droves of Chinese farmers flocking into Russia's Far East might rock the honeymoon between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin

 

 Xi-Putin honeymoon at risk as Chinese flood into Russia

If there is anything that might rock the long-standing honeymoon between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, it is the droves of Chinese farmers flocking into Russia's Far East.
 
Farmers have been coming from China looking for arable land, engaging in large-scale mechanized agriculture and harvesting crops to export back to their country.
 
Initially, they were seen as a miracle cure for the region's depopulation and labor shortage problems. Now, however, a sense of crisis is building as Russians fear a new status quo: Chinese control of their agricultural land.
 
Before it was annexed into the Russian Empire under the 1860 Treaty of Peking, the region was part of Qing dynasty China. Back then, Vladivostok, now a military port city, was known as Haishenwai, Chinese for "sea cucumber cliff."
 
If Russia's powers were to be substantially weakened by the ongoing Ukraine war, Beijing could aim to reclaim the territory. In a recent decree, President Xi ordered Chinese cartographers to include the former Chinese names of several Russian cities on their new maps. Sea Cucumber Cliff is one of them.