Open Forum

The Russian Far East (RFE) has come a long way in the last fifteen years. The signature image of the region’s largest city of Vladivostok is no longer that of a quaint, late-nineteenth century railway station, but that of a daringly aerodynamic, cable-stayed bridge built over a mile long and two hundred feet tall to the nearby Russky Island for the 2012 APEC summit. The buildings erected for the summit are now home to the Federal Far Eastern State University. My memories of struggling through a chaotic crowd of passengers cramped onboard a gritty, smoke-belching, raucous ferry back in 1999—the only way to get to what was then a desolate island—have receded. Since then, Russia and China signed a friendship treaty (2001) and a border settlement agreement (2004)—the latter concluding 40 years of negotiations that were interrupted by armed border clashes around 1969.1 Russia’s trade with China spiked from USD 6bn when I took that rumbling ferry to USD 88bn at the time of the 2012 Vladivostok APEC summit.  The increase in bilateral trade remains impressive despite dropping to about USD 68bn in 2015.2 After Beijing and Moscow signed 30-year energy contracts worth nearly half a trillion dollars in late 2014, transcontinental oil and gas pipelines are expected to stretch even further from deep in Siberia toward Vladivostok and the Russia-China borderlands. Moscow Exchange saw a rapid rise in the yuan-ruble trade.3 Several transborder, special trade zones and infrastructure projects got underway in Russia’s provinces along the China border. These projects have fed an upbeat narrative.

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