Amur Oblast Official Seeks to Calm Russians East of the Urals about China’s Rise

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb.16 – A senior official in Blagoveshechensk, a Russian city on the border with China and within sight of the much larger and more developed city on the other side of that line, says that the residents of Heihi are doing better than those in his own city because China is richer and has been committed to development far longer.

            But Boris Beloborodov, the business ombudsman for the Amur Oblast, continues, Russians in Blagoveshchensk and other regions east of the Urals need not be afraid of a mythical “yellow peril” and instead recognize that people on the Russian side of the border are catching up (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/16/kitaitsy-nachali-gorazdo-ranshe-i-ushli-vpered).

            He says that both Moscow and Russian regions have worked to tighten rules on foreign businesses, including Chinese, and that as a result, while trade between Russia and China has continued to expand, the operations of Chinese firms producing goods in the Russian Federation has declined over the last decade.

            What has happened, Beloborodov says, has been an effort to make the Russian production sphere more Russian with the chances for foreigners to penetrate it far more difficult. Given that, “no one should be speaking about any special preferences for Chinese business.” That may have been a problem earlier, but it isn’t now.

            Russians often compare the city of Blagoveshchensk with the Chinese metropolis of Heihi on the other side of the border. The latter has more skyscrapers and more modern housing but that is because China has more money than Russian does and has for a long time built up its urban centers especially along the border. 

            A major reason why Chinese success inside Russia has been so noticeable, the ombudsman says, is that Chinese businesses are concentrated in the highly visible service sector where they do well because of a Chinese commitment to the idea that the customer is always right, a commitment many Russians don’t share and thus fall behind. 

            Beloborodov also says that Russians are more interested in going to China than the Chinese are in going to Russia and that despite the appearance of ethnic Chinese in Russia east of the Urals, “there have always been more Chinese living permanently in Moscow than in any of the regions of the Far East.”