Tensions On The China-Russia Border Because Of Covid-19

Suifenhe is a county-level city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang with a population of 70,000. It shares a 27km-long border with Russia and is the only Chinese city in which trading with the Russian rouble is legal. The cross-border railway is an important freight transport link but most travellers arrive at the Suifenhe checkpoint having endured a three-hour bus ride from Vladivostok. China temporarily shut the Suifenhe checkpoint on April 7 to contain the cross-border spread of the coronavirus.

The Diplomat: COVID-19: Trouble on the China-Russia Border

China closed its border to prevent imported cases from Russia. Now Russians fear a surge in infections from stranded Chinese travellers.

Suifenhe is a county-level city on the eastern edge of China’s 4,300-kilometer border with Russia. It is 2,000 km away from Wuhan, where the COVID-19 crisis began late last year, and until recently, the epidemic may have felt quite distant.

Locally, Suifenhe is best known for a series of increasingly extravagant national gates in its land port, which are designed to project China’s progress over recent decades, in the face of Russia’s simultaneous decline. During the current pandemic, however, this land port was repurposed as a collective quarantine site for 1,479 Chinese citizens.

This is the result of the hasty return of Chinese citizens domiciled in Russia, which has seen Suifenhe replace Wuhan as the new focal point in China’s domestic struggle to contain COVID-19. As of April 20, 2020, almost 2,500 nationals had re-entered China via the city’s land port. Of them, 377 were diagnosed with COVID-19, with 27 designated as “asymptomatic” cases in China’s terminology.

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Update: Russia’s Covid-19 surge means China cannot fully relax its guard (SCMP)

WNU Editor: Russia was one of the first countries that closed its borders with China when the Covid-19 outbreak was spreading in China, and was widely criticized by Beijing. Now Beijing has closed its borders with Russia, and telling its own citizens stuck in Russia that they are on their own.