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48 CHAPTER 1. PROGRAMS ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSBOUNDARY COOPERATION IN THE BORDER AREAS
ment and Protection of the Environment of Bolshoy
Ussuriysky Island”, which goes as follows: “Activating
the cooperation with regard to the development and
protection of the environment of Bolshoy Ussuriysky
Island. The development of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island
will be carried out with requirements of the environmental
legislation taken into account. Construction of
a bridge crossing over Amurskaya channel by Russia.
Construction of a bridge crossing over Kazakevicha
channel (Fuyuan) and road network on Bolshoy
Ussuriysky Island by China. The possibility of establishing
a border checkpoint will be explored after the
appropriate transport infrastructure is in place”. We
were unable to see any specific environmental component
in the paragraph quoted above. After studying
available documents in Chinese we found out that
China already works to establish a protected area covering
a part of the recently acquired islands. However,
the “environmental agreement” mentioned in the Programme
has nothing to do with these plans and contains
only a general declaration on the need to develop the
area “with requirements of the environmental legislation
taken into account”, as if environmental compliance was
not necessary at other sections of the border.
Despite a decade of talks about joint environmental
protection in the border areas, the Russian regions have
had neither effective cooperation programmes with
their Chinese counterparts nor reliable mechanisms for
coordinating their own environmental activities within
the larger Russian Far East region. If one honestly
recognises that the 2018 Cooperation Programme is in
fact an extension of the economic strategy defined by
the China’s Plan of Revitalising Northeast China, than
it should be expected that it will be some Chinese
authority that sooner or later will take the thankless
work of coordinating the environmental protection
activities of Chinese and Russian regions in the border
areas.
And what gives hope for change for the better is not the
2018 Cooperation Programme, but the following news
story released by Xinhua in February 201014 :
“The Environmental Protection Department of Heilongjiang
Province proposed a comprehensive programme
for the strengthening of cooperation with its counterparts
in the Russian regions of the Far East and East Siberia.
By now the Department has already discussed the programme
with the respective authorities of Khabarovsk
Kray, Primorsky Kray, and Amur Oblast. The cooperation
between Chinese and Russian bodies will reportedly be
focused on the following areas:
• Joint monitoring of water quality in transboundary
water bodies and monitoring of transboundary movement
of pollutants;
14 http://russian.china.org.cn/environment/txt/2010-02/02/content_19352275.htm
• Creation of a network of transboundary protected
areas in order to strengthen the work on the conservation
of ecosystems and biodiversity;
• Establishment of joint waste processing facilities;
• Activation of the exchange of information and best
practices in the field of preventing and combatting
environmental pollution;
• Joint assessment of engineering facilities affecting the
environment of border areas of the two countries and
the strengthening awareness raising and environmental
education activities.”
It is too early to celebrate, since what we have at the
moment are just words, but the statement shows that the
very logic of integration based on the “scenario of revitalising
Northeast China”, due to a systemic and comprehensive
nature of this approach, leads to attempts to
prevent and compensate transboundary adverse environmental
impacts, since the Amur Basin ecosystem is
our common living environment. The question is who
will develop common environmental quality standards
and whether common standards are possible at all for
two cultures so different.
Journey to the West
The signing of a document such as the 2018 Cooperation
Programme and, what is even more important, its
public discussion, provide ample material for an analysis
of administrative approaches presently used for the
formulation and implementation of federal and regional
socio-economic policies with regard to border regions
of Russia. This analysis is particularly relevant in the
context of the further expansion of cooperation between
Russia and China. The border regions of the Russian
Far East have already got used to these approaches, the
freshness of perception has been lost, and the 2018
Cooperation Programme just follows the “business as
usual” principle, summarizing and replicating
deplorable but well-established patterns of modern day
“transboundary cooperation”. Now let’s imagine that
the same model of cooperation spreads westward reaching
West Siberia, particularly the Altai Mountains.
According to most sources, the most significant factors
of China’s adverse impacts on the Russian regions of the
Far East and Transbaikal include the export of cheap
labour, the squeezing out of Russian businesses from the
regional markets (in particular, due to extremely low
labour costs), massive extraction and harvesting of natural
resources in the border (and other) regions, loose
environmental quality standards etc. All these factors
strongly affect the social, economic, and environmental
spheres. In the recent years the Russian regions of
West Siberia also have been facing increasing pressures