standard of living of their neighbors, who owned TV sets and hairdryers and those large white boxes that were as cold inside in the summer as it was outside in the winter. Many of the migrant workers were from the poor villages of northern China and had never seen a refrigerator.

Sergeyeva's bus comes to a stop in no-man's-land. The Chinese customs building, a massive archway made of granite, steel and glass, lies ahead of the travelers. The much smaller structure behind them is the Russian customs building.

The contrast between the two buildings reflects the new pecking order. Sixty years ago, Moscow was still the biggest provider of foreign aid to the People's Republic. Now China is not only investing billions in Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which lie in Russia's backyard, it is also making inroads in the Belarus of Alexander Lukashenko.

Beijing, mindful of keeping up appearances, emphasizes the fraternal cooperation between the two countries. But in Chinese, the term brother is a strictly hierarchical concept. There is a word for an older brother, "gege," who must accept a subordinate role to a younger brother, or "didi." The days when Beijing was willing to play second fiddle are long gone.

The Russian imperial double-headed eagle is resplendent on top of the aging Russian customs building, gazing proudly to both the East and the West. But Russia's national coat of arms is also a manifestation of an eternal state of indecision.

Fear of Being Co-opted

The world's biggest country doesn't quite know whether it wants to be part of Asia or Europe, or whether it wants to develop a Western-style democracy or install an authoritarian form of state capitalism. "Russia's death will come in either of two ways - from the East by the sword of the awakened Chinese, or through the voluntary merger with a pan-European republican federation," the writer and philosopher Konstantin Leontyev wrote in 1891.

The fear of being co-opted still encourages the Kremlin's ideologues today to dream of their country occupying a special position between East and West. They cling to the illusion that Russia could become its own center of power in a multipolar global order, next to the United States, China, India and the European Union. But the country is now far too weak for that.

For this reason, forward thinkers like government foreign-policy advisor Sergey Karaganov advocate an alliance with the EU. "If Russia does not join forces with Europe, it will inevitably become a raw material-supplying appendage of Greater China," he writes. But the closer Russia and Europe get, the less attracted they are to one another. Russia considers Europe to be too liberal. In fact China, which, like Moscow, sees stability as the most important value and deals harshly with dissenters, thinks similarly to Russia's rulers.

This explains why the Chinese Communist Party is behaving like a bride who is still forced to woo her groom, investing billions in its northern border region. Russians arriving in Manzhouli are greeted by reminders of their homeland: a Russian Orthodox church, an oversized matryoshka and busts of the Russian national poets Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

When the border was opened in the early 1990s, fewer than 10,000 people lived in Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli combined. Today Zabaikalsk has remained a village with many wooden houses, even though the booming border trade has increased its size to 11,000 residents. A statue of Lenin still stands in front of the dilapidated regional administration building, and the meadows are littered with garbage that no one bothers to clean up.

China's Voracious Economy

The tallest buildings in Zabaikalsk are five-story concrete structures with squalid stairwells. But the interiors of the apartments attest to a relatively high standard of living. At the equivalent of $15,800 (€10,600), the annual GDP per capita in Russia is more than twice as high as it is in China.

In Manzhouli, where the population has climbed to 300,000 since 1990, the apartments are modest but the buildings are brightly lit by colorful neon signs. In the center of town, 30-story hotels jut into the sky, and at night the city and its skyline look a little like Shanghai. "Even the Chinese can build Potemkin villages," says a metal worker who travels to Manzhouli from Lake Baikal every month to go shopping.

In fact, things do look much more mundane during the day, when Manzhouli feels more like a hastily assembled façade designed to mask the poverty of the hinterlands -- and its real purpose, which is to serve as a transshipment point for natural resources bound for China's voracious economy.

On the eastern edge of the city, wood-processing factories are lined up next to each other for seven kilometers. Red Chinese flags fly from the tops of seemingly endless stacks of formerly Russian logs, as if the new owners were trying to emphasize that these treasures are now the property of the People's Republic. China imports two-thirds of its wood from Russia, and 700,000 rail cars carry lumber across the Russian-Chinese border each year.

But the Chinese aren't just interested in Russian lumber. They also want Russian oil. Some 1,300 kilometers farther to the east, past empty steppes where a driver is likely to encounter no more than three cars an hour, is the small city of Skovorodino. It is the terminal point of the most expensive infrastructure project in the new Russia, a "pipeline with geopolitical significance," as Prime Minister Putin raves.

Helping the Region

Putin sees the 2,757-kilometer, $12-billion oil pipeline as a warning to the West that Russia can easily sell its natural resources to Asia. Moscow built the pipeline with Chinese money and workers.

At Skovorodino, some 15 million tons of oil are loaded onto rail cars and then transferred to ships at the Pacific port of Kozmino. Another 15 million tons flow directly to China through pipelines. At the border, Chinese and Russian engineers calmly measure the quantity and quality of the oil.

Nina, a laboratory technician, was once a schoolteacher in a nearby village, before retraining. Sergey Koleznikov, the young manager of the pumping station, is pleased that "the pipeline is not just helping Russia in its recovery, but also the people here in the region." The only minor complaint is to be heard from Chinese worker Jia Yanping, 24, who says: "Spending three months at a time away from home is a little long."

But there are also limits to the Russian-Chinese partnership, and they become evident after another night journey with the Trans-Siberian Railroad: 760 kilometers away in the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk and in Heihe on the Chinese side of the Amur River.

The cities use the same slogan in their advertising at trade shows: Two Countries, One City. In reality, however, the neighbors have remained strangers. It irks many Russians in Blagoveshchensk that Chinese entrepreneur He Wenan has built five shopping centers in their city, runs the most expensive hotel and drives the first Bentley ever seen there, or that businesswoman Li Lihua has brought the city's traditional brewery, and that a Chinese woman is now producing Kvass, a popular Russian beverage made from bread.

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Change in Russia's Far East: China's Growing Interests in Siberia - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International

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There are just 6 million Russians left on the Siberian side of the border with China. Ninety million Chinese, backed by a voracious economy, live on the other side. China's influence in Russia's far east is growing rapidly and Siberia has become the raw material supplier to Beijing's economic miracle.

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They've made it 1,600 miles by boat, train, car and on foot. Now the light is fading as they finally reach the edge of Greece. "Let's move," Ahmed Jinaid beckons, his family trailing him up a hill in high grass. But then he stops.

He is standing beside an abandoned watchtower near the northern border, the one after which there's supposed to be no talking and, worse for a man with a weakness for Winstons, no smoking. The 42-year-old former deliveryman squints at his white Samsung Galaxy phone.

He is looking for directions.

"No, no, no," he mutters, blinking at the glowing screen. "What happened to the GPS?"

Ahmed is eight weeks out of Syria, part of a historic exodus of Arabs, Africans and Asians fleeing war and oppression. More than 102,000 migrants have risked the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe this year, outpacing even 2014's record arrivals.

Many land in Italy, but a surging number of migrants are coming ashore in Greece. From there, they venture north through the Balkans to the rest of the European Union - a web of perilous trails stretching hundreds of miles. Aid workers have nicknamed it the Black Route. Ahmed had meticulously plotted the trek on his phone's GPS.

On a steep hill ahead, the gaudy glow of red neon burns. That's Macedonia and the casino town they need to avoid. Gangs armed with guns and lead pipes roam the woods, beating and robbing migrants. There are corrupt police on the route. Heat-seeking cameras. Mountains. Wolves.

Ahmed is limping from days of walking. A mysterious pain is knifing through his back. The untreated goiter on his neck - the one he tries to hide with his jacket collar - is throbbing.

He taps the Samsung screen again. It's frozen.

His smartphone. It cost $275 on the black market back in Aleppo, just shy of three months' salary. His compass. Lodestar. A lifeline for the modern migrant, who journeys to the First World by the grace of the mobile Internet.

"Uncle," whispers Marwa Jinaid, Ahmed's shy 19-year-old niece. A kindergarten teacher with flawless copper skin who is used to afternoons coloring with kids, she lets go of the hand of her 11-year-old brother, Mohamed. He's the family comedian, the kid who endured the past few years of war in Syria by watching "Tom & Jerry" cartoons in Arabic. But he has suddenly run out of jokes. And Marwa is hugging herself in a beige winter coat despite the warm spring night.

Bandits, she knows, are capable of more than thievery.

"Uncle," Marwa says again, on the verge of tears.
"What are we going to do?"

Ahmed is taking his niece and nephew to their father, Ismail, who fled Syria last year and is now living in a pastel village called Gmünd in Austria. Theirs is a journey prompted by the desperation of war. It also reflects the dysfunction of the European Union.

That's because many of the Syrians and Iraqis landing in Greece stand a good chance of qualifying for legal asylum. But there is little work and few prospects for aid in this bankrupt country. Farther north, in promised lands such as Austria, France, Germany and Sweden, asylum means shelter, a generous stipend and the prospect of a good job. The European Union, however, offers no safe passage there. Hence the Black Route.

Ahmed Jinaid stows his smartphone.

"You'll see your father soon," he says, looking reassuringly at Marwa and Mohamed. He motions to two others to follow: his brother-in-law, who has tagged along on the journey, and a Syrian teen they took in along the way.

"It's okay," Ahmed says. "God will guide us."

Twenty days before arriving at the Macedonian border, Ahmed, along with his niece, nephew and brother-in-law, had disembarked from a 50-foot pleasure cruiser on the shore of a tiny Greek island, Tilos.

Seventy-five people had been herded into the boat meant for 30. Each adult paid the Ukrainian smugglers $2,000 for the 12-hour trip from Turkey.

Ahmed and his brother, Ismail, had already sold virtually everything of value they owned to help finance the trip. Ismail's two cars. Ahmed's delivery truck. After paying smugglers, Ahmed had a few thousand euros left.

If things went precisely as planned, it might just be enough.

On shore that day, there was a sense of relief. Finally, they had made it to Greece. this bolded graf disappeared and mary beth asked that it be reinstated. bolded it since you're counting grafs for this. Europe! A sunny pebble beach alongside the crystalline Aegean. Marwa - after spending her sea journey pale and vomiting - smiled under her black-and-silver headscarf. Mohamed played cat-and-mouse with the waves, giggling as the water caught his sneakers. Looking up, he flashed a grin at his Uncle Ahmed, who was recording the scene on his phone.

Their father had not wanted his children to come this way. A math teacher before his school closed due to bombings, Ismail Jinaid had traveled from Aleppo to Austria, figuring he would seek asylum and bring over his family with proper visas.

But the plan fell apart. Ismail was only granted temporary status, which didn't allow him to sponsor his family. So he decided to game the system. If 11-year-old Mohamed could get to Austria, he could file for asylum. As a minor, he could petition to bring in his mother, who would then try to sponsor his 16-year-old brother.

More and more desperate Syrians like the Jinaids were pouring into Greece. They were hardly welcome. On the much larger neighboring island of Kos, overwhelmed with more than 7,000 migrants in the first four months of the year, arrivals were being crammed into a fetid husk of a hotel with no working toilet, no electricity and halls piled with rotting food.

But on Tilos, population 299, it was different. Marwa and Mohamed got clean sleeping mats inside an old Orthodox monastery that serves as the island's refugee camp. Ahmed and his brother-in-law, Mostafa Haj Mohamed, 27, slept under the stars, with blankets and cushions. That night, a British retiree came over and cooked them a hearty lentil stew.

Within days, the family boarded a ferry to Athens, where they would await instructions from their smuggler. They had paid him over $12,000 in Turkey. He was a Syrian, recommended by other migrants. The man who could get them to Austria.

Three weeks after landing in Tilos, Ahmed and his family were sitting at an outdoor cafe in the northern Greek town of Evzonoi, their backpacks strewn by their feet. The Hara restaurant was a staging ground for migrants, mostly Syrians, trying to make it through nearby Macedonia. Men compared maps, and listened to tips from those who - attacked by bandits - had limped back into Greece.

Ahmed, nursing the pain in his back with an occasional rub, looked worn out. Marwa, Mostafa and Mohamed quietly sipped soft drinks and water, barely touching the turkey pizza on the table. They had made it about 600 miles through Greece, and the worst part, they knew, was just ahead.

Now a stranger came by, pulling up an empty chair. For a fee, the man said, he could get them across the border.

Ahmed declined. He'd had his fill of smugglers.

Their own smuggler had instructed them to take a train from Athens to the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki. They were to travel with another of the man's clients, Ahmed Abd Elhai, a 17-year-old from Damascus. Someone, the smuggler said, would meet them all at the station.

But when the train pulled in to Thessaloniki, there was no one.

They called.

The smuggler's number was no longer in service.

"Since I lost the money to the smuggler, all the family back home blames me," Ahmed was now saying, fiddling with his can of Coke. "I don't think about tomorrow now. I just think about what we need to do next."

What he did next: Outside the train station in Thessaloniki, Ahmed had paid a taxi driver 300 euros, about $330, to take the five of them to the Macedonian border, 52 miles north.

After 10 minutes, the cabbie told them to get out.

Then they hiked along train tracks for two days, nearly getting hit.

Finally, the family had arrived at Evzonoi, a 90-minute walk from the Macedonian border. The 17-year-old they had traveled with now sat by Ahmed Jinaid's side, helping him to plot a safe course on the smartphone. A gentle young man with perfectly straight, absolutely white teeth, Elhai wanted to go to Germany to become a dentist.

The older Ahmed began to swipe through photos on his phone. There was his younger brother Khaled, back in Syria, confined to a wheelchair after a stray bullet hit his spine. Ahmed wondered when he would see him again.

Then he looked at one last photo. It showed two of his boys, ages 8 and 9.

He had left them at home near Aleppo, along with his three daughters, his infant son and his wife, who was still recuperating from a bullet wound from a sniper. Ahmed wanted to get his family out legally, once he arrived in Austria. But with all the trouble his brother was having, Ahmed fretted it wouldn't work.

"You must understand," he said, turning away, embarrassed by his tears. "I love my brother more than myself. He needs me to bring his children. If I have to go back the same way I came for my own family, I still need to do this for him."

He dried his eyes. If they were lucky, they could cross Macedonia in two days and reach Serbia.

Five days later, a Tito-era clunker of a train lurched into Track 2 at Belgrade Central. Hundreds of glassy-eyed migrants started to jump off the train even before it came to a full stop.

Five figures moved among the disembarking passengers. Huddled together, they looked spent. But they were still alert enough to spot a Serbian cop. Uncle Ahmed and the others instinctively lowered their heads.

After their trek in the wilds of Macedonia, the city of Belgrade, its cars honking, its streetcars dinging, was disorienting. Mostafa drifted onto the street. An oncoming car swerved as Ahmed yanked his young brother-in-law back by his shirtsleeves. Mostafa registered the near miss with a dull gaze.

The family was silent.

"We would only die once in Syria," Ahmed finally said. "Here we are dying 5,000 times."

They had 72 hours to leave Serbia. That was according to the papers that officials are giving nearly all refugees caught crossing the border from Macedonia. The family spotted a spare, grimy flophouse charging $11. The Jasmin Hostel.

Ahmed stepped into their room, gingerly removing his shoes and peeling off his disintegrated socks. His feet, covered with walnut-size blisters, seemed somehow bent. He leaned back on the hard mattress, wincing from the mysterious pain in his side, and fished for a Winston. Then he lit up, closing his eyes, exhaling thankfully.

"You won't believe what we've been through," Ahmed said.

On their first night, he said, they hiked through the forest. A wolf tracked them for hours.

"I prayed," Marwa interjected.

The second night, they walked dozens of miles more. And then they encountered the fellow migrant who delivered the news: They had effectively walked in a circle. So Ahmed put the family on a train to the Macedonian capital of Skopje.

"I thought we would make it," Ahmed said, studying his Winston. But when they got off the train, the conductor pointed them out to the police.

They were hauled off to a prisonlike encampment and locked in a cell with 24 other would-be refugees - mostly men. The next morning, the police drove them to a village near the Serbian border, then instructed them to follow a man who would take them the rest of the way. He instead took them to a house where they were held by a gang.

"They demanded 400 euros per person, just to let us go," Ahmed said. The gang finally accepted half.

The family crossed the Serbian border, where the next batch of police hauled them in. They photographed the group one by one. The cops barked at Marwa to take off her headscarf. The male officers watched as she was forced to reveal her dark hair.

"She cried," Ahmed said.

He reached for another Winston, cupped it, lit it, then caressed his ruined feet. He had never been so tired. Never felt so defeated. The mood remained dark as they rested in Belgrade for another day.

Marwa, so used to a life around women in Syria, spent much of her time alone in a second room.

Only little Mohamed seemed immune. He hummed catchy Arabic tunes. At one point, sitting on a bed with everyone gathered round, he told a joke about a woman whose dentist warned her off sweets.

"So she went home and started eating sugar with a long spoon! When her husband asked her why, she said, 'Well, the dentist told me to stay far away from sweets!' "

He cracked up, hitting the mattress with his hands. The adults offered weak smiles.

The next morning, the family sipped strong coffee in the courtyard of the hostel as they stuffed cookies and bottled water into their backpacks for the bus to the border with Hungary. Just one more country to cross before Austria. But Marwa had reached her limit.

"I need them, please," she pleaded to her Uncle Ahmed, referring to the sleeping pills she was begging him to buy. "If we get caught again and go to another prison, I want to sleep through it. I have to."

She had never expected to go on this trip. Ahmed and Mohamed were already en route to the Turkish coast when her father, Ismail, had called her on that April morning. By then, she was living with her mother and brother in central Turkey, where they had escaped after their home town was attacked by Islamic State militants.

Ismail had learned that even if he was granted full asylum, he could not legally bring in Marwa, now 19 and no longer a minor. So there was only one way for her to reach Austria - with his younger brother.

"I never had time to think," she said.

Without her sleeping pills, which Ahmed refused on the grounds that they were bad for her health, Marwa took Mohamed's hand as they boarded the bus for Hungary. All but two passengers were Syrian refugees. During the four-hour drive through rolling farmland and drab villages, the migrants studied maps on their cellphones and exchanged travel tips.

Unlike in Serbia, the Hungarians were patrolling for migrants at the border and tossing them in jail before deporting them. Migrants could avoid all that if they filed for asylum in Hungary. But doing so would make it that much harder to claim asylum down the line in other E.U. countries - such as Austria.

Ahmed had another plan.

A fellow Syrian migrant had contacted him via WhatsApp the night before. "Brother," he had said in a recorded message. "I am already here in Hungary, and my friend can help you too." That friend was another smuggler.

If they could get over the border by 5 a.m., to the Hungarian village of Roszke, Ahmed could call the smuggler, who would be waiting in town. For 500 euros each - about $550 - the man could drive them all the way to Vienna.

Ahmed only had half that amount on him. But he would cross that delicate bridge when he came to it. Right now, he had a bigger problem. They had just gotten off the bus in Kanjiza, the end of the line. And they were being surrounded by the Serbian police.

"All of you," commanded a Serbian cop in a gray-blue uniform. "Over on the bench, and wait."

The five of them did as ordered. But as the cops busied themselves with another pair of migrants, Uncle Ahmed quietly got up with the rest of them and made a break for it. After a half-mile, two police cars raced up to them on the road.

Four officers piled out. Their commander swaggered over from a nearby brick building. The Jinaids, it seems, had unwittingly wandered in front of the Kanjiza police station.

"Everyone. Papers. Now," the commander barked.

Confusion ensued, in part linguistic. Finally, the commander used an interpreter.

"Are you going to a hotel?" he asked. "Are you staying here in Serbia?

"No," Ahmed answered in Arabic. "We are going to Hungary."

"Legally?" the commander asked.

"No, illegally," Ahmed answered. The four others looked at each other with raised eyebrows that asked whether honesty was truly the best policy.

"Uh, okay," the commander said while casually lighting a cigarette. "Then you're going the wrong way."

"It's that way," he said, helpfully pointing in the other direction.

For the next hour, they walked and walked. Semi trucks passed, too close for comfort. The five of them finally veered off into the underbrush. Bats flew overhead.

By now, it was 10 p.m., and they needed to get to Roszke by 5 a.m. to call their smuggler. They were only 10 miles from the village.

They were at a fork. One way went by a river, the other by a road. Even looking at his now-working GPS, Ahmed couldn't tell which one would get them to the unguarded border crossing they needed to take.

Ahmed chanced a call to their smuggler, a Syrian, who, told him, "Brother, I do not know the Serbian side of the border."

"God," the smuggler said, "must be your guide."

Ahmed chose the river.

He was so close to the smuggler's car and the final sprint to Austria. To finally delivering Marwa and Mohamed to their father, Ismail Jinaid.

"We will be there by 5 a.m.," Ahmed told the smuggler.
"Please do not forget us."

In the Austrian town of Gmünd, Ismail Jinaid, 47, was trying to concentrate over the din of an Arabic bread factory. It had been two days since Ahmed took his children into Hungary. And still, no word.

His smartphone was on a radiator a few feet away. He glanced at it constantly. But so far, every call had been a false alarm. His worried wife. His worried sister-in-law, Ahmed's wife. But no word from his children or brother.

The call finally came that evening, when he was sitting in his apartment. But it was the wrong Ahmed. Ahmed Abd Elhai. The 17-year-old the family picked up along the way.

In a crush of information, the teen explained that the family had made it to Roszke an hour before the deadline, but their phone didn't work. They could not reach their smuggler. They were hiding behind a grocery store in town when a police patrol spotted them.

But Ahmed Jinaid had prepared a backup plan. Older minors seeking refugee status, he knew, were routinely released from jail in Hungary. If the family was detained, he had instructed, Ahmed Abd Elhai should pretend to be little Mohamed's big brother.

When the 17-year-old was freed, the Hungarians at first refused to release the younger boy to his care, the teen was telling Ismail by phone. But Ahmed Abd Elhai had screamed and yelled, he recalled. He went back the next day to press his demand.

Now, he told Ismail, he had little Mohamed. And they were trying to get to Vienna.

The next afternoon, Ismail was walking down the broad boulevards of the former imperial city. He was searching out a small mosque, the agreed meeting place. He turned down a street leading to an immigrant neighborhood, past kebab shops, baklava bakers. A familiar scent of home. He had spent eight months in Austria, days baking bread, countless night alone, waiting. Now, his son was nearby.

Marwa, Mostafa and Ahmed were still locked in a prison in Hungary.

"I will see only one of my children," Ismail said as he approached the mosque. "But my brother. My daughter. They are still in jail."

He knocked once. And the doors to the darkened mosque opened. A ray of light shot in. There was a beaming 11-year-old.

"My darling," Ismail said, tears streaking his face as his son leapt into his arms. He held him tight.

"Father!" said Mohamed, pulling back, trying to speak.

But Ismail cut him off, hugging him close again, and silently hanging on.

Postscript: Ahmed, Marwa and Mostafa spent 15 days in the Hungarian jail. There, a doctor discovered that Ahmed had been suffering from a slipped disk. The trio were subsequently deported to Serbia. On the evening of June 3, the family made it from Serbia through Hungary in a smuggler's car, and secretly crossed the border into Austria. They are now in Gmünd. Ahmed Abd Elhai is now in Frankfurt, Germany.
Elinda Labropoulou in Athens contributed to this report.
Postscript: Ahmed, Marwa and Mostafa spent 15 days in the Hungarian jail. There, a doctor discovered that Ahmed had been suffering from a slipped disk. The trio were subsequently deported to Serbia. On the evening of June 3, the family made it from Serbia through Hungary in a smuggler's car, and secretly crossed the border into Austria. They are now in Gmünd.

Elinda Labropoulou in Athens contributed to this report.

Editor's note: To tell the story of the Jinaid family's journey, correspondent Anthony Faiola and photographer Charles Ommanney traveled with the Syrian migrants for four days, first along the Greek/Macedonian border and then in Serbia. Faiola and Ommanney also reported from the Greek island of Tilos, where the Jinaids made an early stop, and from the Austrian cities of Vienna and Gmünd, the Jinaids' ultimate destination.

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The 'Black Route' to Europe, and the story of a Syrian family who braved it

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They've made it 1,600 miles by boat, train, car and on foot. Now the light is fading as they finally reach the edge of Greece. "Let's move," Ahmed Jinaid beckons, his family trailing him up a hill in high grass. But then he stops.

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Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA from the Claremont Graduate School in 1971. He worked as a freelance photographer in California and taught photography at various institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California (Riverside and Santa Cruz), Yale, the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Art Academy of Helsinki. His work has been included in major exhibitions, including New Topographics at the George Eastman House in 1975 and Mirrors and Windows at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978. Baltz, who received National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1973 and 1977 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, has produced many projects on commission, among them The Nation's Capital in Photographs for the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Near Reno for the Nevada State Arts Commission. He has been based in Europe since the mid-1980s and travels extensively.
Lewis Baltz produces photographs in series focused on a particular theme or geographic area and usually publishes them in book form, as in The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1975), Nevada (1978) and Park City (1981). His work, like that of others associated with the New Topographics, challenges the nineteenth century tradition of western landscape photography represented by Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson by presenting a less innocent view of the landscape. Baltz's perception of the landscape necessarily reveals the effects of twentieth-century culture and suburban development on the nation's topography. His books, Rule Without Exception (1991), Lewis Baltz: Politics of Bacteria, and Docile Bodies, Ronde de nuit (1998) reproduce color work dealing with Europe's urban landscapes.
Lisa Hostetler
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 208.

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Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA from the Claremont Graduate School in 1971. He worked as a freelance photographer in California and taught photography at various institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California (Riverside and Santa Cruz), Yale, the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Art Academy of Helsinki.

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Forget euro summits and G7 gatherings: for the countries that like to style themselves as the world's rising powers, the real summitry takes place this week in central Russia, where Vladimir Putin will hold court.

Leaders of the Brics countries (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) will meet Putin in Ufa on Wednesday, then make way for the Asian powers grouped in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Russia and China are the common denominators, as in so much geopolitics these days. The UN security council, Apec, the G20 - Russia and China are the ever-presents, a powerful pairing whose interests coincide more often than not.

Moscow and Beijing have lots in common apart from a 2,500-mile border, economies dominated by state-run firms and oligarchies that can enrich themselves as long as they play by the prevailing political mood of the day.

organisation membership

Officially, Putin is dismissive about suggestions of a new eastern alliance. "We are not creating a military alliance with China," he said last month. "We are not creating a bloc-based approach, we are trying to create a global approach."

And yet both countries share a desire to limit American power; they enjoy a burgeoning trade relationship in which, in essence, hydrocarbons are swapped for cheap consumer goods; and they have a mutual interest in promoting an alternative model to western diplomacy.

Trade has increased sixfold over the past decade. Last year they trumpeted the biggest gas deal in history. The summer will be bookended by two striking events: Russian and Chinese warships puttering about together in the eastern Mediterranean in May, gaming war; and Russian and Chinese presidents standing shoulder to shoulder in Beijing for the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war in September.

So how robust is the Russia-China axis?

Geopolitics

For China, one of the main attractions of closer relations with Russia is the potential for challenging Washington's still dominant global position.

"In China, where until recently the official line was 'non-alignment', some prominent scholars have started to make unambiguous calls for a comprehensive strategic alliance with Russia," Alexander Korolev, at the National University of Singapore's centre on Asia and globalisation, argued recently. "[They are] arguing on the pages of the CCP [Communist party] central party school's internal publications that 'China-Russia strategic relations are the most substantive ones' and elsewhere that 'China will be unable to shift the world from unipolarity to bipolarity unless it forms a formal alliance with Russia.'"

But often cooperation and tension are two sides of the same coin. Take Central Asia. China's president, Xi Jinping, has set his sights on a "new silk road", using China's billions to help neighbours and regional allies to develop, indirectly supporting growth at home and the expansion of Chinese soft power.

However, this is also Russia's traditional sphere of influence and any Chinese presence that goes beyond commercial dealings is likely to raise hackles in Moscow.

"It's totally possible for China to develop its relations with central Asian countries without challenging Russia," said Liu Jun, a Russian studies expert at East China Normal University. "It's true that Russia would be concerned if China's influence in Central Asia grew too much, but the concerns are not mainstream in the bilateral relations - there are more benefits in cooperation than otherwise."

Russia shares the strategic goal of challenging US hegemony in favour of a more multipolar world, and the two powers often find themselves on the same side in the UN security council, where they wield vetoes as permanent members.

No deal on regulating Iran's nuclear programme can be made without Russia and China, which have staunchly backed its atomic expansion in the past, and the two countries' support is largely the reason Bashar al-Assad has been able to hold on to power in Syria. Recently, Russia has been making political and economic overtures to North Korea, which relies on food, arms and energy from its key ally, China, to survive.

As they support the idea of a multipolar world against American dominance, Moscow and Beijing will also tacitly back each others' attempts to defend their own spheres of influence, said Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre. In the past two years, Russia has annexed Crimea and backed a separatist campaign to frustrate Ukraine's turn to the west, and China has been disputing islands with western allies in the South China Sea.

"China admits de facto that Russia has interests in eastern Europe, Russia admits that China has interests around the perimeter of its borders, and even though neither will actively help its partner in Ukraine or the South China Sea, both will observe an advantageous neutrality," Trenin said. "There won't be criticism of each other in the areas of their core interests."

Leadership

Government enthusiasm for warmer ties with Russia is summed up by a recent video from the state-controlled Xinhua news agency entitled What Do Chinese People Think About Russia?"

It features Chinese children describing Russia as "even bigger than China", an old man praising Russia's strength, demands for more investment, gas sales, a high-speed train, and plenty of airtime given to adulation of the Russian president.

Putin has long been popular in China, where he is seen as a strong leader who has bolstered national pride, and is not a little admired for his topless photo shoots. "Putin you're a handsome man," says one middle-aged woman on being asked what message she would like to send to Moscow.

There is also an overt comparison to Xi, who has fostered a personality cult of bold leadership that has echoes of the Russian leader's (though with less bare flesh). "Putin is the same as our 'Papa Xi'," says one young man, using a government endorsed affectionate term for the president.

For their part, Russians are more ambivalent about Xi, who has a far lower profile in Russia than does his counterpart in China.

Trade

China's interest in Russian exports has until now been largely focused on natural resources and military hardware. Beyond that they do not make natural partners. Russia can offer little by way of famous brands or innovation in consumer technology to tempt ordinary Chinese customers.

"It's a good thing that there is political will behind the business cooperation. Without it, a lot of things won't happen," Liu said. "Most big projects are backed by the governments and the volume of trade along the border is quite small."

The imbalance of the relationship can be seen in the breakdown of their bilateral trade, worth around $100bn a year. China is Russia's second largest trading partner after the EU, while Russia only just scraped into a list of China's top 10 trading partners, accounting for barely 3% of the country's total trade volume.

Moscow is also hoping Beijing will help with finance for businesses, after western funds dried up last year. Some Chinese firms have seen the Russian economic wobble as an opportunity to make capital investments in the country.

Energy

China and Russia should make natural partners in energy deals, but in reality they have struggled to turn past agreements into real supply deals; pipelines announced last decade have still not been built because of disagreements over pricing and other conditions.

Earlier this year, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the largest supplier of oil to China for the first time, with Russian exports to China more than doubling since 2010. But Beijing is accustomed to shopping around for energy and driving a very cheap bargain with its suppliers, while Russia is used to controlling prices for European customers with few other options.

The expansion of shale gas production may have weakened Russia's hand by improving global supply, but China is also increasingly concerned about climate change and needs to wean itself off the dirty coal that still provides well over half its energy.

Since Russia has rarely agreed to sell stakes in strategic land-based deposits to western companies, Putin's offer of a stake in state oil champion Rosneft's biggest production asset, the Vankor oilfields, to China in September underlined the new direction the country's energy policy is taking.

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Workers inspect the pipelines and oil storage tanks of a crude oil pipeline between Russia and China in Heilongjiang province, north-east China. Photograph: Wang Jianwei/AP

The offer was made at a ceremony to start construction of Russia's $55bn Power of Siberia pipeline, a breakthrough project that is planned to deliver an annual 38bn cubic metres of gas to eastern China over the next 30 years. In November, the two countries also signed a framework agreement for an Altai gas pipeline to potentially supply 30bn cubic metres of gas to western China each year for 30 years.

But neither pipeline deal appears to have been completely finalised, and economic sanctions and a weak rouble will probably make financing the huge projects difficult for Russia's Gazprom.

"It seems like at every meeting there's some sort of document signed and hailed as another big agreement ... but Gazprom will need to develop large fields and construct the pipelines," said Grigory Birg, an analyst at Investcafe. "I think in the current environment securing the finances is the major holdup, and we don't have any indication as to the economics of the project."

Although Birg estimated the rate of return on the Power of Siberia investment to be a modest 9% to 10% when the deal was signed, the profitability is likely to be even less if global oil prices remain weak. Beijing will, by all appearances, be able to drive an even harder bargain for the gas price under the proposed Altai pipeline to western China, a region that has less demand than the industrialised east of the country and already receives cheap gas from nearby Turkmenistan.

Nonetheless, analysts expect energy cooperation to continue to grow as Russia seeks alternatives to the politically thorny European market, and China addresses growing demand and problems with pollution and blackouts. Last year, China replaced Germany as Russia's biggest buyer of crude oil. "China is the major alternative market and is easily accessible for Russia given the [location of energy] reserves and the geopolitical partnership, so it's an obvious fit," Birg said. "But the timing at which it is happening is not in favour of Russia."

Pipeline to china

Currency

Both Russia and China have an interest in loosening the US dollar's dominance in global trade as the world's reserve currency. Russia now accepts yuan for oil payments (something that other oil exporters, such as Saudi Arabia, don't do).

Following the imposition of sanctions, Russian companies and banks - traditionally reliant on dollar-denominated syndicated loans - started to look to China for a financial escape route. The rouble-yuan currency pair reached records in trading volumes last summer.

Russian companies are not new to the renminbi market, nor to the issuing of "dim sum bonds" - bonds denominated in Chinese yuan and largely issued by entities based in China or Hong Kong. In the past these options represented a cheaper source of funding. Now they're a necessity. However, yields on Russian corporate bonds denominated in yuan have increased as the list of sanctions started mounting up.

Military

Russian arms sales to China have been estimated at $1bn a year, the Russians were previously hesitant to give advanced weaponry to the Soviet Union's one-time military rival. But the recent announcement by Russia's state arms exporter of a deal to supply China with its S-400 surface-to-air missile systems has taken their relationship to a new level at a time when Beijing is seeking new air and naval defence technologies.

The higher-level arms sales have been accompanied by greater military cooperation, which was on display in May with the war games in the Mediterranean Sea. Such exercises in what has traditionally been a "Nato pond" are designed to expand the Chinese navy's reach while showing the United States that Russia is a potentially important military partner, according to Trenin.

Following the Ukraine crisis, which soured relations with the west, he said the main considerations behind Russia's "entente" with China were political. "Now Russia has an important stimulus to grow relations with China, because relations with the west are troubled, and China is the only large player in the world that can be considered as economic, political and to a certain extent military ally," Trenin said.

China and Russia have repeatedly stated that they will become partners, not allies

Both sides, meanwhile, are concerned that the unrest in Pakistan and Afghanistan could spill over into their territory, or serve as incubators for militants who may one day return home.

But none of that means that either side has forgotten past disputes or present differences. Russia is nervous about China sapping its revenue by reverse engineering the equipment it buys, and is also monitoring Beijing closely for any attempts to project military power into central Asia.

"China and Russia's strategic partnership is a result of the times, but it is totally different from a military alliance such as the one between the US and Japan," the Global Times, a Chinese nationalist tabloid, said in a recent editorial.

"China and Russia have repeatedly stated that they will become partners, not allies. They do mean that. China also cares about relations with western countries. Russia does not want to see relations with the west become a deadlock."

Cyber security

Both Russia and China share a concern over the US domination of the internet. In January, Russia, China and a number of central Asian dictatorships jointly submitted a new proposal for an international code of conduct on information security to the UN general assembly.

In a clause clearly aimed at the US, the document calls for countries "not to use information and communications technologies and ... networks to interfere in the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability".

At a recent internet security forum in Moscow, officials from both countries called for a new approach to online security.

"It's great they [the US] invented the iPhone but when you open your iPhone and see the camera you have to guess whether it's photographing you at that moment or not," said Konstantin Malofeyev, a controversial businessman known for his backing for the Russian Orthodox church and the pro-Russian separatist movement in east Ukraine. "Russia went into space first and Antarctic first but we don't control those things, they are controlled by international charters. Why should the US control the internet?"

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The Chinese flag in front of the Google China headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: Sinopix/Rex

Chinese official Chen Xiaohua said: "We should join hands to build cyberspace order. Various countries share a consistent vision of enhancing the governance of cyberspace ... following the principles of mutual trust and mutual respect."

In the meantime, Beijing and Moscow signed a landmark cyber-security deal recently that could bolster defence against external attack as well as allowing them to share technology for domestic control.

The two countries have poured resources into managing the internet, aiming to curb its potential as a platform for dissent. Beijing's "great firewall" is a powerful and sophisticated filter of the online world, but is still porous enough that most people inside China do not need to bother trying to evade it.

Both countries also field armies of both hackers and paid pro-government commenters, known in China as the "50 cent" group, because of how much they are paid for each post. However, experts say their focus on internal controls may have come at the expense of security.

"Prioritising political information control over technical cyber defence also damages China's own cybersecurity," Jon Lindsay of Harvard University's Belfer centre for science and international affairs said in a recent briefing. "Lax law enforcement and poor cyber defences leave the country vulnerable to both cyber criminals and foreign spies."

Business mood

Among some business people, there is a fear that the enforced turn to the east will mean Russia selling out from a position of weakness.

"The downturn in relations with the west is bad for Russia and bad for the west; the only beneficiary is China," one top Russian businessman said. "The number of Chinese delegations coming to Russia has gone up tenfold, and the Chinese will only enter the market when they see the conditions are very beneficial to them."

Russian media have been told to play up links with China and other non-western countries, and companies have felt pressure from the government to look eastwards even if it makes little business sense. But what initially seemed pointless may be starting to bear some fruit.

"It started as theatre, but now there are some companies out there really getting stuff done," said Tom Blackwell, CEO of EM, a consultancy firm that has worked with a number of major Russian companies on exploring the Chinese market. "Chinese investment funds have very little experience or knowledge about Russia and it's a hard sell. But the strategy seems to be to do the big state deals first and assume smaller ones will follow. Slowly, real things are happening."

Russia's federal migration service is especially wary of an influx of Chinese migrants across the Russia-China border. It has stated that Chinese could become the largest ethnic group in Russia's far east by the 2020s or 2030s; last summer a border official said that 1.5 million Chinese illegally entered the region from January 2013 to June 2014.

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China and Russia: the world's new superpower axis?

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Forget euro summits and G7 gatherings: for the countries that like to style themselves as the world's rising powers, the real summitry takes place this week in central Russia, where Vladimir Putin will hold court.

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It takes a brave man to jump off a moving train for the sake of a sale, but the clothes hawkers had the easy courage of men who did this on the regular. I watched as they leapt off the front carriage as the train chugged into a station with no stop, bundles of cheap Chinese jeans and jackets on their arms, exchanged hurried words and cash with waiting Russians, and jumped back on the last carriage as the Trans-Siberian trundled steadily toward Moscow from Ulaanbaatar.

They were Mongolians, but they knew enough Russian and Chinese to barter in both languages-and to flirt. After the stop, one of them came into the dining carriage where the Russian waitress, happily plump, danced with him without music, one hand turning in his and the other keeping hold of her cigarette as she moved. "Beautiful!" he said in Russian. They sat down with me, and we established the boundaries of our languages; her expansive, laughing Russian, of which I could get no more than the glimmers and he understood easily but spoke brokenly, their song-and-movie-aided understanding of my English, and the pidgin Chinese he and I shared. (This was in 2006; since then my Chinese has expanded from pidgin into harsh-voiced crow.) "English gentleman!" she said, in English, and laughed. "Chinese gentleman!" she said of the Mongolian, which he didn't correct, adding, in Russian, what I took from the loanwords to be "Confucian gentleman, correct? Chinese are Confucians, like English are Catholics."

A little later that day, the train pulled in for a short stop, where the bargaining could be fuller and fiercer. Russian traders were waiting in anticipation on the platform, young men and middle-aged women. The men were gopniks-skinheads in shell suits and gold rings, faces hardened by growing up in Russia's post-apocalyptic 1990s. ( Chavs, the English would say; white trash, the Americans.) The Mongolians preferred the women, for good reason. I watched as two of the gopniks argued loudly with a Mongolian. As the train was about to leave, one of them suddenly shoved the Mongolian trader violently to the ground as the other grabbed his bundle of plastic-wrapped clothes. They bolted with the speed of practiced thieves. The Mongolian leapt to his feet, yelled, and drew his knife, drawing it back over his head to throw. The crowd gasped. He threw-and it clattered uselessly on the platform, the blade only half-extended, as the train started pulling out of the station. He grabbed his knife and leapt back into the carriage and the commiserations of his comrades. I decided that if I were the thieves, I would not frequent this route for a while.

Trade made the Sino-Russian borderlands, carving a great path across Eurasia. It still shaped people's lives: my usual driver in Mongolia, "Jack," had bought his taxi with money earned from shuttling cars from Moscow to China in the 1990s. He went west by train and returned by road, sleeping wrapped in sheepskins in the old junkers he bought. In Budapest, my cosmopolitan grandfather Rudi Fischer walked me to a favorite haunt of his, the " Chinese Market" in Jozsefvaros, one of many grand bazaars of cheap goods shuttled through Russia to Eastern Europe, full of gaming and noodles. In the small Russian segment of Beijing around Jianguomen, every third building was labeled "KARGO."

But the threads of friendship forged along the route, sometimes cautious, sometimes full-throated or loving, were often snapped by violence. Sometimes this was sporadic, and local; more often it was a product of the frictions between two great empires, the Russians and the Chinese, whose resemblances to each other had a magnetic quality, alternately attracting and repelling.

And once, it came close to ending the world.

* * *

Across the frozen Ussuri River that marked the boundary between China and Russia, two armies stared each other down. Soon they would clash, as they did almost every week, on the ice. The Chinese swung halberds and hooks; the Russians advanced like medieval knights with great spears, while others stood by to knock down with maces any Chinese warrior brave or lucky enough to make it through.

This was the winter of 1968, and far worse weapons were on hand, from the Type 56 rifles the Chinese carried to the tanks and BM-21s (mobile rocket launchers) in the Soviet camp to the missiles sitting in silos hundred of miles away, tipped with annihilating fire. But both the Soviet Army and the People's Liberation Army were holding back, provoking and brawling with one another while under orders not to be the first to fire.

Anger between Moscow and Beijing was playing itself out along the border. Chinese soldiers would swim the river in summer, or scramble over it in winter, waving Mao's Little Red Book and shouting slogans about how the Russians had stolen the territory while China was weak. Russians would push them back into the water. When the river was solid enough to fight on, both sides would send out hundreds of men to brawl, adapting medieval weaponry for their own purposes. The Russians, claimed Senior Lieutenant Vitaly Bubenin in a newspaper interview in the early 2000s, were "stocky Siberians with the huge fists of foundry workers, so the Chinese stood no chance of a win until they brought in reinforcements from Northern China."

There was something playful about the fighting, reminiscent, for the Russians, of the "wall on wall" fights where the men of two villages would line up to whale on each other. Even the weapons were meant to hurt, not kill; both sides' thick winter jackets took the worst of the blows. For the Chinese, making it to the other side of the river was a sport; sometimes, if the mood was good, they would offer cigarettes and copies of Mao's writings to the Russians.

But on March 2, 1969, things became less friendly. For unknown reasons, the Chinese opened fire on a Russian patrol on Zhenbao ("Treasure") Island, a scrap of nothing in the middle of the river. Bubenin led a desperate rescue attempt, skidding across the ice in his APC to flank the Chinese who had shot his men and rake them with machine-gun fire.

The Russians were shocked to find that most of their men had only been wounded, but had then been murdered in cold blood, shot or bayoneted at point-blank range. The rhetoric stepped up, as did the bloodshed. Chinese radio broadcasts told the Russians, "Dear Soviet comrades, temporarily residing on Chinese territory! By March 8 our great leader Mao Zedong will give his wife Khabarovsk [the regional capital, 30 miles from the border]!" and "Dear Soviet women! Starch the sheets-our men will arrive soon!" With a total of 59 of their own dead after another Chinese attack on the island on March 15, Russian retaliation unleashed a hailstorm of rockets, killing, by Soviet estimates, between 200 and 300 Chinese.

Months of tension began, punctuated by sporadic exchanges of fire. Fingers hovered over buttons. Talks that September, when Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited Beijing, were held at the airport to avoid the possibility of angry Red Guards stoning his car, or worse. In Washington, the Americans took notice, and the possibility of a diplomatic coup began to take clear shape in Richard Nixon's mind.

No war came. But fear of the Soviet Union lingered for years. In Tangshan in 1976, when the earthquake struck the city's heart, survivors' first thoughts were that the Russians had nuked them. The Chinese poured vast sums of money and arms into Afghanistan in the early 1980s, working alongside the Americans and the mujahedin to fill the secret flights back to the Soviet Union with the bodies of Russian boys every month.

* * *

Yet today, Moscow and Beijing are closer than they have been in nearly 70 years. Chinese media repeats the Russian nationalist narrative of events from Ukraine to Syria. A brief ambiguity over the annexation of Crimea ended up with the term "annexation" itself verboten, and the event instead referred to as "Crimea's return to Russia," or "the integration of Crimea into Russia," echoing China's revanchist ambitions in Taiwan and elsewhere. At Chinese conferences on topics from military to media, Russians are everywhere, far outnumbering Europeans or Americans. Russians are playing out China's own patriotic fantasies; resistance to the West, reclamation of lost territories, the macho posturings of Vladimir Putin. The existing paranoia of the Chinese state about U.S. influence is being doubled by a steady drip of Russia's conspiracy theories.

The Soviet collapse sent shockwaves through the Chinese leadership; the two had been carefully, slowly reconciling after the bitter schism in the years after Stalin's death, which saw the Communist world split between Beijing and Moscow, and it set a terrifying precedent. The humiliation, as the Chinese saw it, of Russia in the 1990s, stripped of territory and economically crippled, seemed to echo China's own "century of humiliation" at the hands of foreign power. Putin's nationalism, coupled with the oil-fueled revival in Russia's economic fortunes, makes sense to Chinese, who see in it an echo of their own ambitions. It doesn't hurt that Russia's ambitions are headed fortunately Westward, toward breakaway separatists like Georgians and Ukrainians, not toward Siberian expansion or Central Asian revanchism. Meanwhile, China's quiet dropping of northerly claims contrasts sharply to its thunder around the South China Sea, where Russia has no interests.

At a state level, authoritarianism seems to be the best glue of Sino-Russian friendship. Moscow and Beijing back each other up on everything from Internet "sovereignty" to the need for brutal "anti-terror" security measures to condemnation of the endless inequities of the West. The two have just announced a shared media platform, although whether it will resemble the freewheeling conspiracy-theories and slanders of Russia Today or the numbing tedium of Chinese state media is as yet unknown.

Yet Russians are more ambivalent than their leaders. Anti-Asian racism runs deep, though mostly directed against Central Asians, and the fears of Yellow Peril and demographic overrun still seep through Russian popular media. But China's power and money make it a tempting ally, especially as Moscow sets fire to the bridges once tenuously built to the West. Most of all, China willingly fulfils Russia's deepest ambition on the international stage: to be treated as a great and equal power, rather than just, as the Cold War phrase witheringly went, "Upper Volta with nukes."

* * *

It was as equals that the two empires first formally met over three centuries ago, in the small fort of Nerchinsk in 1689. They had been fighting for years, on and off, over the Amur basin, which the Qing dynasty's ruling Manchus called home and the Russians saw as another step in their long, predestined conquest of the East. With their conquest of China solidified, the Manchus had moved in force against Russian incursions, burning forts and driving out merchants and colonists. Nerchinsk, a meeting carefully negotiated by Mongol rulers caught between the two sides, was the chance to make peace. The deal struck saw the two recognize each other as equals, with their own rights and territories, and defined the length of the border.

Both were pushing the limits of their empire there and elsewhere. Yet while the Qing envisioned a protective ring of subject states and tribes cowed into submission, the Russians saw an ever-expanding frontier. They had already conquered Siberia, and reached the Pacific. Now they were looking southward, eyeing the khanates and emirates of Central Asia.

Both claimed to be the inheritors of a great, civilized tradition far from their own homelands. To their Han subjects, the Qing pitched themselves as the rightful holders of the Mandate of Heaven, guardians of Confucian orthodoxy and social order. Yet at the same time they were khans, masters of the horse, gun, and bow, heirs of Genghis Khan and the righteous protectors of Buddhism.

The Russians were heirs to Byzantium and to Rome. Moscow, also built on seven hills, was the Third Rome, after the city itself and Constantinople, ruled by their king-emperor, whose very title came from Caesar. That Tsar-or, as Peter the Great preferred to be called, Emperor of All the Russias-was pushing them to be a great European power, shaving his boyar's beards and chastising them for their Mongol ways. But the pull of the east spoke to that same heritage the Tsar was asking them to abandon. Their conquests were both reclamation of their rightful heritage and a civilizing mission, bringing the ways of Christianity and Europe to the backwards people of the East.

The Chinese and the Russians shared the language of empire. They did not, however, share an actual language. The meeting was arranged by Mongols, but negotiated through Jesuits, resident missionaries and scholars at the Qing court who conversed, mostly amiably, in Latin with their educated Russian counterparts. At the mouth of the Argun, a stele recorded the result in Russian, Mongol, Manchu, Chinese, and Latin; on each side of the border stones marked the limits of control, emblazoned with an Orthodox cross on the Russian side and the Manchu for "border" on the Qing.

* * *

It was the follow-up treaty, signed in Kyakhta-now on the border of Russia and Mongolia-in 1727, that both cemented and limited Sino-Russian trade. Caravans would be allowed into Beijing every three years, better terms than for any other Western power at the time. Kyakhta itself, a Russian fortress town of a few hundred people, would be one of only two sites allowed for cross-border trade; the other, at the far northeastern Tsuruhai Tui, never flourished.

Kyakhta did. On the Chinese side, Kyakhta became Maimaicheng, "Buy-Sell Town," a common name for Chinese trading settlements. There was another Maimaicheng on the edge of the monastic Mongolian capital of Urga, today's Ulaanbaatar, another stop on the long "tea road" that ran from Beijing all the way to Europe. Trade increased 64-fold over the next century, Russian furs for Chinese tea. Fujian families ran refined tea for European snobs, buying sea otter fur and European textiles for sale back home. For coarser palates, the bulk of the trade went in tea bricks, the standard currency of merchants-fearing a loss of scarce silver, the Russians forbade currency trade until 1854.

Kyakhta was an ugly mix of squalid border poverty and grand projects, topped with the stone houses of the richest merchants. As traders crossed between the two towns, separated by only a dirt road, they passed under the Kyakhta gate, with its vast two-headed imperial Russian eagle, and into the shadow-literally-of the Russian church. The Church of the Resurrection was the second richest in the Russian empire, its doors made of two thousand pounds of solid silver. (They would, unsurprisingly, be stripped by later revolutionaries.)

Although they lived in different towns, technically, the Russian and Chinese communities of Kyakhta were deeply intermingled. They maintained offices in each other's territory, and fought fires and caught burglars together. Sometimes, though not often, they married each other, while Chinese began to cross the border to worship an Orthodox god. They devised their own language, Kiatkha Pidgin, or learned the others' language, or turned to Buryats or Mongols for translation aid.

Not all trade passed under Kyakhta's eagle gates. The border was vast, poorly patrolled, and porous. Cossacks, Buryats, and Mongols crossed virtually at will between the two sides, bringing their own small caravans with them, and hooking back into Russian or Han Chinese trade networks as they needed. But the town's good times were limited. By the 1860s, the increased speed and slashed costs of shipping had crippled the Tea Road, as had the growing quality of Indian tea. Trade shifted southward, and Kyakhta's coffers shrunk. Both powers, however, would have more on their hands than the decline of one town.

* * *

The treaties had promised limits to empire, and civilized treatment of each other's people. But as Qing strength had collapsed, humiliated by British warships and opium and swallowed by the ravenous black hole of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), Moscow weighed the balance of power and found China wanting. Between 1858 and 1860, Russian diplomatic threats, backed up with troop movements, saw one of the most unequal treaties ever imposed, as the Qing handed over 350,000 square miles of territory once guaranteed as theirs at Nerchinsk into Russian hands without the loss of a single Russian soldier.

It was rage at foreign power, Russian and Western, wielded over a weakened China, and fearful rumors of Christian atrocities, that drove the next round of killing. In 1900, Fang Zhihai was 48, and had been an Orthodox Christian all his life, baptized in childhood at the Russian Mission in Beijing. The Mission had been guaranteed-though limited-by the 1727 treaty, and nurtured by Russian Orthodox priests who often shared the same commitment to Chinese learning that had made the Jesuits famous. Fang straddled two worlds; in one he was Zhihai, in the other Innokenty. A teacher and singer, he was preparing to be ordained as a deacon. Orthodox priests can marry, and Fang and his wife, another Chinese convert known as Elena, had four children, two teenage sons and two small girls.

Innokenty was stoned to death by Boxer rebels in the well by his church; his wife and daughters burnt alive in the house of the Orthodox priest, along with a dozen others, another son murdered somewhere on the streets of Beijing. One son survived to tell the story of his martyrdom. Innokenty, Elena, and the children were listed among the 220 Orthodox Holy Martyrs of China. "By the purity of your Christian ways," the Russian prayer for them goes, "you put to shame the false Confucian piety and trampled demon-inspired Buddhism underfoot, sanctifying the land of China with your blood."

Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, recorded the names of any of the five thousand or more Chinese civilians dragged from their homes by Russian troops and civilians in the border town of Blagoveshchensk later that summer, although Victor Dyatlov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, has skilfully compiled the account of their tragedy.

Like Kyakhta, it was a boom town, numbering some 50,000 Russians and perhaps 10,000 Chinese, most of them servants. "They often learned the Russian language, and approached this undertaking with such diligence-they would often sit with a Russian book or exercises until past midnight, and this zeal secured them rapid results. But among the less literate of our countrymen the Chinese never enjoyed any great popularity. Common folk viewed them, first and foremost, as representatives of a foreign nationality who stubbornly refused to mix with Russians . . . [and as] unwanted competitors," wrote a Russian witness.

Boxer troops had shelled the Russian side of the border, boats had been sunk, and an incompetent military governor could do nothing to stem growing Russian paranoia that the Chinese in the city were a fifth column. Families looked at their once-trusted servants, wondering about poison in the tea or a door opened in the dark. Chinese began to be attacked in the street by mobs, who blamed them for lost work from trade ruined by the fighting.

By July 3, it was obvious a pogrom was about to begin. The authorities issued feeble injunctions not to harm or insult the Chinese, and then the governor received a telegram from Alexander Kuropatkin, the infamously Asian-loathing Russian Minister of War, urging the "total defeat" of the Chinese. The order was given to "expel" all the Chinese. Some had fled, but several thousand had stayed, believing the guarantees of the authorities.

They were marched to the Amur (or Heilongjiang) River, the border between the two countries. Stragglers were hacked down by axe-wielding militia or ridden down by Cossacks. At the river, raging in summer torrent, they were ordered in. When the first drowned, the others refused, and then the shooting began, until the last few survivors were forced in by a bayonet charge. It was not the only massacre. "Regarding killing the Chinese . . . you must be mad to keep asking permission each time . . . when you are ordered to kill them, then you should get on and kill them without any further discussion," the regional governor wrote.

Even after the Boxer Rebellion had been put down, Russian fear of the Chinese continued to grow. As historian Willard Sunderland traces, Russian administrators, who had once seen Chinese labor as an easy answer to their construction needs, became increasingly paranoid about the threat of "yellow labor." From 1907 to 1913, in a Russian parallel to America's racist legislation of the 1880s, harsh laws were passed to "defend the region against the onslaught of the yellow race." N. L. Gondatti, the Russian regional governor, commented, "I'd rather see our lands go empty than be occupied by the yellow race." Foreign labor was banned from state projects, and Asians were driven into "Chinatowns" and "Koreatowns" by zoning laws. Communities that had once thrived from cultural exchange were increasingly characterized by mutual paranoia.

* * *

It was Stalin who made life better. In Siberia, the Chinese population, brutally persecuted in late Tsarist times, was one of the few ethnic minorities not to suffer in the 1920s and 1930s-at least, no more than Russians did. The Soviets hemmed and hawed about the Chinese Communist Party more than ideology would have suggested, but the Chinese themselves, many stranded across the border by revolution and war, were never the target of Soviet policy, while the first Romanization system designed for Chinese, Latinxua Sin Wenz, was devised by Soviet Sinologists. In stark contrast was the treatment of Vladivostok's Koreans, seen as potential agents for Japan and brutally deported to the frozen wastelands of Central Asia.

On the other side of the border, the influx of White anti-Bolshevik refugees after the 1917 revolution gave new life to the Russian community in China. The city of Harbin buzzed with exiled intellectuals, noblemen, and businessmen; the fallen Russian princess, now a high-class courtesan, became a Shanghai cliché. Harbin's department stores were packed with Russian goods, its streets lined with churches and tearooms; the exiles' daughters debuted at balls and picnicked on the river.

The Jewish community, strongly represented among the refugees, exploded from 500 people in 1903 to over 10,000 people and two synagogues in the 1920s, as the city flooded with refugees from the Russian revolution. Chinese found anti-Semitism baffling, and imposed, unlike Europe, no special limitations on Jewish refugees; two decades later Shanghai would provide a similar visa haven for tens of thousands of survivors. But Russian hatreds reached all the way to Mongolia, where White general and lunatic mystic Roman Ungern-Sternberg conducted a brutal pogrom in 1921; Harbin's many White and Jewish papers buzzed with tales of his atrocities.

Harbin's Jews got on better with their Chinese neighbors, in general, than did the other Russians, who were often notoriously contemptuous of the Chinese they lived among. They thought Japan-that power great enough to beat even Imperial Russia-was the side to bet on; Harbin residents lined the streets to cheer Japan's invading Kwantung Army into the city in 1932, and young men trained in a specially established cadet school in Tianjin to be the administrators of a Russia they thought would be "liberated" by the Japanese. In 1946, though, they cheered for the arrival of Soviet troops-only to see their parents and grandparents who had fought against the Bolsheviks in the revolution shipped back to Moscow for execution. The vast majority of the remaining Russian community departed, in dribs and drabs, in the early 1950s, as the P.R.C. made it clear they had no home left there.

* * *

Today the Chinese press endlessly praises Russia and Putin, while the Russian press, less bound to a strict official line, occasionally returns the favor. All the State media articles in the world, however, mean little set next to Hollywood and Harvard. Chinese don't watch Russian TV, don't go to Russian movies, don't sing Russian songs or try to get into Russian universities.

The two fluent Russian speakers I know from China, sent by provincial exchange programs to study in Moscow, both returned hating the country, embittered by daily racism and jealous of their classmates who went to the West. While a few hundred thousand shuttle between countries, the cultural impact of the two powers on each other is next to nothing. There are 12 times as many Chinese living in Vancouver as in all of Russia. Searching for "America" on Chinese social media returns 55 times as many results as "Russia."

Russians still worry that China wants Siberia. But nobody of consequence in China dreams of life on the cold frontier. Finding Chinese labor is hard enough that recruiters often resort to fraud, promising far higher wages than will ever be delivered, or even end up locking them as virtual slaves in isolated farms and villages, threatening their families if they try to escape. The borderlands are left, as so often, to the small and the powerless.

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It takes a brave man to jump off a moving train for the sake of a sale, but the clothes hawkers had the easy courage of men who did this on the regular.

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The Blagoveshchensk Drowning-Story of How Phobias Become a Reality

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The Blagoveshchensk Drowning-Story of How Phobias Become a Reality

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Damansky Island Incident Part 1 (English Subtitles)

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The story of a largely unknown in the West conflict between two communist neighbors - Soviet Union and China. Damansky (Даманский) Island was at the center of the conflict when Russian border guards held off Chinese army's assaults and subsequently prevented the Chinese from taking over the island.

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Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Russia has blocked access to Chinese social media app WeChat, developed by Tencent Holdings, for failing to give its contact details to the Russian communications watchdog.

Access to China's most popular social media platform has been restricted since May 4, according to information posted on the Russian regulator's website.

Last year, Russia blocked U.S. social networking site LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, for violating a law that requires data on Russian citizens to be stored on Russian servers.

Vadim Ampelonskiy, spokesman for the Roskomnadzor watchdog, said on Saturday WeChat was blocked because it did not provide contact details for Russia's register of "organizers of information distribution on the internet."

Tencent told Reuters it was checking the status of WeChat in Russia and was in talks with the relevant authorities.

WeChat, launched in 2011, is not hugely popular in Russia but the blockage may affect Chinese tourists and Russians doing business with China.

The most popular mobile messaging applications in Russia last year were Mail.ru's VKontakte, Facebook's WhatsApp and Rakuten's Viber, according to consultants J'son & Partners.

Meanwhile social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China, with President Xi Jinping a vocal advocate of so-called cyber sovereignty.

Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.

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Russia blocks Chinese social media app WeChat

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Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images Russia has blocked access to Chinese social media app WeChat, developed by Tencent Holdings, for failing to give its contact details to the Russian communications watchdog. Access to China's most popular social media platform has been restricted since May 4, according to information posted on the Russian regulator's website.

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www.asecondworld.co.uk An old Serbian man communicates with a galaxy of communist aliens whilst a series of futuristic Yugoslavian war monuments stand abandoned & crumbling across a non-existent state. Nostalgia for the unrealised & the unreal simmers in these parallel visions of Yugoslav utopia lost. Originally released on NOWNESS (20/04/2016).

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Gun Nation – America’s deadly love affair with firearms

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Simon Roberts travelled across Russia between July 2004 and August 2005, making pictures in over 200 locations and creating one of the most extensive, comprehensive photographic accounts of this vast country by a Westerner.

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Strolling along the streets of Tashkent or riding in a small marshrutka minibus - a common mode of transportation in this busy and bustling with life Central Asian city with a population of about 3 million people - you would feel no surprise looking at the multitude of different faces...

Tanned and dark haired or rather white skinned and blond, with blue, green or brown eyes, Russians, Tartars or Koreans would always appear in the crowd of local Uzbeks.

There used to be even more of them here several decades ago, living together in this calm and friendly city full of sunshine and welcoming shade...

By now, many people have left together with their untold stories - about this capital of "sun and bread", a Soviet-day Babylon that became a true Noah's ark hosting and hiding the survivors of a horrifying storm of ethnic repressions.

Here, lost deep in the heart of Central Asian desert, they multiplied, prospered and lived in peace. Russians, Jews, Germans, Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens, Crimean Tartars and Greeks, most of them had found their second home here, temporary if not permanent.

After the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991, many ethnic groups abandoned this newly rising and predominantly Muslim country. Ones feared possible persecutions - which fortunately never happened - while others simply followed their own practical reasons.

Some left as soon as the restrictions on their movement were lifted in the wave of so called "democratization" early in the 1970s.

However, there was one particular community of people that chose to stay in Uzbekistan. They actually had nowhere else to go. Over the years of pain and suffering, hard physical labor, adaptation and assimilation, this country had become their one and only true home.

These people are Uzbek Koreans, and this story is about them.

Nikolay and I were simply bound to meet. When I saw him first on the calm and quiet streets of Tashkent in the early spring of 2014, he was selling souvenirs, antiques and traditional Uzbek clay figurines to passersby and tourists in the central city square formerly known as Broadway.

Several theaters it used to host were long time gone as were the frequenting them crowds. The name has somehow stuck, adding nostalgia and curious mystery to this huge and otherwise deserted area full of flowerbeds and monuments to fallen heroes.

Only a handful of artists, painters and antiquity collectors remained here, including Nikolay, a small and aging Korean man who would pass anywhere for a "typical" Central Asian. He looked more like a Kyrgyz, Kazakh or Mongol, with his bold head, dark skin burnt out by the sun and swollen eyelids.

Something very special on his smooth and round face was his smile - a kind, honest and hesitant smile of a thoughtful child he still kept somewhere deep in his heart.

I bounced into Nikolay in the middle of my own personal quest. I was looking for a story almost disappeared and now hidden somewhere near. The ghosts of our recent past were haunting me from all sides on that warm and cloudy spring day on Broadway, and probably, they brought me to Nikolay and made him reveal his story to me.

At the same time, the urge to keep telling this story is somehow very understandable for both of us. These are our collective memories imprinted in the genes of all Uzbek Koreans.

They are still kept in the taste of pigodi, chartagi, khe or kuksi - a handful of salty and spicy North Korean dishes that have become a representative part of our vibrant and mixed Uzbek cuisine.

They still resonate in the sound of a few remaining words in Hamgyong dialect, which Soviet Koreans originally spoke when they first arrived to Uzbekistan in 1937.

They still mark our ancient lunar calendar during the traditional holidays, such as Hansik and Chusok - spring and autumn equinoxes - or tol and hwangab - the auspicious first and sixtieth birthday celebrations.

These ancient and typically Korean festivities and cultural rituals have somehow survived all former official prohibitions and are vigorously observed across Uzbekistan by one unique ethnic group.

This very tight community also shares a deeply secretive history known through the tragic accounts of past persecutions, repressions and deaths. These stories would only be told to close relatives and passed among family members, from one generation to another.

The sufferings those stories unveil are always very deep. Equally deep is the pain the memories still provoke...

I also have a story woven into the secrets of this tragic past. Long time ago, my grandfather told it to me only once and never wanted to speak about it again.

This is the story of a little boy who traveled one cold winter with many other people, all stuck together inside a dark and stinking cattle train...

He traveled on that train together with his parents and siblings for many weeks, until one day they arrived to a strange place in the middle of nowhere...

That place was somewhere in Soviet Uzbekistan. It was 1937, and my grandfather was only seven years old.

What brought him to the empty and deserted Central Asia together with all other people was the first Soviet deportation of entire nationality.

What united all of them as the victims of this massive deportation was their ethnic belonging. They all happened to be Koreans.

The cattle train story was the only thing my grandfather ever told me about those painful and complicated times. Yet, all his untold stories would keep haunting me later on, as would also do so his very apparent Korean physic and our Korean last name.

In order to affirm my partly Korean belonging, I would eventually study Korean or rather its classical Seoul dialect, which my grandfather would never be able to understand.

I would keep looking for any affinity with Korea and even graduate in the Korean studies at a renown university in the US, which my grandfather would still happily live to know.

So far from my actual Korean roots and never at peace with this understanding, I would keep looking for those unique Korean stories forgotten and lost deep in Central Asian sands...

It would become my personal quest to uncover the secret spaces left blank on purpose, in our family history and in the history of all Uzbek Koreans.

My grandfather has lived a relatively successful life in Uzbekistan. He went to study in Moscow and was later sent to work in rural Ukraine, where he met his future Russian wife who was working in the same town. They returned to Tashkent together in 1957, already married and with my one year old mother.

For most of his life, my grandfather worked as a chief engineer in the construction bureau at a major industrial plant in Tashkent. He developed and patented a lot of technical innovations for cotton picking machinery - we still keep all his certificates of achievement at home.

This is how the Korean community is ingrained in our social fabric - as extremely hard working people and quite a prosperous diaspora. In fact, many Koreans - including Nikolay's mother and my grandfather - have been awarded with numerous state medals for their very hard labor during the Soviet times.

Uzbek Koreans are also known for their indisputable role in the development of our national agriculture.

Traditional peasants, they passed to locals all their generations acquired land farming knowledge and techniques. Even now, the best types of rice grown in our country and used in the preparation of most representative Uzbek dishes are still lovingly called "Korean".

However, little is known about the heavy toll Uzbek Koreans had to pay in order to gain such a high reputation in our society. They were forced to come to this land, they had to develop it and turn into their own, they bore children upon it and - very slowly - it became their one and only home.

Nikolay and I are desperate to preserve our history - in the name of all Korean people. This is the story of three generations of his family. It is also my grandfather's story. Nikolay and I are determined to keep it alive, so the history may never repeat itself.

At least, we truly hope so.

Nikolay's mother was born in 1919 in Maritime province, in the village called Crabs. Back then it belonged to Posyet national district, and the whole territory of this province was an official part of the Soviet Far East.

In fact, this tiny piece of land - stuck between north-eastern China and the upper tip of present-day North Korea on one side, and surrounded with the Japanese Sea on the other - used to serve as a buffer zone for the Soviets throughout most of the 1920s.

Koreans originally started moving here in the late 19th century, escaping harsh living conditions, poverty and starvation in the north of the Korean peninsula.

In the Russian Far East, they built their first Korean villages and towns; very often with the agreement of Russian provincial governments and local military forces who desperately needed cheap labor in order to develop this desolated land full of opportunities and natural resources.

Initially, the first Russian settlers in the Far East felt quite hostile to unexpected newcomers. Koreans belonged to a different race, spoke an unfamiliar and unheard before language, ate strange food and had very different cultural habits.

However and in spite of the initial hostility and ethnic discrimination against them, by the early 1900s the amount of Koreans populating northern Russia grew to almost 30,000 from the original 13 families found by a Russian military convoy along the Tizinhe River in 1863.

Subsequently, this number more than doubled after Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and Japanese colony in 1910, and more than tripled by the early 1920s. With the Korean peninsula agonizing in a bloody turmoil, more and more Koreans were now helplessly fleeing to Russia.

After the Soviet revolution, all ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East were issued Soviet citizenship, even in spite of the fact that most of their representations and activities such as local governments, schools, theaters and newspapers, kept operating mostly in the Korean language.

Many Koreans became active contributors to the Soviet society. Nikolay's grandfather Vasiliy Lee was one of them. Throughout the civil war in the Russian Far East in 1918-1922, he fought together with the Bolsheviks against the Japanese under the command of Sergey Lazo who later became famous all over Soviet Union.

However, the fact that they truly hated the Japanese aggressors who had colonized and brutalized their historical motherland did not spare Soviet Koreans from their "dubious" ethnicity and "dangerous" links to Japan in the eyes of Soviet leadership and high military command.

Even before - by the end of Russo-Japanese war in 1905 - Korean peasants in the Russian Far East were often laid off the land they had cultivated, with anti-Korean laws effectively applied against them since 1907.

Now in 1937, shortly after having conducted the official census that counted over 170,000 Koreans living in the Soviet Union in almost 40,000 families, the Soviet government was preparing another ordeal for them, much more horrid in its scope and future implications...

It was a dark and cold autumn night of 1937. Nikolay's grandfather Vasiliy, his wife and three daughters, including 18 years old Nikolay's mother Galina and her 24 and 20 years old sisters, were all at home when someone suddenly knocked the door.

They were from the Soviet secret police. The order was simple and quick: "Gather all your belongings, personal documents and all food you can find at home in less than half an hour and follow us immediately. You all are being deported."

This is how the population of entire Posyet Korean national district - or 171,781 ethnic Koreans from there and the rest of Soviet Far East - were mounted on cattle trains in the matter of hours and at the beginning of harsh Siberian winter, without any prior notice and with practically no food, water, warm clothes or personal belongings.

All of them were being sent off to the Soviet Union's first massive labor camps deep in Central Asia.

The train journey was very long and exhausting. It lasted several weeks in dire cold, and the soldiers who guarded the cattle trains shared no food or water with the Korean deportees. In such conditions, people were quickly dying from malnutrition, and their bodies were being left in the snow outside each train station.

During these very brief stops at unfamiliar stations, the deportees were trying to sell to local residents - or simply exchange for food - any objects of value they managed to bring along in this extremely hard journey. They also collected snow and melted it into water.

This is how Nikolay's mother Galina and her two elder sisters survived, thanks to their parents' ceaseless care and initial food supply from home. Nikolay's grandparents were giving away their own food and water to their three daughters. Like that, they didn't last long and died eventually on that train from the starvation and weakness...

Their bodies were abandoned outside a small and unknown train station - one of many on this horrendous journey. Until now, nobody knows the exact place of their final rest. Together with his wife, a hero of the Soviet civil war in the Far East has forever disappeared in the snow...

Nikolay's father Konstantin has also survived the journey, together with his parents and two brothers. He did not meet his future wife on the train. Instead, they met later upon their arrival to Uzbekistan.

When the Koreans arrived, they were lodged in special barracks under 24/7 armed guard. During the day, they had to dry wet swampland and root out the cane surrounding Uzbek capital Tashkent back then.

'It was a hell of a job', Nikolay remembered from his parents' stories. 'There were a lot of wolves, jackals and lynxes in the swampland. During the night, they would come very close to temporary shacks in the fields where the Koreans lived and scare everyone to death'.

Death was indeed crawling and waiting nearby, but in the form of much tinier creatures. Wet swampland was infested with malaria mosquitoes, and many Koreans - unprotected and with no medicines at hand - would quickly get sick and eventually die from malaria.

Nevertheless, in less than five years from the deportees' original arrival to Soviet Uzbekistan, all cane was rooted out and the swampland surrounding Tashkent was made arable.

After they had completed this gigantic task, the Koreans were ordered to start growing rice on the new arable land in order to produce agricultural supply for the Soviet state.

This is when Nikolay's parents met and fell in love, working together in the fields. They got married in 1940 - she was 21 and he was 23.

From the initial barracks and shacks under 24/7 armed guard, they could eventually move together into a tiny house they built themselves out of straw and mud.

All rice they grew and harvested had to be returned to the state. For any hidden amount if discovered, the person who committed the crime would be pledged guilty of collective property theft and go directly to prison.

This is how the first Korean collective farms or kolkhozes started operating, built around the very same rice fields the deportees had to farm and live on. Now they lived in tiny houses made of straw and mud instead of initial barracks and shacks.

Many got married and bore their children on this land that also started to give its very first fruit. The armed guard control and passport restrictions had lasted until it was understood the Koreans would not go anywhere.

In fact, they had nowhere else to go. With so many difficulties, they built their first houses and started their families in this foreign place that finally - slowly and painfully - became their own...

In late 1953, the death of Joseph Stalin marked the end of his personality cult and stopped persecutions of ethnic minorities.

Many of Stalin's policies were declared contradicting the true principles of Leninism in 1956 and subsequently abandoned by a newly rising political leader, Nikita Khrushchev.

Pardoning all Soviet Union's unwanted people and dissolving the infamous gulags - Siberian prison camps - were among his first political decisions taken in order to attempt correcting the mistakes of a very dark past.

Finally, it looked like the Koreans were given a new chance to become legitimate Soviet citizens.

Their children could now go to public primary, secondary and vocational high schools and local universities. They could also move relatively freely within the Soviet Union and look for better professional opportunities.

Paradoxically, most of them stayed in the very same Korean kolkhozes they or their parents initially arrived to and built.

Their living conditions were more stable there, in the tight communities where everyone belonged to the same ethnic group and personally knew each other.

Now their children were also coming back - often as graduates of prestigious state universities all over the USSR - and given jobs of highly trained staff in agricultural, managerial and technical positions at the same kolkhozes.

Life slowly regained its normality... The first generations of Korean deportees had been trying very hard to forget their dark past, together with all its previous mistakes and pain. They simply wanted to live happier lives, if not of their own then at least of their children.

Nikolay saw real bread for the first time in his life at the age of five. Before that his mother had always used compressed grass to "bake" bread of some kind. It was so heavy to digest that all children suffered from severe stomach aches, especially after eating a lot of it.

In the early 1950s, they all lived with constant food shortages, little Nikolay, his mother and two elder sisters (the third one would be born ten years later).

'We had a cow, some chicken and a pig. My dad had left to study at a pedagogical university, and my mother was left alone with three little children, taking care of our house and the animals.'

This is why she finally stopped working in a kolkhoz - there always was plenty of work at home. During the nights and after everyone had left to sleep, she was still awake, secretly sewing clothes, to be later sold to neighbors.

All forms of private entrepreneurship were strictly prohibited back then by the Soviet state. Therefore, Galina's nighttime work simply had to stay hidden.

'I was always playing outside the house as a little boy', Nikolay remembers very emotionally, 'and if I suddenly saw anyone around who didn't look Korean, I would immediately run back to my mother and shout "Inspector is coming, inspector is coming!"'

Galina worked so hard during the day and in her nighttime shifts of sewing that eventually she lost all of her breast milk she still had to feed Nikolay with.

'I had to start drinking cow milk way too early, because my mom was so stressed during the day and so tired of sleepless nights that there was no more milk left in her to feed me...'

Eventually, Galina was able to find a legal job in a state-owned tailor shop. Konstantin came back after finishing the university and became a math teacher at a local school.

He worked as a math teacher for the rest of his life. They both were awarded with medals for their very hard lifelong labor.

There is one memory especially painful for Nikolay. It is the memory of a very dark night back at home. He was still a very small child.

As a three-year old, Nikolay could vividly remember everything around him. That night he was peacefully sleeping in his bed, when the adult voices suddenly woke him up.

Nikolay walked into the living room and saw a crying Korean stranger. He was telling something to Nikolay's parents who were also crying while listening to him...

Nikolay still cries himself like a small child, telling me this story 60 years later.

When his mother came to Soviet Uzbekistan as a deportee in the cattle train together with her parents and sisters, her brother was left behind. He was only 21 and served in the Soviet military back in the Far East.

He was positioned in Kraskino town and separated from the rest of his family who lived in Crabs. When Stalin's order for the deportation of Koreans came in power, he discovered that his whole family had been shipped to Uzbekistan on a train only very shortly before his own arrest.

As a soldier, Fedor Lee was under an even higher suspicion and scrutiny than the rest of the Koreans. According to an official version, he was accused by his neighbors of being a Japanese spy and quickly declared a traitor and enemy of the Soviet state.

Fedor was condemned to ten years of forced labor in the Siberian gulag in Komi Soviet Socialist Republic. There he did not last even through the first half of his imprisonment.

The Korean stranger who visited Nikolay's family fifteen years later was his uncle's fellow prisoner in the gulag. He told Nikolay's parents that Koreans were treated the worst by the guards among gulag prisoners, and only a couple of them eventually survived all horrors of their imprisonment.

Every day they were sent to cut lumber deep in the Siberian woods, in spite of freezing temperatures, lack of clothes and malnutrition.

Fedor badly injured his legs while cutting a tree, and in the cold weather gangrene developed very quickly.

Even after he could not walk any longer, his comrade would remember, they still had to take him out to their working station, where he would cut branches from fallen trees.

After he got so weak that he could not work any longer, the prison guards shot him. It happened in the early 1940s, and nobody really knew where his body had been buried.

'My family was taken on a train all the way to Uzbekistan', Fedor told his Korean comrade shortly before dying.

'If you manage to survive through all of this, please promise me you would go and find them... Please promise you would tell them my story, everything they have done to me.'

His friend, whose name we will never know, fulfilled his promise. He found Fedor's family and came all the way to Uzbekistan to tell them everything that had happened to Fedor.

It seems that in the lives of some there can never be too much suffering...

The lives of two generations of Nikolay's grandparents and parents bear clear signs of two waves of repressions against the ethnic Koreans and political prisoners of the Soviet state between the early 1930s and late 1950s.

There is, however, one more story left to tell and one more wave of repressions left to count. It took place exactly at the same time and became one of - if not the most - secretive part of history in the lives of Soviet Koreans. This is the story not so many people happen to know about...

Alexey Ten came to Uzbekistan on the same cattle train, together with his brother and Nikolay's father Konstantin.

Together they worked in the swampland and later rice fields, and then Alexey went to study in the Chirchiq military academy near Tashkent, where in the early 1950s he was approached with an unexpected order by his higher military command.

The special request came from the young Comrade Kim Il Sung handpicked by Joseph Stalin in the indirect stand-off between the Soviet Union and United States over the Korean peninsula. Eventually, it led to the Korean War, which became known in the West as the Forgotten War.

Back then, young and energetic Comrade Kim Il Sung sent a direct plea of help to all brotherly Soviet Koreans, asking those in the military ranks to fight the Korean War shoulder to shoulder with him, in order to liberate the Korean peninsula from imperialist aggressors.

Many Uzbek Koreans from the Chirchiq military academy, together with other Central Asian Koreans, went and fought the Korean War shoulder to shoulder with Kim Il Sung, helping him to liberate North Korea and establish the DPRK.

Most of these Koreans stayed in North Korea afterwards as war heroes and Kim Il Sung's closest friends and allies.

They became generals, marshals and admirals in the DPRK's newly built military apparatus. Alexey Ten was among them - he also became a general and the DPRK's deputy minister of defense.

Konstantin, Nikolay's father, must have finally felt very happy for his brother - at last, he was in a very high and powerful position in the country that seemed to highly appreciate him.

Earlier and while still living in Uzbekistan, Alexey Ten got married and had his first son Leonid, whom all of his brother's family felt especially close to.

Later, after Alexey had fought together with Kim Il Sung in the Korean War and while his family already lived in North Korea, Alexey's wife got badly ill with appendicitis. She was operated across the border from North Korea in the city of Harbin, but unluckily didn't survive.

Alexey eventually remarried with a North Korean woman and had several more children with her, and his first son Leonid kept living with them.

After the direct request from the Comrade Kim Il Sung, he and many other Uzbek Korean war heroes surrendered their Soviet citizenship in exchange for the North Korean one. The DPRK seemed to euphorically claim them back.

During this time, there was a unique exchange of letters going on between Upper Chirchiq in Uzbekistan and Pyongyang in North Korea, with the help of North Korean Embassy in Moscow.

Konstantin, Nikolay's father, would write to his brother Alexey or his nephew Leonid, always in Korean, and send his letters to the DPRK's Moscow embassy that would then pass them directly to the general Chon Il Bang (Alexey Ten) in Pyongyang, and vice versa.

Nikolay managed to keep some of the remaining letters, together with the photos of his cousin little Lenya.

A colorful and happy postcard from Pyongyang signed with a trembling hand of the little child in broken Russian, wishing his cousins the best of luck and plenty of health...

The lines in Korean from both brothers and little Lenya, who would always write all first names and some particular words in Russian, as if trying not to forget his original mother language...

The signature of the North Korean ambassador in Moscow, stating that he had indeed passed the letters between the recipients...

Those invisible ties that linked the Uzbek Koreans back to North Korea, they weren't there to last long. Nor was there to last their short and euphoric success in the DPRK, a historical motherland they were so happy and proud to help rebuilding together.

Since 1954, upon the death of Joseph Stalin and demolition of his personality cult as contradicting to the true principles of Leninism, the relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union started to deteriorate dramatically.

Kim Il Sung, who adopted the system of adoration and political reprisals from his own beloved Great Leader, felt quite vulnerable after Stalin's defamation in the USSR and started suspecting the new Soviet command of plotting to destroy him in a direct coup-d-etat.

Among the first ones to blame for the same old sins - political and military treason, espionage and animosity to the DPRK - were the same Soviet Koreans who again and again found themselves between the wheels of ruthless state machinery bound to destroy them.

Cruel purges started one by one against closest friends, former fellows and allies. The DPRK's highest military apparatus consisting mostly of Soviet Korean ministers, deputy ministers, generals, marshals and admirals was soon and completely eradicated.

It looked like Kim Il Sung was trying to change the past and make it seem as if the years between the 1940s and 1960s had never existed. He did everything possible to wipe out the entire memory of the traitors who had given him and their historical motherland everything, up to their own lives.

Suddenly, Konstantin's letters started returning from the Moscow based North Korean embassy with a weird stamp ' R ecipient unknown'.

Alexey's postal address simply ceased to exist. Nobody could explain anything. Konstantin kept sending letters, and the letters kept coming back with the same postal stamp, recipient unknown.

It lasted so until Konstantin, exhausted and anguished, managed to talk directly to the North Korean ambassador in Moscow, who finally explained him everything.

'Don't look for your brother any longer. Stop sending him those letters. There is no way to find him or his family now. They have been purged as traitors, spies and enemies of the state, and we know nothing about them at this point. And, probably, we will never know.'

How many cycles of repression can one survive? How many tears can one cry day and night? How many family members can one loose? And the most important question - what for and whose fault is it that such atrocities keep happen?

The Soviet Koreans, Uzbek Koreans, Koreans kept spinning again and again crushed between the wheels of history, betrayed and dishonored again and again by a foreign motherland...

How many motherlands can one loose and how many of them can one get?

And what is it worth, after all, when at the end everything you are bound to have is stay homeless, become forgotten and dishonored..? Or simply die..? Nikolay's parents could never answer those questions. Have they ever asked them at all?

Nikolay answers my question this time. 'Have they ever blamed Joseph Stalin or the Soviet state for what it had done to them? Maybe, they did. Probably so. I don't really know, because they were never free to talk about it, even with us. I don't blame anyone any longer. I simply hope such atrocities will never happen again.'

This project was created in the memory of my Korean grandfather, Kim Da Gir, son of Kim Gyon Se (1930-2007).

All copyright to this project belongs to Victoria Kim (2015).

Part of the archival photography on Uzbek Koreans, including several photographs by Viktor An, was sourced from the website www.koryo-saram.ru and used in this multimedia project with the permission of the website's owner Vladislav Khan.

Please address all your comments and questions about this story to vkimsky@gmail.com

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Strolling along the streets of Tashkent or riding in a small marshrutka minibus - a common mode of transportation in this busy and bustling with life Central Asian city with a population of about 3 million people - you would feel no surprise looking at the multitude of different faces...

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Middle-class Chinese men head to Russia and other Eastern European countries to find Westernized wives with local appeal - Global Times

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When Yuan Shankai, a Beijing-based artist in his late 40s, finalized his divorce in 2010, he decided that if he were going to marry again, his second wife would be either Russian or, at the very least, Eastern European.

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Manzhouli, the Go-between City of Border Tourism

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With gaudy baroque style buildings bordering the streets, Russian restaurants serving Borscht (red soup), black bread and baked salmon, shops selling Russian crafts such as wine glasses and gem-decorated hand mirrors, and perhaps most significantly, travel agencies offering tours to border cities in Russia, Manzhouli couldn't be more attractive to Chinese tourists.

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A Chinese-Russian couple's perfectly executed dance performance on a recent episode of the popular talent show Amazing Chinese has left judges and viewers breathless.

The couple, Tim and Tanya, performed a four-minute long aerial dance routine, incorporating flips and various difficult poses while dangling onto a silk rope. This type of dance demands a high degree of strength, flexibility, courage but most importantly, trust.

The audience and judges were wowed by the pair's seemingly effortless movements, and were especially tickled to see the two share a kiss mid-spin.

Tim, 25, is from Sichuan province, while Tanya, 24, was born in Russia. The two are married and currently live together in Chengdu.

This is the second season of Amazing Chinese, which previously churned out talented acts such as this adorable three-year-old dancer from Shandong province. Fan Bing Bing, star of the recently controversial TV drama The Empress of China is featured as a guest judge this season.

Watch the full performance here:
By Sharon Choi

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Dance by Chinese-Russian couple on talent show 'Amazing Chinese' wows judges

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A Chinese-Russian couple's perfectly executed dance performance on a recent episode of the popular talent show Amazing Chinese has left judges and viewers breathless. The couple, Tim and Tanya, performed a four-minute long aerial dance routine, incorporating flips and various difficult poses while dangling onto a silk rope.

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'Initially men want to see brides with white skin and blue eyes'. Picture: OSD Centre

At first sight, it looks like a rather formal business meeting but this session in Novosibirsk is a get-to-known-you session between men from China and Russian women.

There were supposed to be eight 'bachelors', but only five made it to Novosibirsk after three found brides in their previous love tour stopover in Khabarovsk.

Here in the Puppen House restaurant, drinking tea, the men - aged between 25 and 46 and from Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen - talked with the aid of interpreters over their views on marriage and the family.

Elena Suvorova, head of marriage agency OSD Centre, which operates in a number of Siberian cities, explained that in China there is an imbalance in the sexes, with far more men than women. In Russia the situation is opposite.

'For them, a Russian woman is like a present,' she said. 'Men want to get married, and are committed for serious relationships.

'All the girls who we invited are under 35 years old. Initially men want to see brides with white skin and blue eyes - funnily enough, though, last year the girls who got into a relationship were brunettes with brown eyes.'

'Initially men want to see brides with white skin and blue eyes'. Picture: OSD Centre

Suvorova praised Chinese men and their attitude to women.

'Chinese men treat women with respect,' she said. 'It is important for them that the woman is moderate, natural, calm, smiling, and not competing with the man.'

The men are 'all quite successful'.

She said: 'Last year we organised the first singles' tour when Chinese men visited [Novosibirsk].

'There were six men and 25 girls. After a meeting in Novosibirsk, there were two couples. And three couples after a stopover in Krasnoyarsk.'

In China there are around 34 million more men than women.

'With 120 men for every 100 women, China's Bridget Joneses are now male, and increasingly desperate for a date,' said one report.

China's historic 'one-child' policy has been blamed, which led parents to abandon girls or use sex-selective abortion to guarantee a male child.

A Chinese boy on a street in a province of Zhejiang. Picture: The Siberian Times

Men are increasingly looking abroad for wives, and Siberia is on the doorstep. Cities like Blagoveshchensk, opposite the Chinese city of Heihe, have seen an upsurge in cross-border marriages.

But the singles' tours for upscale businessmen are a fairly new trend, and evidently popular, matching tours by Western lonely hearts to former Soviet countries.

Ivan Zuenko, of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies of the Far Eastern Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: 'There are more marriages registered between Chinese men and Russian women than between Chinese women and Russian men.

'But it is impossible to say that the number of such families is so high that it will impact on the demographic situation in the region.'

A video shows a Chinese man playing saxophone in the city of Blagoveshchensk, the Far East of Russia, to attract attention of local women.

A piece of paper by his feet has handwritten ''Calm, balanced, looking for a Russian girlfriend.'

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We've come for your women: Chinese men seek Siberian brides

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'Initially men want to see brides with white skin and blue eyes'. Picture: OSD Centre At first sight, it looks like a rather formal business meeting but this session in Novosibirsk is a get-to-known-you session between men from China and Russian women.

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In the summer of 2014, Davide Monteleone, an Italian photographer who had lived in Moscow for more than a decade, began to travel to the Russian-Chinese border in search of something that felt real and reliable. "I had been covering the uprising in Ukraine, and then the civil war and the occupation of Crimea," he told me. "I was disturbed by how hard it was to remain neutral when there was so much press attention. I felt like whatever I did was going to be used for propaganda. So I thought about doing something far away." After the European Union and the United States levied sanctions against Russia, the country began signing high-profile gas and trade agreements with China. "There were a lot of articles in Russia about this new friendship between Russia and China," Monteleone said. "So I figured, let's go and see what's going on. Is this relationship real?"

In Moscow, Monteleone had read about a new bridge across the Amur River that the Russians were supposedly building at the city of Blagoveshchensk. "But you go there and there is no bridge," he said. "People in Moscow knew about this bridge, but the people in this place didn't even know they were planning to build it." In the regions around the phantom bridge, he noticed other things that were also missing. "On the Russian side, there's no agriculture," he said. "It's forest and that's it. You ask the Russians why they don't grow anything, and they say, 'The weather is not very good; you can't grow anything.' And then you cross to the Chinese side, and there are plantations everywhere! It's only two hundred metres, so the climate must be the same."

After spending a month on the Russian side, Monteleone made another trip the following year to focus on the Chinese regions, with his work funded in part by a fellowship from ChinaFile, at the Asia Society. Many of his photographs have a sense of space that's rare in China-there are uncut forests, and open blue skies, and flat silver rivers that are free of boats. In such emptiness, a person can imagine and build almost anything. In the border town of Jalainur, six thousand miles from Red Square, Monteleone found that the Chinese had constructed a scale replica of St. Basil's Cathedral. "The Chinese have a strange perception of history," Monteleone said. "They would say, 'It's an old church that was built in the sixteenth century.' It was hard to explain to them that there is a difference between something that was built in the sixteenth century and something that is a copy."

When Monteleone visited the building, he realized that, in fact, it wasn't a church at all. The painted turrets and onion domes were only a shell; nestled inside the church, like a matryoshka doll's surprise, was a museum consecrated to the subject of science. Nearby, an outdoor park displayed the tusks and bones of woolly mammoths that once roamed the northern plains, although these fossils, like the church, were not real. "They were all copies," Monteleone said. "I think there was not a single piece that was original. Except I went to a shop and there was a huge tusk of a mammoth that was for sale. That was the only original. I think it was five hundred thousand dollars."

Over the past two centuries, there have been periodic tensions between Russia and China, including some serious border conflicts, and historically Russia has usually held the upper hand. But nowadays, at the personal level, Monteleone notices a different dynamic. "In a remote place like this, the Russians just wait for something that is going to happen, while the Chinese try to do something," he said. This disparity seemed to shape the interpersonal dynamics of many Russian-Chinese couples that Monteleone met on his travels. In Blagoveshchensk, he spent time with a Chinese businesswoman who runs a small empire of Russian hotels and restaurants. Back in her hometown of Harbin, she has a husband and a child, but across the border she has acquired a kind of modern-day concubine-a Russian husband, along with another child. "I suspected that the Russian husband-it's also for practical reasons," Monteleone said. "Chinese cannot open companies in Russia if they don't have a Russian partner." He found it fascinating to watch them interact: "She was saying, 'Go and get the car!' 'Bring me there!' 'Call this person!' He was a husband, but at the same time he was an employee. She was speaking Russian, but in a strange accent."

That was one of the few mixed couples that Monteleone encountered in which a Chinese woman was paired with a Russian man. "The combination is usually Chinese men and Russian women," he said. This may be a result of simple demographics: in Russia, there are only eighty-seven men to every hundred women, whereas in China there are a hundred and six men to every hundred women. But, in Monteleone's view, it's also a convergence of different social and economic forces. "It's because men die much sooner in these parts of Russia," he said bluntly. "In this kind of remote region, there's no jobs, no activities, no way to spend time, so the men just drink." He continued, "And Russian women here seem to be much more responsible than men. I'm sorry to say it, but they're the ones taking care of things." On the southern side of the border, he noticed that language schools are full of young Russian women who seem dedicated to acquiring Mandarin, and perhaps a Chinese husband.

In Manzhouli, he spent time with Sun Shengchang, a Chinese logger, and Katya Dianova, his young Russian wife. In Monteleone's photograph, they look like archetypes: Sun with the high cheekbones, long nose, and angled eyes of the northern Chinese; Dianova with fair skin and gentle features that could have been described by Tolstoy ("this black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life"). She holds their daughter, Natasha; he holds their son, Ramin. Their apartment is decrepit: peeling paint, rusty radiator. But there's a glow to the little family-in this strange borderland of fake churches and invisible bridges, the dingy room contains something intimate and real. "They didn't have a lot of money, but they were a very sweet couple," Monteleone said. "You could tell that they really loved each other."

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Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border

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In the summer of 2014, Davide Monteleone, an Italian photographer who had lived in Moscow for more than a decade, began to travel to the Russian-Chinese border in search of something that felt real and reliable. "I had been covering the uprising in Ukraine, and then the civil war and the occupation of Crimea," he told me.

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студия фильмотограф

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режиссер андрей холенко

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автор сценария алена шмакова

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Андрей Холенко

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Суйфэньхэ для туристов

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Те россияне,кто впервые побывал здесь двадцать лет назад, помнят его неказистой одноэтажной деревенькой. С тех пор облику и возможностям Суйфэньхэ могут позавидовать многие российские города. Сегодня этот преобразившийся китайский город прочно удерживает статус самого популярного места среди туристов Дальнего Востока. Производство Студии Фильмотограф www.filmotograph.ru