MOSCOW, February 14. /TASS/. Companies from Russian regions on the border with China should make a greater effort to develop cooperation with thriving southern and littoral regions of the People’s Republic of China, Alexey Maslov, the director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, told TASS.

"Due to urbanization and rising incomes, Chinese senior citizens more actively move from cold northeastern regions, those exactly bordering Russia, to southern and littoral provinces. <…> Many Chinese producers have left China’s northeastern provinces [bordering Russia], and as before active trade was carried out with the [near-border Chinese cities of] Heihe and Suifenhe, now the Pacific ports through which goods can be supplied to more favorable southern and littoral regions of China, are gaining an increasingly important role," Maslov explained.

That said, the highway bridge across the Amur between Blagoveshchensk and China’s Heihe and the railway bridge to China from the Jewish Autonomous Region that have been constructed over the past two years, "have notably eased trade logistics and pushed growth turnover up," he added.

"We can criticize ourselves for not doing this earlier and for not constructing the bridges a decade ago, but in any case, increasing the number of border entry points almost always make trade easier," Maslov concluded.