As the Chinese Cut Down Siberia’s Forests, Tensions With Russians Rise

As the Chinese Cut Down Siberia’s Forests, Tensions With Russians Rise  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/world/europe/russia-china-siberia-logging.html

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Guest workers from Central Asia at a Chinese run mill in the Siberian logging town of Kansk, Russia.

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Emile Ducke for The New York Times

By Andrew E. Kramer

• July 25, 2019

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Stumps and felled trees at a logging site in Siberia. Feeding China’s colossal appetite for wood has brought jobs and cash to the region, but has also fueled concern about deforestation.

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Emile Ducke for The New York Times

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“I’m a resident of this city,” Irina Avdoshkevich, a member of the City Council, said. “Why should I tolerate these waste piles, these fires?”

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Emile Ducke for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/world/europe/russia-china-siberia-logging.html, Russia — During the long summer days in Siberia, logging trucks rumble out of the forest heaped with Siberian larch, Scots pine and birch bound for sawmills run by Chinese who can barely believe their good fortune.

“Everything here is Chinese,” said one lumberyard foreman, Wang Yiren, pointing to some of the hundreds of sawmills that in the past few years have popped up along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Feeding China’s colossal appetite for wood has brought jobs and cash to the region, but has also helped to make Russia the global leader in forest depletion, fueling fears that Siberian logging towns will eventually be left without a livelihood.

Not only that, all the manufacturing of consumer wood products is done in China, which has sharply restricted logging to preserve its remaining forests. The arrangement would seem to smell of exploitation, but it has been embraced by a Russian government that, facing Western economic sanctions over its military incursion in Ukraine and interference in elections, has sought closer economic ties with Beijing.

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Russian timber exports to China grew to $3.5 billion last year, from $2.2 billion in 2013, the year before the Ukraine crisis, according to Russian trade statistics. The Chinese, in turn, re-export some Russian wood as furniture, doors, flooring, cladding and other finished goods for sale around the world.

So, while the Chinese timber rush has stimulated local economies in Siberia, it has also stirred resentment, underscoring the promise and pitfalls of an economic experiment with implications far beyond one remote region. The governments of Russia and China, each with its own dispute with Washington, are vowing to get along in a common front against the United States.

On the sidelines of the recent meeting of the Group of 20 major economies in Japan, Russian and Chinese officials promised to use their currencies in bilateral trade, rather than dollars. But there may be limits to the depth of the relationship between countries that had a border clash in 1969 and retain deep mutual suspicion.