Perestroikaand the Normalisation of Soviet-Chinese Relations as a Groundwork for the Modern-Day Chinese Immigration to Russia

Abstract

Complicated normalisation of relations between Moscow and Beijing in the second half of the 1980s, created political and legal conditions for restoring bilateral migration cooperation. Its’ continuation and intensive development, that was taking place even during the period of several years’ cooling of Russian-Chinese relations at the beginning of the 1990s, was sustained mainly by pragmatic reasons connected with the economic needs of neighbouring regions in the east Russia and north-east China. The enormous impact of the perestroika period on matters connected with the perception and management of Chinese immigration, was not propelled by its intensity (relatively low at that time) but rather by the economical and political considerations in the second half of the 1980s, most of which became established after the collapse of the USSR and set general directions of migration processes in the next few decades.