Problems and Paradoxes of Cooperation Between the Regions of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China in the 1990s-2010s

The study was conducted on the example of two investment projects implemented in Chelyabinsk, Kemerovo, and Tomsk Oblasts. These projects were not launched for two years. Everything ended at the level of workflow: agreements with regional authorities, contracts with municipal officials. The relevance of this problem lies in the fact that, at present, the entry of Chinese capital into the market of Russian investment projects is of a great importance, and the future socioeconomic development of both individual regions of Russia and the whole country depends on how useful this entry is. According to the results of evaluating the activities of Chinese representatives in the regions of Western and Eastern Siberia, no practical results that promote the development of the economy and regional infrastructure have been found. For representatives of the PRC, these projects and facilities under them are an extremely effective way of legalizing their own funds (acquired in many cases by criminal means) for numerous corruption checks in China. The ease with which they managed to implement schemes for the acquisition of these objects and lands without the obligatory implementation of the project, in fact, made them turn to the regions of Siberia more and more. The phenomenon discovered during the study of China's investment activity in Siberian regions over the past two decades has no analogues in the history of Russian-Chinese relations, in which regional partnerships and regional trade has always been the cornerstone that strengthens bilateral ties. In 2014, after the start of the US and European sanctions policy towards Russia, Russian economic dependence on the investments from China was completed. Despite the negative side, the regions of Siberia in this situation had something to offer to the neighboring state, for example, a huge amount of natural and human resources as a gigantic platform for investment activity. At the same time, for the PRC this was a unique historical opportunity to remove excess capital from the country on the most favorable conditions, providing it with an enormous production in Russia. However, instead, in the period after 2014, most large entrepreneurs came to the regions of Siberia not to solve investment problems, but to carry out criminal activities which were not possible in their own country. This contradiction has transformed Siberia for the PRC from a large-scale investment platform into a large-scale platform of foreign corruption policy.

Keywords

Authors

References