MANZHOULI, CHINA - From the Altai Mountains to the Pacific Coast, logging is ravaging Russia's vast forests, leaving behind swathes of scarred earth studded with dying stumps.Since China began restricting commercial logging in its own natural forests two decades ago, it has increasingly turned to Russia, importing huge amounts of wood in 2017 to satisfy the voracious appetite of its construction companies and furniture manufacturers.
In the Solomon Islands, the current pace of logging by Chinese companies could exhaust the country's once pristine rainforests by 2036, according to Global Witness, an environmental group. In Indonesia, activists warn that illegal logging linked to a company with Chinese partners threatens one of the last strongholds for orang utans on the island of Borneo.
The trade has instead underscored Russia's over-reliance on natural resources and provoked a popular backlash that strains the otherwise warm relations between the countries' two leaders, President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping.Members in Russia's Upper House of Parliament have assailed officials for ignoring the environmental damage in Siberia and the Far East.
"If the Chinese come, nothing will be left," Ms Marina Volobuyeva, a resident of the Zamensky region south of Lake Baikal, told a television channel after a Chinese company secured a 49-year lease to log in the area. The factories cover dozens of acres on the city's edge and have created more than 10,000 jobs in a city of 300,000 people, according to a municipal official.
In Ms Zhu's view, the trade is a classic case of supply meeting demand. She described it, perhaps over-confidently, as enduring. The next step will be to seek more concessions westward. Logging without contracts is also common, while arsonists are suspected of having set fire to forests, because scorched trees can be legally culled and sold.