Sino-Russian cooperation and exchange under the Belt and Road Initiative increases

Frozen grounds, cold winds and long nights - these can be a nightmare for any construction team. But this is what employees of the China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group grappled with in past winters while building the China-Russia Tongjiang Rail Bridge crossing the border between China and Russia. The bridge is expected to trigger a commercial and infrastructure development boom in the cross-border economic corridor, along with a larger flow of cargo and people.
                                                       

Scheduled to be finished this year, the 2,280-meters bridge (about 1,900 meters of which is built by China) connects Tongjiang city in Heilongjiang Province to Nizhneleninskoye in Russia. It is one of the most important infrastructure projects to promote the implementation of the "plan for building the China-Russia-Mongolia Economic Corridors." The Chinese construction team nearly completed the major parts of the project in China over an intense 14 months in 2015, wining global praise.

With both countries embracing the upcoming year of China-Russia local cooperation and exchange, its completion is a veritable gift to facilitate China-RFE cooperation, together with joint projects in other fields between the two countries in RFE.

Cooperation tightens

In the past two years, the Russia Far East Area has absorbed $9 billion in foreign investment, of which 80 percent comes from China, which is how Russian president Vladimir Putin introduced RFE at the Eastern Economic Forum in 2017.

According to data provided by the Ministry for the Development of Russian Far East, Chinese enterprises increased by one-third in 2017. The 28 joint projects committed to the area are valued at $4 billion, accounting for 35 percent of overall foreign investment in the Far East over the past three years.

Beyond the resource-extraction industry, China's Tianjin Port Group signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation with Commercial Port of Vladivostok Group in June of 2017 to promote the two ports' integrated development and respond to China's international Belt and Road Initiative.