Speaking at the SPROUTS business forum in Kazan, Russia, on Monday, analyst Natalia Khobrakova of the B1 consulting firm said that China has become the top investor in the Far East, with over 90 percent of foreign investment in the region coming from Chinese sources. That includes Russia’s Tatarstan region, where the forum was held.
“Russia in general, particularly the Far East, are of the significant interest for investing. It can already be said at present that China is the largest investor in this region,” said Khobrakova, who is a partner in the B1 firm.
“The Deng Xiaoping Logistics Center is one of the largest projects with participation of Chinese investors in the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan,” she noted.
Kazan is the capital city of Tatarstan, which was formed in 1920 and remained in the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The SPROUTS forum is an annual event that began three years ago to strengthen bilateral economic and cultural ties between Russia and China. The organizers of this year’s event said it had over a thousand participants, including representatives from over 200 Chinese companies.
Rustam Minnikhanov, prime minister of Tatarstan since 2010, said at the opening ceremony for the forum that Kazan has “launched direct flights to multiple Chinese cities” since last year’s event.
“The Republic of Tatarstan is one of the key Russian regions. It holds leading positions in the country by the economic potential and the openness level. The volume of trading between Tatarstan and China is above $3 bln for two years in a row already,” China’s consul general for Kazan, Xiang Bo, said on Monday.
“I am confident Tatarstan has become one of the most active Russian regions in developing cooperation with China and is on the first line of Sino-Russian interregional partnership,” said Xiang.
China and Russia declared a “no limits” partnership shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. In the wake of the invasion, China said the two dictatorships were “friends forever, never enemies.”
Although China has occasionally offered itself as a broker for peace talks, ostentatiously brandishing vague multi-point “peace plans,” it has never condemned the invasion or brought any pressure to bear against Putin to end the war.
The German Foreign Ministry produced a report in May that found China was responsible for roughly 80% of the attempts to circumvent sanctions against Russia.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has denounced China as a “decisive enabler” of the Ukraine invasion because its commerce, investment, and sanctions-evading activities have propped up the Russian economy.
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