Ethnic Chinese in Russia
[2] However, this figure is contested, with the Overseas Community Affairs Council of Taiwan claiming 998,000 in 2004 and 2005, and Russian demographers generally accepting estimates in the 200,000–400,000 range as of 2004.
The Russian trans-Ural expansion into the area resulted in a low level of armed conflict during the 1670s and 1680s; in 1685 the two sides agreed to meet for boundary negotiations.
Hostilities broke out around Peter the Great Gulf, in Vladivostok when the Russians tried to shut off gold mining operations and expel Chinese workers there.
[12] Large-scale migration from Qing territories to lands actually under the control of the Russian Empire did not begin until the late 19th century.
[17] One of the most successful Chinese in late 19th century Russia, the prosperous Khabarovsk merchant Ji Fengtai (紀鳳台), better known under the Russified name Nikolay Ivanovich Tifontai,[18] had his first naturalization petition rejected by Governor A.N.
[17] During World War I, several thousand of the Russian Empire's Chinese residents were brought to European Russia to work on the construction of fortifications.
[19] The wave of Chinese migration to the Soviet Union lasted as late as 1929; the border remained relatively porous even up until the mid-1930s.
[22] Those Chinese who remained in the Russian Far East were deported to other areas of Russia in 1937 for fear that their communities could be infiltrated by Japanese spies.
[26] From 1950 until 1965, roughly 9,000 Chinese students went to the Soviet Union for further studies; all but a few hundred eventually returned to China, though they often faced persecution from the Anti-Rightist Movement as a result of their foreign connections.
[30] For example, Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, the chief of the Population Migration Laboratory of the National Economic Forecasting Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, estimated in 2004 the total number of Chinese present in Russia at any given point (as resident or visitors) at about 400,000 persons, much smaller than ill-educated guess of 2 million that had been given by Izvestiya.
[35] Most Chinese workers in the region come from the northeast of China, especially Heilongjiang, where they form an important part of the province's strategy to gain access to natural resources in Russia to fuel their own economic development.
Though some immigrants come from Jilin as well, the provincial government there is more interested in developing relations with Japan and North and South Korea.
[28] Population pressure and overcrowding on the Chinese side of the border are one motivation for emigration, while the chance to earn money doing business in Russia is described as the major pull factor.
[32][34] During the 1960s, when the Sino-Soviet split reached its peak and Beijing-Moscow negotiations about regularization of the border rolled on fruitlessly, Chinese civilians made frequent incursions into territory and especially waters controlled by the USSR.
