Article - A Chinese `Invasion` - News From Russia

Article - A Chinese `Invasion` - News From Russia: "23 September 2003 21:14 A Chinese `Invasion` Russia's latest census has produced a bombshell result: over the past decade, the Chinese have emerged as the fastest growing ethnic minority in Russia. While official data of the October 2002 census will be published only next month, preliminary figures leaked to the press show that Russia's Chinese population has grown from just over 5,000 in the late 1980s to 3.26 million today. This makes the Chinese the fourth biggest ethnic group in this country after Russians (104.1 million), Tatars (7.2 million) and Ukrainians (5.1 million) - all indigenous inhabitants of Russia. More than three-fourths of Chinese immigrants have settled down in Siberia and the Far East. The census results lend chilling reality to Russia's age-old nightmare of a Chinese takeover of the Asian part of Russia. Eighteen million Russians scattered across the India-size expanse of the Far East and Siberia face 250 million Chinese cramped across a common border in China's northern provinces. In the past the huge Chinese demographic pressure was contained by a tightly sealed barbed-wire border, but when the Soviet Union collapsed the 4,300-km Russian-Chinese border was thrown open to bilateral trade. Chinese traders poured in to sell clothes and other necessities to Russians struggling with a deep economic crisis and take back to China Russian timber,"